By Randi Altman
Zack Howell is a post guy at heart, having worked just about every support job in the post pipeline, including dailies, offline Avid editorial, conform and finishing. After two years at Light Iron as post production systems administrator and previous roles at Hula Post, Sim Digital and Wexler Video, he found his way to the Walt Disney StudioLab as a lead architect, a job he refers to as the highlight of his career.
“At Disney, it was baptism by fire,” he says. “Going from a facility engineer to learning cloud computing, devOps, and getting innovation projects done in a massive enterprise has been a wild ride! Not for the faint of heart.”
We recently spoke to Howell to find out more about his role and where he sees the industry headed.
What does a lead architect do day to day?
Day to day, I execute highly technical and complex projects to incorporate emerging technologies into the content creation pipelines for our various stakeholders at Marvel, Disney Live Action, 20th Century Studios, etc.
I also ensure any new solutions deployed by third-party vendors are deployed using TWDS best practices and adhere to content security regulations. Not easy!
What would surprise people about what that position also entails?
It’s a lot of technical writing, which is akin to creative writing in the sense that all of your projects need to be fully drafted in narrative format before the PowerPoints or keynotes take shape. If you don’t put them in a narrative first, then these very difficult innovation projects can’t withstand technical scrutiny from your peers and the wider enterprise.
What is a large project you’ve been tasked with recently? Is it the transition to the cloud?
I can’t go into great detail, but I provided a cloud burst rendering component to an internal application using Azure virtual machine scale sets that deploy Colorfront Transkoder nodes during peak demand — then they spin down when their work is done. It was my first project graduation at Disney, and it only took two years. (laughs)
Speaking of cloud, what do you think of the MovieLabs 2030 white paper? Do you agree that’s the way to go, and do you think they can make that deadline?
The deadline is very ambitious, but the year 2030 has a nice ring to it. With the 2030 Vision, you can’t innovate in the order of their 10 principles, meaning Principle 1 — all assets will go straight to the cloud — is the most difficult. Currently, everyone is in a hybrid architecture since most of the post production phases still require bare metal servers/storage nearby. From my experience, hybrid on-prem/cloud environments are more complex to manage than full cloud. Eventually, the sheer volume of data will force us to go to full-cloud architecture, and the 2030 Vision will become more feasible.
Other than the cloud, what’s an important workflow that you are keeping your eye on? Virtual production?
Virtual production is interesting because it’s creating a new job role, similar to the DIT back in 2008. The Unreal game dev person will be in high demand as VP becomes more ubiquitous. Greenscreens are being seen as more of a burden than putting some upfront time into designing your virtual environments. Very exciting stuff.
Any tips for those just starting out in the industry?
Learn to code? Seriously, you can really push the limits of your workflows if you know how to leverage APIs, adapters and plugins, which requires some development knowledge.
Follow my three Cs for success: Be consistent, be courageous, be curious. Have no shame in being the dumbest person on the Zoom call. Learn fast and continue to build a unique talent stack.
