High Five: Meet Xavier Desdoigts, Director Of Technical Operations For Animal Logic

Photograph by Luis Enrique Ascui/Getty Images

1

QUICK LEARNER
Desdoigts started at Animal Logic in 1992 as financial controller. His background was in software sales. "I'm probably one of the rare people in this business at this level without a computer background."

2

DATA DECISIONS
One of Desdoigts' biggest challenges has to do with data storage. While making an animated film, the artists create up to 2 Tbytes of data a day, "and really only a small amount has value over time." That necessitated creating a workflow system that mirrors the daily data flow but backs up only the data valuable to the long-term progress of the movie.

3

FROM AUTO TO APPLE
He has always been interested in technology. "I remember buying one of the first Apple Macintoshes with insurance money from a car that was stolen. That's how much computers cost in those days."

4

DEAL WITH IT
During the multiyear process of making Happy Feet, Desdoigts had to freeze the company's computing infrastructure and support 2,000 clustered servers, all running Windows 2000--"not known as the best option for clustering," he says. "We learned to deal with that. We had to create a few things along the way."

5

BUSINESS FIRST
"Technology has to make sense from a business point of view," he says. "Technology for technology's sake is a theoretical exercise."