SUMMIT, NJ, September 21, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Lindsey B. Williams has been included in Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
In the dead of winter, Williams born the youngest of three to prominent New York architect, David K. Williams, and local mother-baby nurse and educator, Garnet L. Williams. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey's family-friendly Washington School District, in a home that locals will tell you is distinctive, having been designed by her father. She grew up through the decades-long construction of her home and was largely educated in the public school system. Having several learning disabilities, mental health issues, and unusual allergies, her mother, like many others during this time, had to fight to ensure that she received a quality education as well as the support she needed. This ultimately resulted in Williams' commuting back and forth from Union County College and Cornerstone Day School, a therapeutic high school, which at the time was a tiny charter school in the industrial park of Springfield, NJ.
To much of the district's shock, given the false-perception that she would be under-educated in therapeutic high-school, Williams' scored nearly-perfect on her ACT on the first attempt, meaning she would get accepted on to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she intended to pursue genetic engineering and digital arts. After blowing through their curriculum, Williams began to catch the eye of former DreamWorks' director, Mike De Seve, who would give her her first job in the entertainment industry as his intern on the now award-winning motion-comic, Operation Ajax.
Williams' work frequently was far-above her peers and expectations. When Williams began to discuss the development that she needed to do to realize her visions it sparked her professor, Leo Quiles, to suggest that she meet Dana Peters, one of his friends who worked at Weta Digital Ltd., as they were trying to do very similar things. As result of a series of scheduling conflicts, Williams actually met J.P. Lewis, at the time the Head of Virtual Studio at the studio, who was actually stepping in for Sebastian Sylwan, its CTO. Their conversations surrounding Williams' work and her technology to allow for virtual characters to get wet in a way that would be easily directable continued sparsely for several months via email, however these would get disrupted by DreamWorks' Animation, Mike De Seve's alma mater who had also taken an interest in Williams and her software. DreamWorks began requesting source code of that very piece of software in a manner that made Williams' concerned. Sure enough it also made Sylwan concerned, and so Weta Digital and DreamWorks Animation proceeded to have a bit of a fight about DreamWorks' request on Williams, a then sophomore in college who did not have an experienced advisor. During this time Williams would actually be nominated for the first time to AMPAS SciTech and end up being accepted as a transfer student to Stanford University as a Computer Science major, which was unheard of. As she was trying to decide what to do with her future, Sylwan flat-out offered her a position at Weta Digital, which she ultimately accepted. Sylwan, now as her CTO, hung around Williams and what was supposed to be 3-months turned into a year-long stay in New Zealand working on new technologies for several of the production-houses' future films, after which she would matriculate at Stanford University.
Williams drive to excel can be traced back to late 2003, when she was not-enthralled with Peter Jackson's adaptions of J.J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, even though she didn't have much interest in the books herself. Instead of complaining, she set about creating a film of her own that would "dethrone Peter Jackson". She knew that to create a film worthy would require her to use her own technology and have a story worthy to tell so she founded her own production company called Open-Eyed Productions, which she still owns today. She began that journey by writing a high-fantasy novel that now, over a decade later, takes up more than 40 GB on a hard drive and is still growing.
In 2009, Robert Kaplow was both impressed and shocked to receive a piece of it as a homework assignment to grade:
"This is genuinely astonishing: a complicated, multi-dimensional fantasy, alive with history, legend, imagination...Vividly sustained imaginative world. Impressive and unique."
Later in 2014, Lord of the Ring's producer, Rick Porras was introduced to the material, and he began supervising her as she attempted to launch it out into the greater studio-system only to realize that she wanted to keep creative control over it the way George Lucas kept Star Wars. To this end, Porras and Williams met over morning meetings for over a year trying out all sorts of cafes along the Avenue of Americas in New York City, until Williams began to suspect that her writing vault was being hacked and leaked.
As far as the future of the project Williams says:
"It will totally still be made, all this will just be its free marketing. I always like to bring something new to the material each time I work with it.
Think of this: a bunch of angry and desperate has-beens steal my work in hopes to devastate me as they make millions off me – but all they end up doing is creating me a larger audience than I could have on my own.
In some way I should thank them, but they still owe me a f**king lot of money not to mention an apology because my work has never been published or submitted anywhere.
At the end of the day I think that they were just upset that I wouldn't let in outside producers and this their way of having a tantrum rather than bidding on my work like they are supposed to.
The footprint left by Williams on the Entertainment Industry qualifiers her as one of greatest creative minds in modern media but it also paints her a victim of the burgeoning privacy-crisis in Silicon Valley and of the system developed by the generation defined by Harvey Weinstein, that isn't just stack against her but against anyone who wants to control their work.
Williams is currently represented by a cluster of attorneys including veteran literary attorney, Alan Kaufman, formerly of Penguin Publishing; complex litigator, Gene Markin of Stark & Stark; and senior litigator Sanford Young. She's represented in Europe by Colin Manning of Bishop & Castle.
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Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America®, Marquis Who's Who® has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America® remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis® now publishes many Who's Who titles, including Who's Who in America®, Who's Who in the World®, Who's Who in American Law®, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare®, Who's Who in Science and Engineering®, and Who's Who in Asia®. Marquis® publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who® website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
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