The Pixar Story - A Marriage of Art & Science

Tuesday 25^th January 2011

Reflective Practice

In today’s session we watched a documentary film entitled The Pixar Story (2007) By Leslie iwerks. 

Having looked into this documentary film I believe it is available to buy/download via iTunes & may also be on the Wall E 2^nd disc(I will be checking!).

I’ve checked & it is part of the 2 Disk special edition of Wall-E!

This has allowed me the opportunity to watch it back, take a few of the notes I made on the 1^st viewing and revisit these, expanding where I felt relevant. So here goes …

Storyline

A look at the first years of Pixar Animation Studios - from the success of "Toy Story" and Pixar's promotion of talented people, to the building of its East Bay campus, the company's relationship with Disney, and its remarkable initial string of eight hits. The contributions of John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs are profiled.

The decline of two-dimensional animation is chronicled as three-dimensional animation rises. Hard work and creativity seem to share the screen in equal proportions.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/

The official film website: http://www.thepixarstory.com/

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Notes I made during the showing related to some of the points I thought key …

How 3D animation was a marriage of art & science & how a lot of commentators from within Pixar commented on how the success of Pixar can be traced back to strong story lines and character driven films.

John Lasseter comments that Pixar’s success was down to “it’s people as much as anything else”.

KeyPlayers:

Ed Catmull         -                     Creative Scientist

Steve Jobs         -                     Entrepreneur

John Lasseter-                  Talented Artist

Together they brought together a marriage of ‘ART & SCIENCE’

Key Points:

The creation of CAL ARTS – founded in 1961

Class mates of John Lasseter at CAL ARTS included Tim Burton, John Musker & Brad Bird.

Cal Arts brought back together the ‘9 old men’ from retirement

A computer animated left hand, c1st use of creating curved surfaces and wrapping texture around the curved surfaces. Courtecy of Ed Catmull based at University of Utah was used in the 1976 Sci-Fi film Futureworld

(1^st use of 3D animation in a live action film).

Ed developed software called Tween based out of NYIT that transformed hand drawn animation into a digital medium

QUOTES:

Art Challenges Technology – Technology Challenges Art

“Sharing of information was rich at Disney & Cal Arts”

“Film is forever, pain is temporary” – Brad Bird

Key Organisations:

CAL Arts (California Institute of the Arts) http://calarts.edu/

NYIT (New York Institute of Technology http://www.nyit.edu/

Lucas Film http://lucasfilm.com/divisions/animation/

Hardware Developments:

EditDroid - http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/EditDroid

The Pixar Image Computer

Software Developments:

Renderman - https://renderman.pixar.com/

CAPS

TIMELINE:

1961: Cal Arts Founded

1975: Lasseter at Cal Arts

1979: Lasseter Lands Job at Walt Disney Studios

1987: Lasseter produces Luxo Jnr

1989: Oscar for animated short film

1991: Disney & Pixar join & give the Go-ahead to produce 1^st feature length animated film.

1992: First Animaton Test for ‘Toy Story’

1995: Toy Story released

1995: Pixar Goes to the stock market – Raised $132million

1998: A Bugs Life

2000: Oscar award to technical team for computer animated software (1^st of it’s kind)

2006: Merger of Walt Disney & Pixar into Disney Pixar

FILMS: (ILM- Industrial Light & Magic)

Vol Libre, Loren Carpenter, 1980

Star Trek, The Wrath of Khan,

Andre & Wally B – 1^st Character Driven Film

Young Sherlock Holmes

FILMS: (PIXAR)

Luxo Jnr (1987)

Reds Dream

Tin Toy

FILMS: (Disney&Pixar)

Rescuers down under (1990) – Renewed efforts to combine hand drawn with Computer Animation

Beauty & The Beast (1991)

Jurassic Park (1993) – using Renderman Software

PEOPLE OF PIXAR:

Pete Docter – Director

Andrew Stanton – Director

MINDSET:

Unplanned Collaborations were encouraged!

An Office is an empty Canvas!

OF NOTE:

>Steve Jobs loosing over a million dollars a year for over 5 years from 1995-2000

> Pixar spends approx 2 ½ years doing nothing but storyboarding the film.

I will be revisiting these notes but in the meantime this reminded me to pick up a copy of the 10-year anniversary of Toy Story and look at the extra’s DVD. There;s another two hours gone.