This week on 8111, Josh Pines!! Josh grew up in Long Island, NY. His father was a celestial mechanic (aerospace engineer) and his mother worked as a probability and statistics professor at Hofstra. He was the youngest of three with two older sisters.
As a kid, he spent weekends going with his parents to Manhattan exploring the museums, attending operas, movies, and music venues. He played classical piano growing up and set his sites on a music degree at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. When that didn't work out, he wound up going to the Cooper Union where he earned a degree in electrical engineering.
He played in several bands during college and really enjoyed electronic music. He connected the exploration of electronic music to other elements in engineering (sound waves, time varying signals going through circuits, Fourier analysis, signal processing, etc.) Everything he was interested in related to music suddenly seemed to have a direct connection to image making. After graduation he stuck around campus for a few years teaching film classes.
Josh first began working in visual effects at MAGI in 1982 at the tail end of their work on "Tron" and went on to lead the computer graphics division at R/Greenberg Associates in NYC. Later he supervised film effects and film recording at Degraf/Wahrman in Los Angeles.
Josh was then hired by ILM where he supervised the film scanning/recording department for more than 10 years, and worked extensively with both traditional and digital cinema technologies. He has received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and has credits on several feature films. Today he lives in the Bay Area and often commutes to LA for work.
Josh is still looking for a clown based solution for several problems facing industry. There is no denying his brilliance, his wit, and great sense of humor. I'm forever a fan. It was a super fun chat catching up with Josh and hearing his story.
