WM: Are you still doing special effects here now?

Con Pederson and a model of the spaceship Discovery used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Courtesy of Con Pederson.

CP: Yeah. It is all computerized now for the last twenty years. I started doing a lot of programming back in the mid-seventies and early eighties. I guess it has been as the computer, specifically the micro-processors, got cheaper and the cost of using them for graphics became less and capacity grew, it has been one of the more thriving industries in the world. The interesting thing to me is that we end up hiring so many people from abroad. That will probably change but I think there are a lot of other countries that give you the impression they are ahead of us in some way. This company, Metrolight Studios, has been here almost twelve years, and it's such a polyglot place. We have people from Spain, Italy, South America, the Orient. It's just remarkable what an international thing the computer is. It probably symbolizes not only the computer itself but computer graphics in particular. The methodologies have been established pretty rapidly. That might be true of Edison's time too because it didn't take long for the telegraph to establish itself, and electric lights, the telephone, film and the automobile -- so there was a period of growth in the late last century. It was extremely rapid just as it is in the last 20 years of this century. I think there's a punctuated equilibrium, as it were, about the evolution of technology that is kind of elastic; there will be sort of bursts, the silicon chip made a burst, then kind of eased off. Other things took off, now it's all peripherals that are trying to match the speed of the chips, because the big problem is getting out of that micro-world and into something that is tangible, so everybody is trying to figure out what kind of storage material is the best. I'm not a technological person, I only dare dabble in it because I don't make my living in the mechanical aspects of computers at all. I couldn't put one together. Strictly software. But yeah, we do a lot of film work. It's fun.

WM: Computers also actually make animation and special effects international. Just recently in Animation World we had an article about an animation studio in Madagascar which is linked to Korea and France. They can instantaneously, on-line send what they are doing to the three different places, all of whom are participating on the same film...

CP: When we were working last year on a Tom Hanks project for television, the Apollo project, From the Earth to the Moon, which was the same title of course at the Jules Verne book, we had some Russians, they were based in San Diego, and had done some exploratory work together with them and we ended up sending stuff in a trial job to Moscow. It turned out, not only did they have the same software and hardware, Silicon Graphics, that we had, they had the newest stuff. They had better stuff than we did. And they were complaining about how hard it was to get into L.A. because of the electronic traffic on the Internet here. It's so slow. I thought it was amusing that here's a country virtually in shambles and they are first class when it comes to computer graphics. That is the anomalous aspect of Russia. They were the world leader in sound technology, music and sound effects, and then they have these soft spots economically. This whole global thing is fascinating, but Madagascar! That is wild.

WM: Yeah, it is amazing. At the time that 2001 was made, did anyone actually think that computers would end up doing the sort of things they have done in terms of this global village?

CP: If you look at the brain room scene in 2001, you see we had little Plexiglas modules that were keyed in and out of the memory -- that was kind of an abstract representation of the brain room of a computer, it was as though you were down inside of a chip. I remember that was virtually pre-chip.

WM: Oh yeah. They still had cards.

CP: Yeah, it was much later that I learned how to use key punch and paper tape. I learned to read paper tape when we were running our motion control stuff because we were not ready for computers yet. Our first computer in the '70s was an old, hand wire-wrapped core, 16 kilobyte memory surplus computer that had a lot of flashing lights on it, but was like a calculator. That's how I learned. I learned FORTRAN on one of them things. But the brain room sequence, I think, showed you a world which is totally unlike what we are going to have in a year and a half! Maybe if it had been called "3001" it might have been more accurate, but less saleable. That was true of 1984, the Orwell book. When 1984 came around, everybody said, "Gee, look how different it is. It's nothing like that! There's no Big Brother and all of that stuff." So you have a problem in dealing with a large audience, apart from science fiction people, when you put science fiction out in front of a larger audience, the dates are too small. You are not looking far enough ahead. Most science fiction movies in Hollywood are made so that we are in the year 20-something or the year 23-something. My goodness, that is incredibly far in the future, but I spent a couple of years working on a script which is a billion years in the future and I thought, "I'm never going to be able to sell this, will I?" (laughs)