My teacher is Bruce Lee, who dominated Hollywood.

Chapter 171 I Don't Want Copyright

A Boeing 707 passenger plane lands on the runway at Salt Lake City International Airport.

The view from the porthole was completely different from that of the East Coast of the United States three hours earlier.

What came into view was the rolling, snow-covered Wasatch Mountains of Utah. The moment the cabin door opened, the dry, cold air rushed in like a knife, instantly clearing away the "garbage smell" brought from New York from my lungs.

Stepping out of the airport terminal, Qin Han got into the back of a taxi: "University of Utah"

Half an hour later, the vehicle came to a smooth stop in front of a gray concrete building, which is the computer science building at the University of Utah.

Qin Han pushed open the car door, his bespoke suit and Oxford shoes looking completely out of place on the university campus.

The people walking through the corridor were all typical science and engineering students.

They wore pilling flannel plaid shirts, faded jeans, and worn-out Converse sneakers covered in mud.

Everyone was carrying yellowed punched paper tapes or thick, brick-like printing sheets.

In their eyes, this suit-clad thug who suddenly barged in was as conspicuous as an alien.

Ignoring the curious and awe-inspiring gazes around him, Qin Han walked deeper into the corridor and finally heard a series of muffled rumbling sounds.

That was the roar of the industrial air conditioning exhaust fans running at full power to prevent overheating from the mainframe computers of that era.

Pushing open the heavy fire door and descending the stairs, the smell in the air began to change.

A strong burnt smell wafted over, the smell of electronic components baked at high temperatures for an extended period.

Following the smell, he stopped in front of an underground laboratory that had no signs.

The door was ajar, and several black cables, as thick as an adult's arm, peeked out from the crack, winding across the concrete floor like giant black pythons.

"This simply won't work! Our hardware computing power has reached its physical limits!"

An extremely irritable male voice pierced through the noise of the exhaust fan and came from the laboratory.

"We've wasted two whole days on this damn wireframe model! The peak floating-point performance is only this high; add ten more polygons and the machine will crash immediately!"

"Jim, calm down. If physical computing power isn't enough, we'll use math to solve it."

Another voice rang out, its tone tinged with extreme exhaustion: "If we can optimize the algorithm, we can reduce the computation by at least thirty percent —"

Qin Han peered through the crack in the door and saw chalk rapidly rubbing against the blackboard, deriving a series of complex equations.

"Don't waste your energy, Ed. No matter how sophisticated your algorithm is, it can't change a cruel reality." A third voice drifted out, weak and feeble, as if it might stop breathing at any moment.

"The computer time allotted to us by the school will be completely used up in three hours. By tomorrow morning, we won't even have the right to type a single punctuation mark on this machine."

It must be them.

Qin Han reached out and pushed open the half-closed wooden door.

A dozen or so tables were haphazardly pieced together, piled high with leftover pizza boxes, crumpled scrap paper, and foul-smelling coffee cups.

In the very center of the laboratory stood a bulky, large computer.

Three disheveled young men with sunken eyes were gathered around a monochrome monitor that was constantly flashing green light.

The image on the screen is a three-dimensional teapot made of rough white wireframes: this is the prototype of the famous "Utah Teapot" in film history.

It is also the most primitive embryo of the digital special effects industry, which will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the future.

Qin Han's gaze returned to the faces of the three young men, comparing them one by one to the once-powerful tech giants he remembered.

That hot-tempered young man who just smashed his keyboard was Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, the future Silicon Valley hardware legend.

The man writing formulas with chalk in hand is Ed Catmull. He will become the future head of Pixar Animation Studios.

The man slumped in his office chair like a lump of mud, despairing over the lack of funds, was John Warnock, the future creator of the Adobe empire and the grandfather of image processing software.

These geniuses are now like a group of prisoners trapped in a quagmire.

What limits their talent is not intelligence or inspiration, but the most mundane thing in the world—lack of money.

The lack of academic funding made even completing a basic teapot rendering a luxury for them.

The three geeks stopped arguing abruptly and turned around at the same time, staring warily at the man who didn't belong there at all, as if he were an intruder.

Qin Han walked straight to the expensive computer terminal, his gaze fixed on the broken teapot still struggling to spin on the screen. He pulled out an exquisite business card holder from the inside pocket of his suit, took out three business cards, and threw them onto the greasy table.

"Han's Films. I'm a Hollywood producer."

The three looked at each other, exchanging glances.

Jim Clark was the first to react. His already irritable mood, which was already fueled by the code not working, was completely ignited when he heard the word "Hollywood".

"Hollywood?" He gave a cold laugh without any politeness, pointing towards the door. "Sir, you've come to the wrong place. This is the ground floor lab of the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah. We don't study camera lens focal lengths here, so don't disturb our work."

The order to leave was issued extremely abruptly.

In the eyes of this self-proclaimed technological pioneer, those Hollywood moviemakers are nothing but a bunch of hedonistic types who simply cannot comprehend the great cause they are undertaking.

Qin Han wasn't angry. He slowly turned around, his deep gaze sweeping across Jim Clark's face.

He pointed to the flickering wireframe teapot on the screen and let out an undisguised chuckle: "You all pride yourselves on having the smartest minds in the world, spending your days blinding yourselves in this dark, sunless basement, and what's the result?"

"The result is that you used the most complex mathematical formulas to draw a broken teapot that even a three-year-old wouldn't want to look at twice."

"If making this ugly teapot spin around is the ultimate goal of you geniuses—then I've definitely come to the wrong place."

These words were like a resounding slap across the faces of these three arrogant geeks.

Jim Clark's face flushed red instantly, his fists clenched, and the veins on his forehead throbbed.

Ed Catmull's chalk snapped in two, dust falling to the floor. Even John Warnock, who had been slumped in his chair, sat bolt upright, his eyes blazing with fury.

This is a provocation.

But what Qin and Han wanted was to provoke them.

Before they could unleash a torrent of angry retorts, he uttered his second statement.

Do you know how Hollywood makes movies these days?

Universal Pictures is currently filming a disaster movie about sharks in the Atlantic Ocean. The studio spent millions of dollars hiring top mechanical engineers to build a 25-foot-long mechanical great white shark.

"Guess what happened?"

"That expensive piece of industrial waste short-circuits as soon as it comes into contact with seawater. Its lower jaw dislocates frequently, and it looks as stiff as a giant piece of dead wood in front of the camera."

"The entire physical special effects industry in Hollywood has reached a dead end."

His voice rose in pitch: "Monster skins molded from latex, miniature cityscapes, wooden boats destroyed with gunpowder—these ridiculous toys can never escape the constraints of common sense physics!"

The three young men's anger was temporarily suppressed by this description of the film industry. They looked at Qin Han with some confusion, not understanding why this Hollywood tycoon was complaining to them about the difficulties of filmmaking.

Qin Han turned his gaze back to them, his eyes now burning with an ambition a thousand times more insane than these geeks.

He walked up to Ed Catmull and looked at the blackboard covered with algorithms.

"Ed, right? This teapot may be ridiculous, but if I asked you to use code to generate a toy cowboy on the screen that moves, jumps, and greets children, do you think people would still find it boring?"

Ed Catmull felt his breath catch in his throat and fell into deep thought.

Qin Han whirled around, closing in on Jim Clark, who had just been telling him to leave. "As for you, Jim. Stop complaining about the computing power of this crappy machine!"

"Think about how to invent a machine that can render everything you want!"

Jim Clark opened his mouth, instinctively took half a step back, and his back slammed heavily against a row of server racks.

The last gaze fell on John Warnock, who was slumped in his chair.

His voice echoed in the cramped basement: "As for you, could you invent software that would bring a long-extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex to life on screen, shaking its head and wagging its tail?"

An inexplicable deathly silence fell over the basement.

The three men looked at each other in bewilderment: Where did this madman come from?

They always thought that the matrix arrangement they derived day and night was an extremely marginal and obscure research topic in the eyes of the academic community.

But this man from Hollywood has brought the mathematical formulas in their minds directly to the big screen!

Toys? Dinosaurs?

This pursuit of the limits of vision will completely eliminate physical models, and is simply the most romantic and ultimate ode to computer graphics!

After a brief period of excitement, the three men's exhilaration subsided, replaced by a deep sense of powerlessness.

"Mr. Qin—I must admit, your dream is magnificent. But—"

John leaned back in his chair and pointed to the ridiculous wireframe: "The reality is, it takes this machine a full three hours to turn this broken teapot, which has only a few dozen polygons, around once."

"The scenario you've described requires millions, even tens of millions of dollars in research and development investment!"

He gave a bitter smile and spread his hands: "And we don't even have the money to buy sandwiches for lunch tomorrow. In three hours, the school will cut off the power to our lab. Your dream is too expensive for us."

Looking at these three geniuses, their backs bent low by reality, Qin Han pulled up a chair and sat down: "Money? In Hollywood's rules, money is the least valuable resource."

"I will establish a dedicated Hans Visual Technology Pioneer Fund within the Computer Science Department of the University of Utah, under the name of Hans Films."

"The first round of funding, $500,000 in cash, will be in your lab's corporate account before sunset tomorrow."

.

Qin Han held up a finger, pointing at the old terminal: "This money is specifically for purchasing the highest-spec mainframe currently available to your group. You will have a supercomputer that will never be turned off!"

"In addition to hardware and operating costs, this fund will also guarantee each of you a generous personal salary."

"Starting tomorrow, you will no longer need to be subservient to anyone for academic funding. Your only task is to turn the algorithms in your brains into images on the screen that can amaze the world."

$500,000 in initial funding! Unlimited machine time! Top-of-the-line equipment!

For the three people trapped in the basement, this was nothing short of a divine intervention.

Ed Catmull's lips trembled with excitement, but Jim Clark clenched his teeth tightly.

As the man who will one day create a Silicon Valley legend, his business acumen is far more acute than that of the other two tech geeks.

"What's the price?" Jim stared intently into Qin Han's eyes, as if trying to see through the devil's disguise: "Five hundred thousand US dollars, enough to buy the three of us, skin and bones. Are you planning to buy out all the patent rights to the algorithms and hardware/software we develop in the future?"

Once the patents were bought out, they became high-level assembly line workers in Hollywood studios.

Faced with Jim's wary questioning, Qin Han shook his head and let out a light laugh.

"Jim, what do you take me for? A vampire?"

"I'm a filmmaker; my battlefield is the movie theater, the box office. I don't sell software, much less hardware chips."

"Listen carefully. All the latest underlying algorithms, graphics technologies, and even the hardware patents you develop yourself, sponsored by this fund, belong entirely to you!"

"You can publish papers and win the Turing Award, or when the time is right in the future, take these technologies with you, leave the school, go to Silicon Valley to start your own company, and make billions. Han's Films will never interfere with your business empire."

The three of them stared at Qin Han, hardly believing their ears.

Providing massive R&D funding but refusing the most crucial patent rights? How can there be capitalists in the world who do charity like this?

"I have only one request. A bottom line that you can never cross."

Qin Han's voice was deep and carried an absolute air of dominance: "Han's Film Company must enjoy absolute priority access to these technologies and a perpetual free license."

"No other studio's film has been able to enjoy the benefits of your technology before Hans."

"In the future, no matter what great company you establish in Silicon Valley, Han's Films will always be your top priority partner in the film industry!"