Kim Libreri: “The Matrix” of Innovation

** Episode Note: We did have some audio issues with this episode, but it was too good a conversation to keep on the shelf!

Tech visonary Kim Liberi, walks us through the mindset that carried him from early console graphics and London VFX labs to the painterly breakthroughs of What Dreams May Come, where live action became living brushstrokes using optical flow and fine-art sensibilities to his ground breaking work on the Matrix films, and his most recent incarnation as CTO of Epic Games.  

The conversation opens into simulated worlds and the convergence of film and games. Kim breaks down how procedural cities, photogrammetry, and Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering shift power back to creators—letting directors dial weather on set, game designers craft cinematic beats, and teams reuse systems without losing soul. 

If you’re curious about how math, art, and collaboration turn into wonder—on set and on screen—Kim's path is one that will resonate with you. 

www.slightlyprod.com

Transcript

Opening Dream: Entering Star Wars

Kim Libreri 0:00

And I, you know, I had this dream that one day something as amazing and as visceral as, you know, watching the Star Wars movie, that you'd actually be able to go into something like that using computer graphics.

Kim’s Roots and Early Inspirations

Jen Coronado 0:12

Hi, welcome to everyone is. I'm your host, Jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all kinds of people and build the understanding that anyone who has any kind of success is successful because they're a creative thinker. So whether you're an artist or a cook or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. Because everyone just is. I have known Kim Liberi for a long time, and I am comfortable saying I think he is a genius. While he currently inhabits the role of CTO at the Colossus Epic Games of Fortnite fame, he has a long history of innovation in the film industry, which has brought him two Academy Awards for technical achievement. But more than the specifics of his career, I want to dig into the whys of how he thinks about things. So on that note, welcome to Everyone Is Kim Lebrari. Hi, everybody.

Kim Libreri 1:05

And hi Jen.

Jen Coronado 1:06

So I know a little bit about your background, but I want to know more. So let's start off with the basics. Where were you born?

Kim Libreri 1:11

I was born in a, well, I lived in a town called Leyland in the north of England. It's just about 26 miles north of Manchester. So that's why I have a slightly funny accent.

Jen Coronado 1:21

Kim, tell me about your parents. Tell me about growing up in your small town.

Kim Libreri 1:25

You know, my dad, my dad was a factory worker, and uh my mom was just uh honestly, she had a simple job. She was a cleaner at the local school that I used to go to. And uh it's a it's an industrial town. We were known for making trucks and buses, and uh it was uh Leyland is a was a quite famous automotive manufacturer a long time ago, British Leyland. And then it sort of the town went into a little bit of a recession, but uh fortunately we also had um a local um uh jet fighter company, British Aerospace. Sort of a mix between industrial and uh sort of rural. It's a small town, 50,000 people.

Jen Coronado 2:03

Yeah. Your dad was born in Malta, though, wasn't he?

Kim Libreri 2:05

Yeah, my dad was born in Malta, and I think 11 years old, he moved over to the UK. He still has a very thick Maltese accent to this day.

Jen Coronado 2:13

Nice. And Kim, I don't I actually don't know this about you. Do you have any siblings?

Kim Libreri 2:17

I have a sister and a brother, yeah, Carla and James.

Jen Coronado 2:20

Are they older, younger?

Kim Libreri 2:21

Younger. Carla's like 18 months younger, and then James is 14 years younger.

Jen Coronado 2:27

Oh wow, that's quite a difference. I have a brother who's 14 years younger. When you were little, Kim, growing up in a small town with your parents and your siblings, what like what were the things that really like interested you as a kid? Did you like movies? Did you like video games? Like when we were kids, it was like Atari. So what were the things you were really interested in?

Atari to Algorithms: Art Meets Code

Kim Libreri 2:45

I used to like to draw and a little bit of painting. I got into video games when the Atari VCS came out and uh loved it, was fascinated by it. And I was lucky enough that I think it was 1979, my dad scraped together enough money to buy me an Atari 800 computer, which also played fantastic games, but you could program it because it was a computer. And because it was, I got it quite early in the life cycle of the Atari machines, I wanted to make my own game. So I started learning how to program. And the thing I liked the most was making pictures out of programming. So from a young age, I would um sort of blend that, you know, technical software engineering mindset with trying to make art. So that was kind of what sort of birthed my interest in computer graphics and sort of plotted my path into university as well, where I studied computer science and computer graphics.

Jen Coronado 3:38

Well, I have a question about that. Your parents didn't have the kind of technical jobs that you and creative jobs that you moved into. So where were your inspirations coming from? Was it something that your parents talked to you about? Was it something you saw outside of your family? How did that come about?

Kim Libreri 3:52

So my grandmother, who was she was Italian, her father had been an architect. Actually, even though they were Italian, they were based out of Cairo for a long time in the 1920s and 30s. In fact, uh my uh great-granddad was a quite a famous architect, built the Semeramis Hotel and a whole bunch of mosques in Cairo. Anyway, so my grandma, who equally brought me up with my mum, sort of, you know, would talk about art. My granddad, who ran the local factory that my dad worked at, um, was a patent designer in his early career, so he could draw. So I was always fascinated as a very small kid and seeing him draw. And I think that sort of planted the seed of loving art. And yeah, as I say, the computer thing came because it just felt like a new cool way of making art. And in them days, you kind of had to learn to program if you wanted to make anything. There wasn't paint programs, not really, in the early days of Atari.

Jen Coronado 4:44

So you went to university and you were studying computer science. And I've heard you say in other interviews before that like math and computer graphics are a passion for you. That was it at university that you discovered really what that was, and what as opposed to just peripherally knowing?

University, Graphics in the 80s, First Jobs

Kim Libreri 5:01

What happened is that you know, I got this Atari when I guess I would have been 12 when I got the Atari, and I taught myself to program and I used it to actually draw, I would like write code that would, you know, lay pixels down that would actually start to look like images. And as I went through school heading towards university, I started to really get a fascination in how, you know, how do we make a computer make images? And, you know, at the time Star Wars came out and all these great movies that started to show that there was something going to happen with computers and filmmaking. And I, you know, I had this dream that one day something as amazing and as visceral as you know, watching the Star Wars movie, that you'd actually be able to go into something like that using computer graphics. So it was like from that early age, I was driven to combine these two things together. And when I went to university, I studied computer science, but I specialized, you know, anything I could learn about graphics. You've got to remember, this is you know the mid-1980s. Computer science, computer graphics was not really what it is today. Right. But I got through university, learned how to program big, massive parallel processing systems, transputers. And everything I did was about getting the computer to make better-looking images so we could make art with computers. And eventually, what I was hoping is that one day you'd be able to make interactive simulations that were as real as any movie that you would see in a movie theater. So that sort of plotted the career, you know, the career that I worked with you at when I was at ILM and now when I'm at Epic. It's all connected to this drive to entertain people and show them things that they could never see, but not just in a two-dimensional way that you would see in a movie, but something they can actually go in and explore and be part of.

Jen Coronado 6:45

Yeah. How old were you when you went to university?

Kim Libreri 6:49

Just I think 18 is when we start university in the UK. And I did, I, you know, I thought about doing a PhD, but honestly, computer graphics was so primitive when I, you know, I graduated in 1989. It was so primitive that it was much, much better to get out into industry. The challenge is a simple northern lad from Leyland, finding somewhere that you could work in that was really about you know pushing the envelope in computer graphics was kind of difficult back in in Lancashire where I come from. And initially, I think my first job after university was um working at a place called AMS Neve, making mixing consoles, but doing the graphics software for mixing desks. They've still got them at Skywalker Sound 30 odd years later. But I, you know, I worked there for a couple of years, but I really, really, really wanted to make pictures. I wanted to make art with a computer. And I I just got this, you know, I started to look around, and obviously, I think it was when did the ILM book come out? The original ILM book. It was like 1986 or something.

Jen Coronado 7:44

Yeah, 1986 in the mid-80s for sure.

Kim Libreri 7:46

Yeah, I get at the very back of that book, there's a little appendix on computer graphics, and it's got the what is it, Avengers of Wally B, I think in the and it talks about Ed Catmull and the Pixar computer and all that stuff. And I'm like, that's it. That's really what I want to be able to do, is I want to be able to make pictures of that fidelity level. And, you know, in England, other than coming to California and working at ILM, which, you know, it wasn't easy to get into ILM at all in that era, I just got really lucky and I heard of this place in London called the Computer Film Company, run by my friend Mike Boudry and my great boss uh Wolfgang Glemp. And they were looking for a programmer that knew how to program graphics for embedded computer graphic systems, not silicon graphics, not the standard, you know, um stuff that we use. It was no Nvidia stuff. It was like all hardware that they'd commissioned and built that they needed a programmer from. And I fortunately, with my background of having done a lot of um parallel processing and graphics, I got the job. And that was the beginning of me making images that I wasn't embarrassed to be showing other people. And it ultimately led me to the United States and working on movies.

Finding a Path to Film Innovation

Jen Coronado 8:54

Well, that's something I want to ask you about because I talked to a lot of people from the UK, and how do I put this in a way where I don't sound like a jerk? There tends to be a hesitancy to for towards ambition. And you have this tenacity, Kim, to push towards new things and to try new things and to really go after the things that you're looking for. And I wonder, did you feel like you had that when you were young and it just was part of who you were? Or is it something you developed and allowed you to move to the US? Like what where do you think that comes from?

Kim Libreri 9:30

Yes, back in the UK, there is a little bit of a, you know, be happy with your lot in life. It's not, you know, I not not I love England, yeah. Obviously, it still sounds somewhat English after 25 years of living here, but it just, you know, the level of ambition and you know the lack of barriers that you have in America is not quite was not quite the same in the UK at that in that era. I actually think it's changed a lot. There's so many great entrepreneurs in the UK. Oh, yeah, for sure. Amazing artists. So I don't think it's quite the same environment that it was that I grew up in. And especially, you know, I'm in the north of England. I was in London, I wasn't in a population center when I started out. But I think the thing for me was, you know, even though, you know, I was brought up in England, you know, almost everybody I knew in the local vicinity was my family. So not only was my dad Maltese, but my my my uncle and auntie had moved over, they worked to the same factory, they were from Malta. So a lot of my upbringing was, you know, either via my Italian grandmother or my Maltese family that used to live around the corner from us. So we just have a bit of a different outlook. So you really need to think of, even though I have an English accent, my um personality is somewhat Southern Mediterranean. And if you've ever been to Malta, it's they're pretty high-energy, passionate people. So I always felt that like if I really worked hard and tried hard and studied hard, then I'd do well. And most people of my era in the UK, the opportunity to come and live in California is a dream. And remember, my you know, my Atari was from made, you know, made in Sunnyvale, California. And my real dream was not to go to LA and Hollywood. My dream was to come to the Bay Area where all these legendary companies like Apple and Atari were born, and a new form of entertainment, especially in video games, had been formed. And that's another thing that people think that, you know, I was a filmmaker at Core. I loved making movies. I loved entertaining audiences, especially on more breakthrough things that show audiences things they've never seen before. But I equally had a passion for video games, always. And, you know, in 1989, when I graduated university, there was no 3D in computer games. Right. And if you really cared about, you know, making amazing pixels, movies was really the only place to go. That's changed, you know, in the last decade and a half. I think that we've shown pretty much that the two industries are on this sort of convergence. Yeah, convergence. It's not really a collision course because I actually think both industries can be better by learning from each other.

Jen Coronado 11:56

Yeah.

Kim Libreri 11:56

It was, yeah, it was definitely a passion of mine to be in video games as well as movies. That's what's one of the nice things of working at Lucasfilm because we had both sides of it. In the days I was there, we had LucasArts and we had ILM. So you could play at the extreme level of both arts at the same company. It was great.

Jen Coronado 12:12

I've always thought of you. I never actually Kim thought of you as someone who had a passion for not that you didn't love film or a passion for film or games. I thought you you had a passion for vision.

Ambition, Culture, and Crossing the Atlantic

Kim Libreri 12:23

I like innovating and I like innovating in a way that brings wonder to others. That really is it. That's why I love working with you know the Wachowskis on the Matrix movies, is they wanted to show visuals that nobody had ever seen before. Yeah. And, you know, that movie, the first Matrix, was so out there, most people just didn't understand what we were trying to make. And only when it came out did people get what we were actually trying to achieve. It's actually a very hard movie to crew. Most people that we interviewed to come and help us work on that movie wouldn't come. They were like, we're not working on the Keanu Reeves movie. It's a it would, I think it's hard for people to believe that people wouldn't have believed in that movie at the time. But they just they wanted to really get people to think about the story they were telling and also show people that what was happening in the movie and the concepts of the movie in a way that you'd never seen before. And that was exciting to me. Almost everything I ever worked on that I really enjoyed was about working on the cutting edge, doing something that people thought was impossible, working with an amazing team of artists and engineers. Almost everything that I've loved working on, it's an equal dose of engineering and science and art, and them teams coming together, production crews that I've worked with over the years. There's so such close bonds between both sides that yeah, it's it really is the I think the place where I am the best suited.

Jen Coronado 13:42

I'm gonna loop back on Matrix in a second, but the one thing I want to talk about is the film that you came to the US for, which is What Dreams May Come. And I want I want to talk about that film because I thought it was so visually interesting when I saw it the year it came out. And I know that a lot of the people that you worked on that film continue to be your collaborators through the year.

Kim Libreri 14:02

We all worked together like a quarter of a century later.

Jen Coronado 14:05

Exactly. So I want you to talk about what was it about that experience and then coming to the US and how you connected with those people.

Movies and Games Converge

Kim Libreri 14:11

I was working at the time, before I came here, I was working at CineSight, wonderful visual effects company run by my my buddy Colin Brown, which was it was a division of Kodak. Um, in fact, they'd worked previously with ILM to build a film scanner, and they were a startup visual effects company to really propagate the knowledge of digital film. One of the last movies I worked on at CineSite was a movie called Mission Impossible One with Tom Cruise. And there was a sequence in there that we the the it was a it's a shot that goes around Tom Cruise and is it Emmanuel Bert? Does that sound right? I think there's a bit of romance between them and the camera goes around them. And the problem was is they couldn't shoot this in a way that the the move would be smooth enough and the timing would work. So we had to um work out a way of um sort of re-speeding the shot. And we were working with Kodak at the time, and they had this, they pretty much sort of stumbled across, or not, actually not stuff, they've been working on it for a while. They had a thing called CineSpeed, which was an optical flow system. What that would do, and it's very nerdy, is for every pixel in a shot, the computer could work out exactly where every pixel would go from frame to frame, and that allows you to re-speed it. Anyway, we've been working on this, and one of my friends is visiting from America called Nick Brooks, and Nick was already working on what What Dreams May Come, or they were doing some tests for What Dreams May Come. And he's like, Hey, we have this movie that Vincent Ward is directing, and he wants to make live action turn into something that looks like a painting. And, you know, we just we we were at the pub and we were brainstorming. I'm like, Nick, I think that if you really want to shoot it as live action and you want to basically effectively attach paint strokes, you know, and you know, understand how light is expressed and how texture is expressed in a painting and attach that to a piece of live action and make the live action look like a living painting. I think this technology that Kodak has is going to enable that. And you know, I was advising Nick as a friend because I wanted to help Kodak propagate this software and get more of the film business using it. So Kodak helped Nick and the team do a test for what dreams may come. And they just did, it was a few shots and it just showed promise that hey, you really could do it. You could actually take paint strokes that had been made by a fine artist, choose which paint strokes best fitted contours and areas of light and dark in the image, and then have that follow live action so that the the live action then turned into a painting. And the test was so successful, Nick was like, Hey, do you do you want to come and move to work for us at um I think the company was called Mass Illusion at the time? And I'm like, Well, yeah, I don't know about living in Massachusetts, I have no idea what Massachusetts is like, but if you were in California, I'd move to California or the Bay Area, and he's like, Well, that's funny. We're shooting the movie in the Bay Area because Robin lives in the Bay Area. Well, why don't you set up an office there and I'll be out there like a shot? And that's how I got involved. And then Wait, hold on.

Jen Coronado 17:11

You got someone to set up an office for you?

What Dreams May Come: Painting Live Action

Kim Libreri 17:14

Well, they were shooting the movie, they were shooting, you know, the good old days when people would spend money on visual effects, but um they you know, they were shooting. Nick actually liked the idea of being in the Bay Area, and you know, we were a company that was a hybrid between art and technology. ILM was already in the Bay Area, PDI was in the Bay Area, Pixar was in the Bay Area, it was the place to be if you really wanted to innovate. And it's not just that, hey, the people are available to hire. The people that we hired came from all over the planet, but there there was a you know, in the late 90s, mid to late 90s, there was a magic here in the Bay Area for computer graphics where you knew that Pixar was innovating, you'd know that PDI was doing all this crazy stuff. And we had a community where we'd all sure share ideas, and we knew that George was powering up ILM to do the next Star Wars movie. So it was the whole place was it was buzzing. It was really, really, really cool. Yeah. And, you know, and also where else could you meet amazing technologists, amazing artists that all are a little bit counterculture because we're in the Bay Area? It was fantastic, it was a fantastic time to come here, a fantastic community to be part of. It worked, it was not, they didn't even bat an eyelid about setting up the Bay Area because it was an obvious place to do it.

Jen Coronado 18:26

Yeah. So I want to jump into the matrix of it all. And I want you to tell me about Lana and Lily Wachowski and how you began working with them. And do you think that was a career catalyst for you?

Kim Libreri 18:38

I don't know about career catalyst. It just was an awesome experience, yeah. And also it was so it was so hard to make. So, how do we get involved in it? So at the same time as working on What Dreams May Come, Mass Illusion had also been tapped to do the Matrix movie. And myself and Rodney Wishina and John Gator would sort of we were starting to ideate how we would do bulletem as we were still working on what dreams may come. And, you know, on the first one, we only met, well, I only met Lana and Lily just only probably two or three times during the first movie, because they would come to our really scruffy offices in Alameda. I don't know if you know the story. We you know, we worked on the old Alameda Naval Air Station. Yeah. But when I first moved to the US for What Dreams May Come, it was I think July 1997, and the Navy had just moved out of Alameda. It was pretty cool. From a from a pure environment to make movies in, nobody was on this Navy base, a whole massive Navy base, you know, it kind of in the middle of the bay, or not really the full middle, but to kind of the side of the bay.

Jen Coronado 19:40

Yeah.

Kim Libreri 19:41

Nobody's there. All these disused buildings, empty houses, a crazy environment to be making something that was as groundbreaking as the Matrix in particular, which is, you know, you actually, I don't know if you ever went over to Alameda during that era, but it was like a ghost town. It was the weirdest thing. And you know, you go, you go to the edge of the Navy base or the the bit they would let you go to, and you've got like a fence that you can't cross um because that the air the runways are not an active runway, and it's just disused, and there's pampas grass and fucking hairs running across the location, and then you see San Francisco in the distance across the bay. Yeah, and it's it's almost honestly, it's like because you can't see any traffic, you don't see any motion. It has that sort of eerie, you know. I know Stephen King in the Dark Tower series when he dis describes some of the big cities, it's got that very eerie feel, but yet they're there, and we don't see another soul other than people making the movie with us. It was awesome.

Jen Coronado 20:36

That's very cool. And I mean, out of well, the first matrix gave you is that where you got your first Academy Award, your first technical academy?

Kim Libreri 20:43

Uh yeah, we got a scientific and technical achievement award for the virtual environments that we built on the Matrix. I don't think I don't know if Bullet Time, I don't think Bullet Time was actually included in that. I think it was mostly for the environments of the Bullet Time stuff, is uh is is what the award was for.

Jen Coronado 20:58

Tell me about Bullet Time and developing that and what that looked like and how did you think about that? Because I know you were like, what was your exact role on the film?

Kim Libreri 21:06

I was Bullet Time supervisor, mostly for dealing with how we were gonna shoot it and how we were gonna process it. You know, John Gator was the visual effects supervisor, my friend Yannick's another big shot visual effects supervisor now, was my buddy that years earlier when working at the computer film company, we were I would write the software, he would do the compositing.

Jen Coronado 21:25

It's uh was such a Was that when you worked on the Muppet movie?

Kim Libreri 21:28

The Muppets Christmas Carol.

Jen Coronado 21:30

That's right. I mean, great that the Caper is the best film, but I like that movie.

Bay Area Magic and Community

Kim Libreri 21:34

No, Christmas Carol is awesome. Like Michael Cain's performance in that is unbelievable. How he keeps a straight face through all of that craziness is unbelievable. Yeah, and you know, Brian Henson, you know, took over the directing duties from his dad, his dad passed away, yeah. And that was the my first experience of ever working with the director, and it was awesome. When we got Kermit to walk, it yeah, it was quite an emotional because they couldn't do it without digital effects. You couldn't really get Kermit to walk without a guy in blue behind him doing the puppeting and then removing that. So it was cool anyway. That's cool.

Jen Coronado 22:08

That also goes back to the first film where they were trying to take his legs for frog legs, remember?

Kim Libreri 22:13

Yeah, yeah, delicious, delicious.

Jen Coronado 22:16

Okay, so bullet time. You it let's go back to bullet time and talk about developing that.

Meeting the Wachowskis

Bullet Time: From Boards to Breakthrough

Kim Libreri 22:21

The Wachowskis are already storyboarded what they want. So people think that we made a tool and then they utilized it. It wasn't that, it was always in their heads. They they were super comic book aficiados, they loved Hong Kong cinema, they wanted to bring together the um the action of Hong Kong cinema, but with the visceral, you know, when you watch a comic, when you when you look at a comic, especially the you know, the Marvel action ones, there's so much, there's moments in there that are hyper-real that you really don't see in the real world, but it sort of kindles the imagination. Right. And they storyboarded this hybrid way before any of us were working on this thing. They storyboarded that uh the original rooftop shot of it's called GR22, is the is the actual shot name of Keano on the rooftop, dodging the bullets. And uh anyway, so that we we had that template, and you know, we had to work out how to do it. Um, the Mass Illusion and John and Nick had done an early test, and actually Pierre Jasmine as well, had done an early test probably a year before the movie was shot with some still cameras, doing a still camera array. John was like, Oh my god, really? We're gonna have to do this with still cameras. It's super complicated with still cameras. Every camera has to be positioned, has to be focused, has to be triggered, has to be loaded. There are still cameras, they only shoot 30 exposures. The batteries are a total nightmare doing it with still cameras. So John was like, can we not just do four or five movie cameras and then do some clever 3D reconstruction and move the camera around in pulse, which now you can. We have nerfs and we have Gaussian splats and the technology, you know, almost 30 years later is exists now, but just no way. Shooting on film and doing it that day and age, there's no way we could have done it. So we decided to settle on the still rig. We built a custom rig. Uh Frank Gallego and his team at Innovation Arts built uh the bullet time rig for us. There was a lot of previous. So the way it would the way we got the shots done is that a Wuping's Hong Kong action team would basically rehearse the work out the choreography of what they wanted to do for the actual these stunts, rehearse them with videotape, them, not even mocap, because you've got to remember 1998 motion capture was, I think, I think it'd just been used on Titanic, but very little motion capture in the movie business at that point. Yeah. I don't even remember. Havan Helsing was like the first thing for ILM, I think, that you did extensive mocap, but correct. Anyway, we'd get the choreography, would get it into Soft Image, and the way we would do it is my buddy Dan Clem would you know rotoscope the stuff by hand in Soft Image in 3D so that we would get the stunt action and then we would pre-vis around it. It's one of the earliest uses of pre-vis as a sort of tech viz capability so that you can work with the filmmakers to design the camera move, to design how the action is positioned in the world, and then work out ultimately in post-production where do we want them cameras, where do we want that virtual camera to fly? So yeah, we started off with pre-vis, worked out where the cameras would have to be, when they would be triggered, and each camera, it you know, we're getting pretty technical. It's like a thousandth of a second between each camera firing, getting stuff to rig. So, you know, it was a nice, it was a it was a nice thing to see the you know the martial artists coming together with the pre-visualization artists, which really wasn't a term in that day and age. Dan Clem did most of it in soft image. And then we're, you know, basically doing simulations for where we have to put the cameras, because you know, cameras have a body. You you you they you have to you you can't space them infinitely close together. So there was a whole bunch of complexity in working out where where they would actually physically fit and then how many frames of interpolation we would have to generate to get the final camera to work. Somewhere in this house, there is a Bible of all the steps to make a bullet time shot. Really? A hundred steps just for the post-production side of things, to the point where almost every compositor that worked with me on the first movie to do bullet time ended up being kids that I trained out of school. Tom Proctor, who's a big hotshot visual effects supervisor in London now, had he just, I don't, I he just finished his degree and we're like, hey kid, I'm gonna teach you how to composite and pull a green screen. And because anybody who was experienced was like, this is madness, this is so hard, you're crazy. Why are you doing this? It's like surely you don't need these shots. It's like we do, they're really pivotal to telling the story that we have to show that Neo has is able to have his mind have power over the matter of the matrix.

Jen Coronado 26:56

Yeah.

Kim Libreri 26:56

Anyway, the very very, very complicated process. I don't go into all of it, and we've talked about it plenty of times, and I'm pretty sure people at home will be panic.

Jen Coronado 27:03

Well, here's my question for you how many times did you panic?

Panic, Backups, and the Super Bowl Trailer

Kim Libreri 27:07

You know, I've always said to the crew that I work with, success is a state of mind. If you've got a smart team and you really feel that there's going to be a solution, you'll get through it. There's been very, you know, maybe I've just been really lucky and I'm about to like the next thing I work on is gonna blow up in my face. But we've always, you know, it that I think that's one of the hard things about being creative and innovating and just having enough instinct to what could be possible, what do you feel that you can do? A lot of people sort of live in this world of, oh, we can only do it the way we've done it in the past. That's never been a project that I work on. It's oh, we're always like, well, what is the science and the art and the tools? Where could we go? If we extrapolate where we are, where do we really feel we can do? And sometimes that ends up being a very hard process. Making them bullet time shots was really hard. They were made over the best part of a year, and you know, we got pretty close to the end. And it's by the and I, you know, you've worked with me on some productions at ILM, and you know that, well, if you're gonna innovate, it's gonna be the last 10% of the time when you do most of the actual work because you've worked out the special ingredients for the technique you're deploying. But you know, by the time we got to three-quarters of the way through, we were pretty confident we got one shot sort of working. Our issue was we're a little tiny visual effects company that can't pay a lot of money in the Bay Area during the dot-com era where you know anybody who was good at science was getting crazy salaries. It was just we crunched. It was like there was not many of us working on it, and we really had to crunch. The biggest panic was for so it was really important for Joel Silver that we got a trailer into the Super Bowl. So January 1999, the bullet time shot of Neo dodging the bullets on the rooftop is there in the trailer. And if you ever look, if you look at that historic trailer, it's not as good looking as the final version. But there's a reason it was it's it still looks good. It was the bullet wakes, to be honest, that were the biggest letdown in that shot. But uh what happened was uh we didn't have a lot of money at that company. Man X was not super rich, and uh, we were working up with 3K imagery. Yeah, a lot of disk storage we need, a lot of disk storage. And the way to do it in that day and age is you'd buy a fancy RAID disc and there would be a hundred thousand dollars worth of disk. And we couldn't afford it. And we couldn't afford it once we started the shots. So what we had is we had four drives regular, normal external hard drives, SCSI drives what they were called at the day in that day and age. And the data would be spread across them for we get maximum speed because we really needed speed because we were loading so many images. The problem with that is if one drive dies, everything is lost. And finally, a couple of weeks before we're delivering the Super Bowl trailer, our IT person shows up and we've got your RAID disc. Oh About time. Blumminek. It could have been a few weeks ago. It would have been better then. We're kind of in a crunch now, but we're like, you know, there's always this chance this disc fails. So we bet we swap we'll swap it out. And anyway, he goes to start swapping the discs out and he gets distracted by somebody else. I'm not going to say whose name it was. Dude, you're totally stressing me out with this story. Continue. This is super stressful. It's unbelievable. And remember, Tom, Tom was 21 years old. Not I actually he turned 21 in the middle of making Matrix. Congrats. And this is Tom Proctor. And he sat there behind his workstation, our IT guy swapping out these discs. And at some point, somebody across the room says something to him. I almost said his name. And he turns around to them and his bum hits these discs. And he knocks them flying on the floor. The good the ones with our data on them. And they're lying on the floor going, ging, which is the heads grinding of the disc. And we're like, oh God. Oh god. Yeah, Tom's like throwing up pretty much at this point. And I'm like, so you how have them nightly backups been going? And remember, we had no money. Yeah. And our IT guys we ran out of tapes. Oh Jesus Christ. So the closest one we've got is a month old. A month? A month. We've got two weeks to finish this. So we've got to do a month's worth of work in like two weeks and finish the bit we hadn't finished yet. And you know, Tom's a trooper. And honestly, it's usually it's a very valuable lesson. When you do something for the second time, it's usually not as hard. It's a lot easier. A lot easier. And we were able to recover it and we got our shot for the Super Bowl. And Joel Silver was very happy, and we all got banned by Joel.

Jen Coronado 31:45

Oh man. You stressed me out, but just tell me the story. I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting, Kim, about everything you've done, regardless of what you've dealt with, you've always kind of done a version of simulated worlds, right? Um, and is the idea of these big simulated worlds something that's super cool for you too? Like the idea of like you work with real-time rendering right now with the Unreal Engine at Epic. Like is that super what excites you about that?

Kim Libreri 32:11

Well, so being a computer programmer, you know, what one has a tendency to, when you're trying to solve an artistic or creative problem, one tends to also go towards maths and algorithms to try and solve the problem. And having worked on the matrix, when we got to the second and third matrix, and we have all this city stuff in this in the matrix, and we're like, come on, Lana and Lily, we can shoot some of this as plates. No, the matrix is a simulation. The matrix is a simulation. We need to be authentic. So, first of all, you know, we we deployed photogrammetry to build a city in the computer. And, you know, after we'd finished the second and third movie, we're like, there must be a smarter way of doing it. And you know, we'd looked at buildings so much that we started to understand the like they repeat themselves a lot. You know, the way an architect designs a building is yeah, the group the ground floor is usually pretty unique. But from then on, it's just a repeat of the corner pieces and the and the main body of the buildings. And you can use maths and proceduralism to lay that stuff out. And then, you know, as I started to get more and more into game engine technology, you start to think about how games are made. And games are a simulated world. You know, the designers of the games are trying to build something that a player believes is a real place. And, you know, what is one of the things that's been driving us? And, you know, the way that we make an Unreal Engine is, you know, we we try to make it to work for many industries, the film business, the games business, the architectural business. And what we've been trying to educate people is if you take this mentality of actually programming something, then you make a world not only in a way that the next time you want to make it, it's really easy to make. So if you want to make like a weather system that you know sprinkles snow over a city and produces the snow particles and you know, adjusts the lighting and all the things that happen when a snowstorm happens or when rain happens, then if you do that as a simulated way, then it's really easy to use it time and time again later. But it also starts to free up the filmmakers so they can do that stuff on set. So if you can do that real time and go, you know, it would be better if it's a bit foggy right now, or hey, make the rain stronger. It it actually is actually quite freeing for people trying to tell stories. I think what interests me there is you use a computer to take the grunt work out so you're not having to do every single step manually. And when you can do that, you can give them controls to whether it's a game maker or a filmmaker that you know that now they can be all powerful and be able to do very expressive things that have massive consequences to the to the story they're telling or the look of the thing that they're making in a way that is intuitive to them and easy.

Jen Coronado 34:48

The other thing, you know, we talked about this a bit earlier, but I think it's important. It can be you work with a lot of the same people over the years and you bring teams with you to to places that you go. You've been at Epic for 10 years now. I don't know if you realize 10 and a half years. Yeah. So do you find comfort in these teams or do you find that you like to just hold on to people who you know have been your best collaborators?

Simulated Worlds and Unreal Engine

Kim Libreri 35:12

When we work together, you know, people compliment each other and we have a connection. We, you know, we all love working with each other and we've done so many amazing things over the years. You know, it's not typical people have no fear of innovating. People are pretty can be pretty conservative. And when you find like-minded people that are passionate, smart, and fearless, it like it becomes addictive working with them people. So together, it's not it's not they all want to work for me or I just want to work with them. We're drawn to each other. We just we've done so many amazing things together that you know, if you you look at Steven Smallberg, he's worked with the same crew as much as he can. Yeah, it's like it just a bond gets made that is, you know, and also when you do really difficult innovative things, you work very hard together and they become your family, you know, as much as your real family. Even you know, occasionally you work with somebody on something really hard, you get sick of each other for a little bit. It's just like families. I won't see them for a bit. And then you come back together. Years later, you're like, Do you want to do it again? Do you want to do something crazy? So there's just a bond that's made from pushing the envelope and succeeding.

Jen Coronado 36:20

Like, yeah.

Kim Libreri 36:20

And I, you know, and when you don't succeed and you fail, that makes even stronger bonds. Yeah. Because you really people are thematic. They always, you know, if you have something in your heart that you think something's possible and you don't succeed once, really great people will do it again. Like we're very thematic, yeah. Things stay there, we program ourselves, and if if something failed, we usually are innovators do not give up. You'll see people trying, trying to until they crack it. And I think that drive as well. And you know, we all but all back to the matrix moves. We all really believed that computer graphics was going to revolutionize entertainment as a whole. Yeah, that's why the move from movies to games for a lot of these people has been easy. They don't like like the to them, it's about using our skills to to make these amazing experiences, whether they're linear 2D stuff or they're fully immersive 3D interactive stuff. Yeah. We just did a crazy concert. I don't know if you saw we did a concert in Times Square with Soup Dog last not last Friday, but the Friday before. Yeah. Michael Gay, who was he built the Burley Brawl for us, he was the artist that held together the Burley Brawl team and did all the Burley Brawl Matrix movie, yeah. Agent Smith battle. He and our team worked out how do we coordinate every single screen in Times Square with the graphics that we worked with our friends at Magnopas, they did an amazing job, but them graphics play across time and space. So it's not just the one screen that we're controlling, every screen was coordinated to the animation of this, and then on top of that, inside the game of Fortnite 10 million players, 10 million plus players were able to experience the same thing that was a combination of live human entertainment of Snoop Dogg live in Times Square with what they were doing in the game. It's awesome. It's like the ability to do things that just bring so much joy to people is amazing.

Jen Coronado 38:12

And we all thought Snoop Dogg was just there for the Olympics, but he's there, he's everywhere.

Kim Libreri 38:17

He's one of the coolest people in the world right now.

Jen Coronado 38:19

Yeah, it's true. So, you know, we talked about the technology, we've talked about the vision of things, but I want what I want to talk about, Kim, I want to put all that aside. And I want to talk about who are you, Kim, outside of that? Like, for example, I know you make a great risotto, but what are the things that bring you joy outside of what your job does?

Kim Libreri 38:39

I do like cooking. I think that came from my grandmother. And there is a relationship, I think, between making imagery and having the passion and skill to cook. I like a lot of my friends that I've worked with over the years all cook. I like my cars, I like driving. I like I it's funny. I have this really therapeutic thing that I like detailing cars. I know that sounds really weird, and everybody at home is gonna be like, what? I'm like, it's I just find it so therapeutic. All week, all I do is talk to people, all I do is look at images, interact with games, to be able to just do this finesse detailing of my cars is super therapy for me. I just love it. But yeah.

Jen Coronado 39:18

That's great. I think that's important for people to have that. Sort of as a final wrap-up question, one of the things we did at the beginning of this season is we talked to a bunch of kids and we asked them two questions. And one was, what do you want to be when you grow up? And what does imagination mean to you? And I want to ask you kind of an esoteric question, which is what do you think little Kim would have said? And how do you think about imagination and creativity as a grown-up?

Teams, Trust, and Lifelong Collaboration

Kim Libreri 39:47

I think young teenage Kim would have said, work out how to make a video game be as awesome looking and as awesomely moving as the very, very best movies. I literally as a little kid, where like well, I wouldn't have been that little in 1986 when that book came out. I had a dream. I had a dream, I would have been a late teenager. I had a dream that I was flying at a snow speeder in the Battle of Hoth, but in a game. And it looked exactly like the movie. But yet I was commanding what was happening there. Like that's honest truth.

Jen Coronado 40:26

That's amazing. And what does grown-up Kim think creativity means now?

Kim Libreri 40:31

I don't know. Creativity, what does it mean to me? Yeah. I think it's I think it's about making your dreams come true, not just for yourself, but for others.

Jen Coronado 40:40

That's beautiful. Well, my friend, we're towards the end of the conversation. Is there is there anything you else you wanted to add? Any pearls of wisdom?

Kim Libreri 40:49

I I think at the end of the day, you know, it's never about an individual person, it's about your team. And that that that thing about success is a state of mind. I think the tradition of the film industry is very hierarchical, but the reality is the great stuff is not made that way. The great stuff is made as a team effort where everybody mucks in together and even the youngest mind can be the one that actually solves the amazing problem that you need to solve. So I think it's it's looking after your team, inspiring your team, super important. That's great.

Jen Coronado 41:16

Well, thank you, Kim. I really appreciate you.

Kim Libreri 41:18

Cool. All right, thank you.

Jen Coronado 41:21

Thank you for listening to Everyone Is. Everyone Is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson. Executive producer is Aaron Dusau. Music by Doug Infinite. Our logo and graphic design is by Harrison Parker, and I'm Jen Coronado. Everyone Is is a slightly disappointed productions production dropping every other Thursday. So make sure to rate and review and like and subscribe. Thanks for listening.