Those of you who have lusted after a career in the movie industry should know that Dan Gregoire has your dream job - and he is hiring. Gregoire - whom we spoke to last year at Siggraph - is now running his own company, called Halon Entertainment. He has been at the forefront of designing digital content for various cutting-edge movies, including the current and previous Star Wars installments, Moulin Rouge, and War of the Worlds. Along the way, he has worked for filmmakers such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. We met up with him in his offices in Santa Monica last week, and were immediately disappointed with what we saw. Or more precisely, what we didn't see.

Gregoire is someone who spends his days sitting in front of his computer engaged in activities like designing the look and feel of a Star Wars battle scene, or figuring out how to digitally explode something and show it on film. Given that, it is perhaps surprising that his workplace is a dark, non-descript cave on an industrial side-street, which would border on the seedy were it not within a mile or so of the Pacific Ocean. There is no large corporate sign - or any sign whatsoever, other than the address of the building itself - and no grand architectural statement of purpose. This is hardly room to park at all, let alone the labeled reserved parking spots that most of us associate with movie moguls and big egos.

Inside the office, once my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I saw no racks of servers, no obvious signs of sophisticated computer technology, no bundles of wires running from room to room, and no more than two computers per desktop showing any evidence of the modern era. It was as boring an office as you could imagine, something more out of a 1950's Spencer Tracy movie than the current era.

It was the most terrifically understated place that I have been to, and yet I was in awe of it and the people who worked there. Make no mistake: Halon is at the center of power for movie geeks.