An experienced visual effects and motion graphics artist, Mary Poplin has worked on major Hollywood feature films including The Last Airbender, Gulliver’s Travels and Jackass 3D. She consults with film studios and customers, providing hands-on training to help evangelize the power of Mocha, Sapphire and Continuum software. Poplin’s passion for the visual effects industry has enabled her to become a mentor, trainer and advocate for visual effects artists. She has trained thousands with her informative video tutorials, onsite training at studios and tradeshow events. She has also paved the way for women in the VFX industry.
Who’s your favorite female character in movies or TV? I self identify as a nerd, and that’s the life I live. So I am going to pick a guilty pleasure character, honestly, and it’s going to sound silly. I know a lot of ladies like me would say Xena, Buffy, Supergirl, the new Dr. Who, or Wonder Woman. And all of those characters are amazing and have something incredible to latch onto. But Sookie Stackhouse from True Blood speaks to me. Yes, it’s a hokey vampire “popcorn” show set in a South that never existed, but hear me out. This woman is a person who discovers a world full of creatures more powerful than her and shows up without fear and without shame. She has an inner glow and strength and captivates monsters who would otherwise tear her apart. While this is also a bit of a Mary Sue situation, I love how mouthy and self assured she is. She won’t take sass or freshness from anyone and she is her own person. She owns her body and her mind and her own destiny. Her gender isn’t the only thing interesting about her. She’s a complete person, even though the show is, as is typical with female characters, viewed through the lens of her relationships with various men. As a telepathic character who grew up thinking she had a mental disorder instead of a gift, she loosely mirrors the struggle of empathetic women and neurodivergent women. And even though she deals with horror and pain throughout her character arc, she remains trusting and kind. Most importantly, she shows her own feminine strength without adopting typically masculine stereotypes of strength. She’s not a good fighter, she simply has a strong soul. I can relate to that and appreciate it.
What topic do you think will dominate media industry headlines in 2019, and why? I think machine learning will continue to be the buzzword in 2019 in tech. Computers are getting more and more advanced as we perfect our data sets and algorithms, machine learning gets used in every field from fraud detection to computer vVision. It seems like everything mind blowing in tech is a branch off of machine learning lately; from deep dream paintings, where a computer takes two disparate images to create new art, to self-driving cars that navigate without the need of a human operator. I would have said AR if Magic Leap could truly take off. However, that is going to be dependent on headsets and I think it’s still several years off. VR and AR has been some of the most enthusiastically latched-onto tech for the last several years, and while I see a little bit of a dip in that enthusiasm as headsets and content struggle to catch up, camera tech is improving every day. When AR combines with machine learning and big data, we are going to be in a constantly connected world, for good or for ill. But there’s so many interesting things that are coming. At SIGGRAPH, I experienced retinal projection for the first time, where an image was sent directly onto my eye instead of seeing it on a screen. That was uncomfortably intriguing, and it stuck with me long after the show was over. We see robotics taking off as well, with exoskeletal augmentation for heavy-lifting factory workers, to the dog robot packing supplies and weapons over rough terrain. There’s so many fascinating things happening in tech right now, and we are privileged to live in a rapidly evolving world. The usefulness and helpfulness of this tech is going to be highly dependant on the people creating and wielding it, and it’s important to keep an eye on that.
What can people in the industry do, today, to help reduce gender discrimination? Oh my, this could be a long essay. Women need to lean in, as we keep saying, but men need to talk less and listen more. By now I hope everyone has read about Dr. Dale Spender’s study where men tend to think women are speaking equally in the conversation when they talk for just 15% of the conversation and dominating the conversation at 30%. That means that even when women are talking 20% less than half of the time it is viewed as overwhelming to their male counterparts. This is really telling research, and while we can debate the academic standards of that research, we can corroborate it with other studies (Kelly, 1988; Brophy and Good, 1974). Men need to listen and not talk over or repeat a woman’s idea like it was their own, and women need to back each other up by reinforcing each other in conversations. We all need to look at how the kyriarchy works, how our culture supports systems of oppression, and how our own biases reinforce those systems. If you personally are unfamiliar with terms like kyriarchy and intersectionality, learning about that is a step one to understanding how to tackle this issue. There is no way to fix discrimination against women only in tech. We have to fix it globally. But we can start in tech by stopping and examining our own beliefs today. Next time someone worries about a woman not being a “good culture fit” or not being “hungry enough”to be the new hire, the best course of action would be to stop and evaluate those feelings. Are they real, or are they a lack of willingness to work with people we are unfamiliar with, folks who might have a different perspective than us? Usually it is the latter, and not actually a problem with the candidate. We need to look at our individual company cultures and make them more friendly for women. Most women get pushed out of STEM because of hostile working environments and a lack of accommodation for women with families. Having policies like parental leave for men and women, flexible schedules to accommodate caregiving and childcare, and paying equal wages for equal work help everyone and help retain all talent, not just women. Enforcing policies against sexual harassment, taking immediate action against hate speech in the workplace, and ditching restrictive, sexist, and often racist dress codes are all key to transforming culture in the workplace. Another good step would be understanding that, when women talk about feminism, patriarchy, kyriarchy, and intersectionality, they aren’t talking about how men are evil. They are talking about our patriarchal culture and how we are all complicit in creating and maintaining that culture. Feminism is about dissecting these intersections of power and then dismantling them. Women and men, and people of all genders for that matter, are all complicit in upholding the patriarchy. It’s not something to take personally, it is simply something to examine and then do better. As women, we need to not view other women as competition for a few available positions, and men can help by helping women make more seats at the table for their peers. In other words, women should help recruit other women, and their male counterparts should listen to those recommendations. We need to actively lift women up, and that means all women, not just white women or cis women.
What famous women, living or dead, would you like to have dinner with? Emma Watson. She’s the next generation of women lifting women, and her visibility is invaluable in that. From her work with the UN campaign HeForShe, to her work promoting education for girls across the world, her public push for feminist ideals at such a young age is admirable. When she said feminism "is not a stick with which to beat other women," I practically clapped behind my computer screen. She’s so much more than an actress or model, in fact, it’s the least interesting thing about her. I’d love the opportunity to pick her brain. I suspect we had a lot in common growing up, as we were both often called “bossy” and a “perfectionist” for doing the same things our youthful male peers did (working hard and possessing leadership traits). She was sexualized at a young age because of her early fame, and that is a lot to deal with as a young girl. I can absolutely say I think she’d be a fantastic dinner companion.
What have you seen or read recently that inspired you? I am years late, but I recently watched Her on Netflix, and I have to say I was blown away. I know it was made in 2013 but I just now got around to it. I took forever to watch it because I thought the movie would be about a sad man who fell in love with his Operating System because he could not handle the reality of being with a real live woman, but that was only about 10% of the movie. Instead, the movie was about how we project what we want onto the people we love. Samantha (The OS) was an entity that Theodore (The Main Character) made her into. Someone to listen to him and be “his,” but she evolved into so much more, and eventually evolved past him. She was his and not his, as she tells him later in the film. She is herself before she belongs to anyone, if she can even be said to belong to anyone. The whole movie is a profound sci-fi love letter to consciousness and relationships and how we make the same mistakes with each new person we meet and what it means to be alive. Some of the lines from the movie haunted me. Samantha tells Theodore things like, “The past is just a story we tell ourselves.” And that is so powerful. We get wrapped up in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and half the time those narratives are so biased they aren’t even true. We deserve better than that from ourselves. Samantha also reflects that “We are only here briefly, and in this moment I want to allow myself joy.” And that too, is hard for a lot of us. Just being in the moment. We are so connected to tech and everyone around us but we are increasingly isolated and insulated too. It is distracting to be in one place while we talk to people we aren’t with in another. If feels like in some ways we have never been more surrounded by people but at the same time none of us have ever been so alone. At one point in the film, Theodore asks Samanthia if she is talking to anyone else while she talks to him. She responds that she is talking to over eight thousand people. And he gets upset, because of course other human people want us to give them their full attention. But she isn’t like him, she is not a human, she can divide her attention without being distracted and he can’t. He gets even more upset with her when he asks if she loves anyone else, and she says that she loves six hundred and forty one other people. But her love for him is not diminished by her love for others, her heart is not “a box that gets filled up,” “it expands in size the more she loves.” She tells him “I still am yours. But along the way, I became many other things too and I can't stop it.” I love that concept, the idea that you can change and grow both apart and together with the people you care about. It’s really a beautiful story, and I recommend watching it if you have not already. I was very touched by the film.