Guess who's pregnant again...

Guess who's pregnant. Relax, it's not Cheryl. My supervisor is going on maternity leave for the next six months so I have been asked to take over as Project Lead for the production pipeline. For those who don't remember what I do, here is a description from a recent job posting for my team:

"The Production Engineering group is responsible for designing and implementing software used in the production pipeline to create animated feature films. Production engineers understand the entire computer animation process and use that knowledge to develop the DreamWorks global animation pipeline."

The Pipeline team is the glue that connects all of the production departments together and build applications that artists use based on the core technologies built by R&D. So, R&D will work on the animation software, but we are the team that helps production build and organize things to animate (called assets), get those assets into the animation software, provide plugins and other systems to solve problems not covered in the animation software itself, and then provide the tools for capturing their work and preparing it as input for the next department to work on the scene. As the complexity of animated movies seems to have no bound, it becomes very important for our department to find not only technical efficiencies but also streamline the artist workflow. This may help explain why I say we work on every movie, but yet can't point to specific artistic contributions that make it in a film.

My new role will be mostly focused on project management and helping to improve the software development process for our team of a dozen developers.

It is kind of interesting that both Cheryl and I have ended up taking over leadership or management roles this year at work. It will be a challenge to keep the balance between work and spending time with RJ.