July 27, 2016 • 48 mins
How did the Pixar studio get started? How did it evolve from a small operation to a power player in the Disney empire? And how has the company led innovation in animation?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Technology with Tuck Stuff from Stuff. Hey there, and welcome
to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, flying solo again.
This is part one of what I expect will be
a two part episode saga about one of my favorite companies,
(00:26):
or at least a company that produces some of my
favorite entertainment pis are I um decided to cover Pixar
because I've been interested in this company for a while now,
but I didn't know a whole lot about it apart
from some general notes, and as I dug down into it,
I found it much more interesting than I was already aware.
(00:50):
And this is one of those places where when you
see video of the Pixar campus and the amazing building
and the way people work there, it's very inspiring. But
to learn about the full history, it's pretty cool, and
it's actually kind of amazing that it even happened, because
the company, or the various entities that would eventually become
(01:13):
Pixar didn't always have the smoothest ride. There were a
lot of issues along the way, and the company could
have easily disappeared and we might not have ever seen
the films that Pixar created as a result. So the
story will overlap with another episode of tech Stuff from
(01:36):
two thousand and twelve, a good old classic episode. That
episode is called tech Stuff looks at Industrial Light and Magic,
So Pixar in Industrial Light and Magic actually have a
shared history in some ways. Um, I'm gonna look at
that innovation of of Pixar, but it's not just a
story about computer animated films. Pixar has developed tons of
(01:56):
technology in the field of computer graphics and image processing.
When the company found out that there was no tech
that could do what they wanted to do, they started
building it and then selling it to other people. We'll
get into that in this episode. Now, to talk about
the history of Pixar, we first have to chat about
some of its founders. But I'm not talking about John Lastner,
(02:19):
I'm not talking about George Lucas, I'm not talking about
Steve Jobs. They will all factor into this discussion, but
those are not Those aren't the people who were there
at the very beginning. Uh, At the very beginning was
Dr edwind E Catmoll now Dr Catmull was born in
nine in West Virginia, and as a child he dreamed
(02:40):
of working for the Walt Disney Company, but eventually kind
of gave up on that dream. He felt that he
lacked artistic talent and felt that, you know, there's just
no room for me at Disney, which is kind of funny.
So he decided to study computer science and physics instead.
You know, if you can't be an animator for Disney,
going to co eater science in physics. He attended the
(03:02):
University of Utah and that's where he earned a bachelor's
degree in computer science. He earned another one in physics,
and he got a PhD in computer science. So he's
a smart dude, and he was granted his PhD in
nineteen seventy four. Now, in nineteen seventy two, while he
was still in school, Dr Catmill created a computer animated
(03:23):
version of his own left hand that was incorporated into
the film Future World, and that marked the first full
length feature film to have computer animation in it. Now,
this was just a tiny little segment that was featured
in part of the movie. It wasn't like it wasn't
like they made a feature length movie about a guy's
left hand. They've they've since done movies like that, but
(03:46):
that was not what this one was about. And you
can actually view the animation and how it was made
on YouTube. There's the clip available right there. The title
is called a Computer Animated Hand nineteen seven two, and
then the video you see that they started with a
physical model of Captain Bill's hand. I'm guessing they cast
(04:06):
in his hand, so, in other words, they made a
mold and then filled that mold with some sort of
resin or something along those lines, and the finished product
was a copy of Captain Mill's left hand. Then they
drew polygons on the surface of the model hand, so
they physically drew these polygon shapes so that it could
(04:30):
be translated into a digital form. They digitized the model
by scanning it with a tiny little scanner that was
kind of a attached to an arm, so they could
like a like a like a mechanical arm, not a
not a human arm, but almost like one you would
see on a lampstand, and they traced out the hand.
(04:51):
This created the digital model, so they ended up with
a wire model inside the computer. They then did a
halftone sequence on top of this wire model, and then
a smooth shading sequence, and that ended up creating a
three D model of the hand, which they then could
animate and make it do different gestures and rotated and
(05:13):
that kind of stuff and give it that sort of
three dimensional appearance. Now, that and other projects that he
was working on that Ketmol was working on got the
attention of a somewhat eccentric, wealthy entrepreneur named Alexander Shure,
and Sure had founded a technical college, the New York
(05:38):
Institute of Technology, one of the first dedicated higher learning
institutions that specifically looked at technology, and he ended up
hiring Dr Katmull to come over and become the director
of a brand new division called the Computer Graphics Lab.
This was in nineteen so right after he got his PhD,
(06:01):
Dr Cammel came over to New York and began to
work at the New York Institute of Technology. At that
Computer Graphics Lab, Ketmel met with other pioneers in computer
graphics and one of those was ALV. Ray Smith. Now,
Smith is also a name we have to mention when
you talk about the beginnings of Pixar. Smith is is
(06:23):
as important to those early days as cat'n Moll. He's
a co founder of the company and he earned a
bachelor's degree in nineteen sixty five and electrical engineering from
New York. It's from New Mexico State University rather, and
in nineteen sixty uh he also earned his PhD in
computer science from Stanford. He taught electrical engineering and computer
(06:48):
science at New York University and the University of California
at Berkeley before joining Xerox Park. Xerox Park, by the way,
fascinating place. We mentioned it on a few previous episodes
of tech Stuff from way back. It's one of those
R and D divisions that really shaped computers. Things like
the graphical user interface and the mouse all came out
(07:11):
of Xerox Park. They were not invented by Apple. It
was actually a Xerox invention first and then eventually made
its way into other devices and personal computers. Now, when
he was at Park, uh Smith actually helped develop a
computer graphics paint program, which he would continue to to
(07:32):
uh you know, work in that field after moving over
in the computer graphics lab at the n y I
t Now, also that lab was another guy named David
Di Francesco who graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He
would become a founding member of Pixara as well, and
in nineteen seventy seven some other folks joined. Ralph Guggenheim,
(07:57):
who had freshly graduated from Carnegie In University with a
degree in communications, joined the lab and he also would
become part of Pixart later on. So they start working
in this graphics lab. They're working to UH TO to
push the boundaries of computer graphics, which was a very
very young discipline at that point. They were actually kind
(08:19):
of defining the rules as they were going along. And
this went for a couple of years until nineteen seventy nine,
and that's when George Lucas was putting together Industrial Light
and Magic. Lucas really wanted to push film editing and
production technology forward. He felt that Hollywood had been relying
upon the same tools for decades, and he felt that
(08:43):
because of the rise of computers and other technologies, the
industry was ripe for change. He just had to find
the right people to do it. So he created UH
Lucasfilm Computer Division in Industrial Light and Magic, and he
recruited doctor ed Catmull from the New York Institute of
Technology to head the new department. So here's cat Moll.
(09:07):
He's been working at n y i T for a
few years. He was named the director immediately upon being hired, Like,
imagine this. Imagine going to college and then immediately after
you get your bachelor's degree, imagine pursuing your post graduate
work and getting your PhD. Then imagine you're immediately hired
(09:27):
to be the head of a brand new department in
the first Technical Institute of the United States of America.
Then imagine that George Lucas wants you to go and
work for him. Now, it's pretty charmed life if you
ask me. At any rate. Uh, he recruited Dr ca'm
moll and Camill came along, and then he brought along
(09:50):
Alvi ray Smith, David D. Francesco, and Ralph Guggenheim from
the Graphics Computer Lab to join the new departments. So,
in a way, I'm not saying that he necessarily intended
to do this, but Lucas raided the Graphics computer Lab
at n y I T to create his own computer
division and Industrial Light and Magic. So cat Will became
(10:12):
vice president of the division and managed development and not
just film editing, but also computer graphics, digital audio, and
video games. One of his earliest projects it was actually
coming up with a method to imitate motion blur with
computer graphics so that looks more like a fast moving
action that's usually cut on film, because if you're using
(10:33):
film and things are moving quickly, you get this blur effect.
And without that blur, the graphics would remain too sharp
and then seem fake or unrealistic. If you've ever watched
uh a television set that has a really high refresh
rate and you just feel like things don't look right,
even though everything's very clear and very sharp, it doesn't
(10:54):
look right. That might be part of it. It's the
removal of that blur. Well, that a camel was actually
learning how to insert a blur so that things would
look more natural when they were on screen. Over the
next few years, Cammell's team pioneers computer graphics for film,
and they published more than one hundred papers on the
(11:14):
subject in various publications. So they continue doing this work,
developing the technology necessary to do computer graphics, but they
realized there's a big, big problem. Computer graphics requires a
decent amount of processing and the technology just wasn't up
to speed to do this in an efficient way. It
(11:37):
was really expensive to produce computer animation and really difficult
as well, very time consuming because processors just weren't fast
enough to handle data at the speeds necessary to turn
this stuff out quickly, and so there was actually real
discussion about how Moore's Law would eventually solve this problem,
(11:57):
but it would require them to wait a round a
bit in order to get to it. So they kept
on pushing against those barriers, but they acknowledged that there
was only so much you could do without spending ridiculous
amounts of money. And in fact, this entire department within
Lucas's empire was a money losing proposition. It costs more
(12:21):
money to develop and produce the computer animation than the
division was generating, or at least you could argue that.
In nine three, John Lastner joined Capt. Moll's team as
a contract employee. Here's the thing about John Lastner. He
had worked for Disney two times already, although that's kind
(12:44):
of misleading. The first time John Lastner worked for Disney
he was a skipper for the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland.
So if you've ever ridden the Jungle Cruise ride, you
know who these people are. There, the folks who are
your host as you get on the the boat, and
they mostly pepper you with puns and really wacky jokes.
(13:06):
As you go through the ride, so they might say
things like, uh, you know, that's an African elephant. How
can you tell? And the answer is because we're in Africa,
instead of you know the ears or anything like that.
Or you go behind the waterfalls, is everyone look here,
(13:27):
it's the backside of water. A joke so old and
repeated so frequently that weird Al Yankovic worked it into
his song Skipper Dan. So John Laster was a skipper
on the Jungle Cruise ride and uh, he you know,
that was a job he had when he was a
young man, like a teenager. Uh. And then later on
(13:49):
John Lastner would join Disney as an animator. So he
worked there for a while but was eventually let go
or fired if you prefer. And they're different reasons that
have been given for this, but the one that I
see that seems to be repeated the most frequently is
that he was so interested in computer animation. He was
(14:09):
really pushing for Disney to start looking into computer animation
as a means of telling stories, but the company wasn't interested,
and eventually they just didn't have anything for him, so
they let him go. But Captain Bull and Smith were
frequent visitors to Disney. They would go to Disney to
check things out, and they met John Lassen when they
(14:31):
went to Disney Animation. So as soon as Laster was fired,
cat Will said, Hey, you should come over here and
work for us. So he joined the graphics group and
worked on a short film titled The Adventures of Andre
and Wally b. Now, at that time he was a
contract employee. He was not a full time employee because
cat Will only had certain amount of authority to do
(14:55):
things like higher on new people. He would join as
a full time employee the Computer division in nine and
his title at that time became Interface designer. And the
reason he was an interface designer is because Captain Will
didn't have the authority to hire on an animator, so
(15:15):
they made up the title, or they gave him a
title that wasn't really what he did in order to
be able to hire him. At the conference of the
a c m S Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics
better known as siggraph S I g g R A
p H, seven of the thirty papers that were accepted
(15:35):
for publication for that conference came from this Lucasfilm team
headed by Captain Bill so. In other words, they were
dominating the space. They were providing a lot of the
uh most forward thinking ideas in computer graphics, and they
(15:57):
were defining the process more than anyone else was at
that time. So they were instrumental in getting computer animation
and computer graphics integrated into entertainment. It was pretty impressive.
Some of the movies that the team worked on during
their time there included Star Trek to the Wrath of Cohn.
(16:20):
If you're familiar with the movie, you know there's a
sequence in which, uh, the Genesis program, the Genesis device
transforms a dead planet into one that's just teeming with
life and you get this, um this interesting effect as
you watch the plant kind of sprout life everywhere. That
(16:40):
was one of the sequences that this group worked on.
In fact, Alvi ray Smith himself directed that sequence. He
was the one in charge of it. It was also
used in some stuff in Return of the Jedi, and
they provided a sequence in Young Sherlock Holmes that ended
up being a first So Young Sherlock Holmes is the
(17:03):
story of Sherlock Holmes when he's a young man. He's
attending a school and John Watson ends up being put
into the same school and the two of them have
to try and solve a mystery, and at one point
a character is hit with a dart that has a
hallucinogenic on it, and the hallucinogenic makes these terrible things
(17:26):
seem to happen to people, and it mostly drives them
to do terrible things like jump in the way of
a of a carriage that's racing down the street, and
thus they end up dying. But it looks like they're
committing suicide, but in reality they are trying to escape
this freaky vision they have. In this case, the freaky
vision was a figure in a stained glass window appears
(17:48):
to come to life, jump free of the window and
attack a person. And this marked the first time computer
graphics were incorporated into a scene with live action actors
and done in a convincing way. Before when you had
computer graphics in movies, it was essentially the entire frame
you're looking at a computer graphic. It's not something that's
(18:12):
interacting with live action characters, or it might be something
that's on a screen within a scene, but not something
that's actually supposed to be in the physical space along
with the actors. This marked the first time that happened
uh if you have not seen Young Sherlock Holmes, I
recommend it. It's not the best film, but it is
(18:34):
interesting and it is entertaining. I think it gets a
little um, maybe a little self satisfied, but it's worth watching.
I actually saw it in the theater, So this is
one of those moments where I think I witnessed history.
I saw a movie in which the first computer generated
(18:55):
character had an interaction with a live action actor. Didn't
know that that at the time, but now it's true. Now,
the technology that the team needed to produce these sorts
of effects didn't really exist, at least not in a
way that was attainable for a a division within a
production studio. So the group began to develop a specialized
(19:18):
computer called the Pixar Image Computer. So that this is
where they get their name of the company. Spoiler alert,
but Pixar Image Computer. The name came from Alvi ray
Smith and Lauren Carpenter, who were trying to brainstorm and
name for this device. Uh. Alvi ray Smith wanted to
(19:40):
come up with a name that had almost kind of
a Spanish verbs sound to it, and he wanted to
be a little, um, a little uh futuristic sounding too,
and they decided to go with pixar as if it
were a verb to to make a picture. But it
was all on at it and ultimately they thought Pixar
(20:02):
sounded kind of cool, and that's what they called the computer,
the Pixar Image Computer. The computer allowed for both image
processing and computer graphics development on the same device. So
up to that point, those processes had to be done
separately on different machines, which limited the sort of stuff
you could actually produce. But the Pixar Image Computer changed
(20:23):
that and created a new discipline called image computing. So
it's sort of a combination of the two previously existing
disciplines and it allows you to do a lot more
interesting stuff. The Pixar Image Computer had a chap channel processor,
which is a four parallel processor chip capable of performing
(20:44):
forty million instructions per second, which was not bad for
the mid nineties, and it had a twenty four megabyte
picture memory AH and that memory could be expanded to
forty eight megabytes UH memory bus could access that memory
and a blistering two forty megabytes per second, and the
(21:05):
system was also expandable. Two additional chaps could be added
to provide up to a hundred twenty million instructions per
second um. This is, you know, obviously not state of
the art compared to today's standards, but in the eighties,
to be able to create this device specifically so you
could do image computing was pretty impressive. The video controller
(21:27):
bus was twice as fast as the memory bus at
four eighty megabytes per second, and depending upon the software
load out, the computer would work with in TSC PAL
and ten twenty four by seven r GB displays. The
Pixar Image Computer required a host computer, so it wasn't
a standalone device on its own, and you actually had
(21:48):
to pair it with another computer in order to control it.
This typically was a big, expensive computer that was not
meant for personal you. So this wasn't a personal computer.
It's not like it was a an Apple one or
anything like that. It wasn't anywhere along those lines. We're
talking about like a Sun system or a similar computer,
(22:13):
where uh, it's a pretty massive, powerful system all on
its own, and then you would connect that, you would
network it to the Pixar Image Computer and it would
communicate over cables a transmission rate of eighty megabytes per second. Uh.
The computer was not cheap. It cost one thirty five
(22:35):
thousand dollars, and keep in mind this is the mid
nineteen eighties, so it would be significantly more than that
today if you adjust for inflation. And also keep in
mind that a hundred thirty five thousand dollars just gets
you the Pixar image computer. You still need that host computer,
which could cost another thirty five thousand dollars. So hundred
seventy thousand dollars just for this one method of image
(22:59):
computer geting, it's pretty pretty expensive. The list of customers
was small, but it included some very influential ones, and
in fact, the company envisioned, or rather the division at
this time within LucasArts or Lucasfilm, envisioned six different markets
for its image computer, and that included medical imaging, remote
(23:22):
sensing and mapping, seismic imaging, design and animation, graphic arts
and science, and scientific visualization. So that's kind of incredible
when you think about it, like this was a company
that eventually becomes known for creating computer animated films, but
early on they were trying to generate revenue through developing
(23:47):
hardware and selling it to a diverse group of clients,
not just other entertainment companies, but medical industries, you know,
and and scientific research centers. So it was kind of incredible.
One of the customers that was interested in this technology
was Disney that the Walt Disney Company and Walt Disney
(24:11):
Company approached the Computer Graphics division over at Lucasfilm and said, hey,
we have this idea, but we can't put it together.
We need someone else to design it for us, but
we want a computer animation production system or CAPS, And
this was their attempt to update the cell animation process.
(24:34):
It was to digitize the cell animation animation process. So
in other words, they still weren't going away from hand
drawn animation. They still wanted to do that, but they
wanted an updated method to process each of those cells
to make it more efficient and uh more effective. So
(24:55):
the process of creating the system CAPS spanned a couple
of years. By the time it was ready, the division,
this computer Graphics division was no longer part of Lucasfilm.
It actually would take so long for them to finish
the CAP system that it was when it was done
when Pixar became its own entity. Now, Smith continued to
(25:21):
work on other projects, including creating a new channel for pixels.
So by channel, I mean how do you describe a pixel?
You already had the color channels of red, green, and blue,
but Smith added an alpha channel, and the alpha channel
allowed you to tag pixels with extra data that could
(25:41):
be used for matting, for a compositing, for overlays, and
for anti aliasing. So you can think of it as
here's an extra way of being able to describe this pixel,
to get a specific effect beyond just what color is it?
That's kind of cool Now around, Alvie Smith was looking
(26:03):
into creating the first feature length computer animated film, and
he started actually having some serious conversations about it. It
was going to be a collaboration with a Japanese company,
and the movie they had decided to try and make
would be a story inspired by the famous Chinese novel
Journey to the West. But when Alvi Ray Smith sat
(26:27):
down to seriously look at how much would that cost?
What would the film's budget need to be, he realized
that the industry wasn't efficient enough to allow for a
realistic budget. It's just that it would be too expensive,
it would never get made, and he came to the
reluctant conclusion that they would continue to wait for Moore's
law to keep on being Moore's law and bring down
(26:50):
those costs. Keep in mind, Moore's law at its heart
really isn't about how quickly computer power increases. It's really
about how quickly computer power becomes more affordable. Uh. When
Gordon Moore made the observation, it was really from an
(27:10):
economic standpoint, not a technological capability standpoint. He said that
when the price of developing more powerful processors comes down,
then obviously people develop more powerful processors. And he's noticed
that that tends to happen every eighteen to twenty four months.
So it's interesting to think that More's laws really more
(27:32):
about economics than it is about how many discrete elements
you can cram onto a square inch of a silicon wafer.
But at any rate, UH Smith recognized there just was
not going to be a full length computer animated feature
film until the technology was caught up to make it,
(27:53):
you know, economically feasible. In February six, the Computer Graphics
Division was spun off from Lucasfilm. The technology the team
had developed had applications beyond the film industry, like we mentioned,
you know, was the medical field and seismic studies as
well as things like meteorology. All of them had different applications,
(28:16):
so the technology was valuable, but Lucas was ready to
get rid of it because while the division was accomplished,
it had been losing money for several years and it
was really expensive to make good computer graphics. But on
top of that, Lucas had other reasons that he didn't
want to have this financial drain hitting him. For one thing,
(28:39):
Return of the Jedi had come out in nineteen eight three.
Now we're talking about nineteen eight six, three years later.
Star Wars merchandise sales were starting to slack off pretty
big time. By so the huge checks that had been
coming in we're starting to dry up at this point.
(28:59):
On up of that, Lucas had had a very expensive
divorce in nine three, and he was having lots of issues,
uh surrounding that, which is an entirely different episode that
doesn't involve technology, So I don't know who will ever
cover it, but it is a fascinating story. Oh and
(29:19):
and Lucas also had one other albatross around his neck.
He made a little movie called Howard the Duck, and
it didn't perform quite as well. As he had hoped.
You remember I mentioned that if you haven't seen young
Shelock Holmes, it's worth seeing. The same is not true
for Howard the Duck, although if you've got a bunch
(29:41):
of friends over and you just want to make fun
of a movie, it's a pretty decent candidate. So Lucas
wanted to dump this computer graphics division, and cap'n mill
and Smith knew about this. They knew that this was coming,
They saw the writing on the wall, and so for
about a year before for this happened, they began to
(30:03):
talk to potential investors who might be able to give
some capital to the spun off company. And uh they
ended up courting a certain Steve Jobs as a potential
backer for that new company. And it had happened for
about a year and Captain Bill Smith became co founders
of this new company, which they now named Pixar. So
(30:26):
they took the name from the computer they had developed,
which wasn't an easy decision, by the way, there were
a lot of internal disagreements within Pixar about what to
call the new company. Uh, the temporary name on the
documents at around that time was actually g f X,
so I'm glad that they dropped that and went with Pixar.
Steve Jobs provided capital for the company. He signed a
(30:49):
five million dollar check specifically to Smith and to Captain Mill,
who then signed it over to Lucas. Now that five
million dollars was to essentially pay Lucas for the the company.
He gave the company another five million dollars to act
as starting capital for Pixar itself. And like I said,
(31:11):
Jobs wasn't the only person that they talked to about
the possibility of investing in this new company. Another person
who almost funded Pixar. This story would be different if
this had come to pass. The person who almost funded
Pixar was Ross Pero. And guys, if you're old enough
to remember, you know Ross Pero was an entrepreneur and
(31:34):
a former presidential candidate, independent candidate UM and certain character too. Man.
I mean Saturday Night Live had a lot of fun
imitating Ross Pero for a few months. Anyway, Ross Perrow
almost was the one to fund Pixar, but that deal
fell through at the last minute and Steve Jobs stepped in. Meanwhile,
(31:57):
Steve Jobs himself was going through a bit of a transition.
He had co founded Apple computers in the seventies. But
by this time Apple had more or less forced him
out of the company. The board had made his life
incredibly difficult. They kind of removed all of his responsibilities,
(32:17):
so he didn't have anything to do, and they kind
of sent him off off to the side, so he
was more or less forgotten. So he just kind of
left and they paid for it. That company did not
do so well without Steve Jobs. In fact, Apple began
to lose focus. At one point the company was in
danger of completely going bankrupt. And only then was really
(32:39):
Steve Jobs asked to come back and try and work
on fixing that. And he did come back and eventually
was made CEO of Apple and turned everything around. But
that's another story. In fact, we've covered that on Tech Stuff.
We've talked about the story of Steve Jobs and his
exodus from Apple, his his exile, and then his triumphant
(33:01):
returned later on. Now you might have heard that Steve
Jobs has been referred to as a founder or the
founder of Pixar, or the owner of Pixar, and technically
neither of those were true at the time that Pixar
was founded. Now he had a majority stake in the company.
He had seventy ownership of the company and the employees
(33:21):
had the other thirty percent. But it was Smith and
cat Moll who actually founded the company and ran the operations.
They were the the president or well, Catmill was the
president and Smith was the vice president of the company.
They managed the company. So what Steve Jobs did was
provide that starting capital. And he also was a master
(33:43):
marketing genius type. We all know this if you've ever
seen any Steve Jobs presentation. The guy knew how to
sell like he was really good at expressing interesting ideas
and getting you excited about them. So what he started
to do with Pixar is marketed as a computer hardware company,
(34:04):
like the makers of the Pixar Image computer, and that
became a major product under his watch, and Pixar sold
several to various entities, including the Walt Disney Company. Now
Steve Jobs was technically providing money to Pixar to buy
the technology rights to the systems that they built that
picks our image computer and other technologies that they built
(34:24):
while they were at Lucasfilm. That was where that first
five million dollars went. And uh, like I said, they
he had seventy of the ownership and the employees had
thirty ed. Catmill and Alvie Smith owned the majority of
that thirty percent, and that's how they ended up also
becoming the managers, or rather they were also the managers
(34:49):
for Pixar, the president and vice president respectively. And they
weren't really as keen on the idea of being a
hardware company. They lies that there was a necessity for
it in order for them to remain afloat while waiting
for Moore's Law to kick in so that they can
actually start doing what they wanted to do in the
(35:10):
first place, which was produced computer animation in an economical way.
And when Pixar formed, Catmill and Smith brought along around
thirty eight employees of the computer graphics division with them
from Pixar. That included John Lasseter, so Lasted was one
of forty Lucasfilm employees who became Pixar employees, and Lasted
(35:37):
also really wanted to push computer animation, just as he
was still doing a Disney before they fired him. He
really wanted computer animation to become a thing, and he
got the freedom to work on a few projects. Now,
it wasn't that Steve Jobs was interested in having this
company produced computer animated shorts or films. That wasn't the case.
(36:02):
Lasseter was able to make the argument, Hey, we have
this equipment, this Pisar image computer, and you need to
be able to sell it to people. So you need
to show them some interesting demonstrations of what the computer
is capable of doing. How about we shoot some computer
animated shorts and that will act as almost like a
(36:24):
sales pitch, a demo of the technology itself. And he
got the go ahead. So Laster kind of found a
work around in order to get to do what he
wanted to do, which was to make computer animated films. Uh,
but these weren't intended at least not originally to reach
a wider audience. It was really meant to pitch to
(36:44):
potential customers. But that did change. So in a little
bit later on, after it spun off and started It's
It's shaky first Steps, Pixar premiered the film Luxo Junior
at Siggraph. Now that's the short that introduces the famous
(37:06):
Luxo desk lamp. That little lamp that bounces into frame
with the Pixar logo, jumps up and down, on the
ball and then becomes the eye for Pixar. Uh, this
is where that that character comes from. And the short
received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film,
(37:27):
so people took notice of it. The award actually ended
up going to a different film called a Greek Tragedy.
But it's okay because Pixar would end up getting a
lot of Academy Awards over its history, and I'll mention
quite a few of them in both this one and
more importantly in the second episode about the Pixar story.
(37:52):
So by getting that notoriety of being a nominative for
an Academy Award, it helped the company lands some commercial
get pigs and design animation for other studios, so it
kept business going, although Pixar as a company was still
losing money, and when it would lose money, Steve Jobs
would invest a little more money to keep it going
(38:14):
in the hopes that it would eventually pay off big time.
Um more on that in just a minute. So in
nineteen eight seven, Pixar debuts a short film titled Red's
Dream r e. D Red's Dream, also directed by John Laster,
and they premiered that at the seven cigagraph in they
(38:38):
have another short film come out. This one is called
Tin Toy t I n Tin Toy, and it won
an Academy Award for Best Best Animated Short. That exposure
helped the company a lot and led to the eventual
partnership with the Walt Disney Company. It got Disney's attention
(38:58):
and eventually would lead to discussions between the two companies now.
That same year, Night Pixar finished development on an animation
system called mens M E n V, which stands for
Modeling Environment. Um. I'll go into more detail on some
of the technologies they developed in our second episode. In nine,
(39:20):
Pixar completed work on a new short called knick Knack,
one of my favorites. It features a very determined plastic
snowman inside a snow globe and he's trying so hard
to get to a Hawaiian themed like a tropical themed
setting including a a a lovely young lady toy. So
(39:43):
you've got the snowman who gets a crush on this
on this whole you know, sort of tropical uh toy,
and is trying really hard to break out of his
snow globe in order to get over to there. That's
an adorable little short pixel. Pixar also started work on
some commercials at that time. My favorite commercial that pixarre,
(40:05):
or actually it's really it was an ad campaign that
Pixar worked on, because it wasn't just a single commercial
came out in the early nineties around that was an
ad campaign for a cool mint, Listerine. So if you've
ever seen those commercials, those are the ones where you
see a little bottle of listerine swinging through the jungle
(40:28):
and Baltimore's Tarzan Boy is playing in the background, which
is an awesome poppy song. So I remember those distinctly
because I remember seeing those commercials come on and they
actually affected me, Like I thought, well, it's a neat commercial.
Most of the time, I ignore them, but I like those.
So pis are just kind of had this ability to
(40:49):
inject personality into objects that otherwise would be inanimate, and uh,
it was something that would serve them very well as
they moved forward into the feature films later on. Getting
back to the nineteen eighties, in nineteen eighty nine, Pete
Doctor and Andrew Stanton both joined Pixar, and they both
(41:10):
become very important later on. Both of them end up
writing and directing films for Pixar. According to the book
To Infinity and Beyond, by this time or around this time,
Steve Jobs had invested more than fifty million dollars into
Pixar over the years, mostly as an attempt to just
keep the business going. Sales of the Pixar Image Computer
(41:33):
had really dropped off by this point, the computer, the company,
rather it was losing money, so Jobs ended up doing
a round of downsizing, in other words, firing a lot
of employees, and Jobs was also in the middle of
dealing with another troubled venture, his company, Next Incorporated, which
produced the Next Computer, which is incredibly expensive but pretty
(41:56):
impressive machine. The machine itself failed to make a large
impact in the market, but it was the thing that
convinced Apple's board to bring Steve Jobs back a little
bit later. So by nine Steve Jobs decided he wanted
to sell off the hardware division of Pixar to refocus
Pixar into an animation studio and no longer be a
(42:18):
company that's developing hardware for other industries. So he sold
that hardware division for two million dollars to a company
called Vicom Systems. Didn't do so well, for Vicom Systems.
They filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy the following year. In ninete,
(42:38):
Steve Jobs fired half of Pixar's employees. The company was
still losing money in he demanded all employees stock shares
of the company, so he essentially bought the employees shares.
In fact, he kept doing that throughout the years that
fifty million he invested in the company. Uh, most of
(42:58):
the time that ended up him being him purchasing employee
stock share, So little by little he was increasing his
ownership of Pixar. But it wasn't necessarily because he thought
it was going to be a huge hit. It was because, uh,
he had to keep investing money for it to stay around,
and he wanted to have that that investment payoff. If
(43:20):
he let the company just die, he would lose all
that money, he would not have recaptured it at all.
So at one point he technically shut down Pixar like
Pixar was done, but he formed a new company called Pixar,
so really it was shut down on paper only it
wasn't really shut down. And he hired on all the
(43:43):
people that he had not fired in that round of downsizing,
and he had full ownership of the company. The employees
did not get shares in the company. That would end
up benefiting Steve Jobs big time in just a few years.
One of the employees who left Pixar in was its
(44:04):
co founder alv Ray Smith, so he had been there
from the very beginning. His name was on the founding
documents along with Ed Catnill. But this was his time
to leave, so he departed Pixar and went on to
co found a company called Altamira Software Corporation, which was
later acquired by Microsoft. Then he worked for Microsoft for
(44:28):
a while until he retired in nine so he kind
of departs our story at this point. It was also
right around this time that Pixar got a message from
a little company called Disney, and they decided that Disney
would fund Pixar in making the first feature length computer
(44:50):
animated film. By those those conversations had developed a little further,
Pixar actually agreed to go into a partnership with Disney
and minute to a three picture deal three movies for
twenty one million dollars. So the three movies essentially each
had a budget of seven million if you just divide
(45:11):
it up evenly. The first movie that was to be
produced under that deal. Is the movie that became Toy Story.
Now that came out in Steve Jobs had still been
shopping the company around in those last couple of years,
kind of seeing if anyone wanted to buy it. But
he wasn't ready to just give up on it. He
(45:32):
wanted to recapture the money he had invested in the
in the company that fifty million dollars, which is a
little tricky to do, you know, if people don't think
that the company is worth that much. And he almost
sold it a couple of times. He almost sold it
to Microsoft at one point, but instead he held onto
it and he wanted to see how Toy Story would
(45:53):
do at the box office. Uh. They had screened Toy
Story to critics it had not come out in theaters yet,
and the early response was overwhelmingly positive. It was looking
pretty good. So right around that time, Steve Jobs named
himself Pixar CEO. According to several sources, this was mostly
(46:18):
done out of necessity. The idea was put a recognizable
name as CEO of the company. Steve Jobs was someone
that people they knew who he was, so it's almost
like having a celebrity as the head of your company
to get that recognition out there. Technically, Cat Moll was
really still the one calling the shots for Pixar, but
(46:41):
the question was would Steve Jobs hold onto the company
or not. It all would depend on the success of
Toy Story. And here's where we end part one a cliffhanger.
Will Toy Story be a hit? This is the problem
(47:02):
with making a cliffhanger for a show that's about a
stuff that's already happened. You guys already know the answer
to that question, but play along with me. Join me
for the next episode where I really focus on Pixar
as it becomes a power player in computer animation and
(47:22):
feature films. UH, in pushing technology forward an innovation. There's
some great stories in there, including UH stories that transform
not just Pixar, but the Walt Disney company itself. These
are big deals. I mean, we're talking about billions of
dollars from a financial standpoint, millions of people entertained from
(47:45):
another perspective. So UH, tune in next week to hear
part two. And if you guys have any suggestions for
future episodes of Text Stuff, maybe there's a topic you've
always wanted to hear. More about Maybe you've got a
specific technology you would like me to explain, or there's
someone you would like me to interview, or if you
(48:08):
have an idea of someone that should be a perfect
guest host in the future, let me know. Send me
an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook
for Twitter, the handle of both of those is tech
stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again, really sick.
(48:34):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, stuff
works dot com
Technology with Tuck Stuff from Stuff. Hey there, and welcome
to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, flying solo again.
This is part one of what I expect will be
a two part episode saga about one of my favorite companies,
(00:26):
or at least a company that produces some of my
favorite entertainment pis are I um decided to cover Pixar
because I've been interested in this company for a while now,
but I didn't know a whole lot about it apart
from some general notes, and as I dug down into it,
I found it much more interesting than I was already aware.
(00:50):
And this is one of those places where when you
see video of the Pixar campus and the amazing building
and the way people work there, it's very inspiring. But
to learn about the full history, it's pretty cool, and
it's actually kind of amazing that it even happened, because
the company, or the various entities that would eventually become
(01:13):
Pixar didn't always have the smoothest ride. There were a
lot of issues along the way, and the company could
have easily disappeared and we might not have ever seen
the films that Pixar created as a result. So the
story will overlap with another episode of tech Stuff from
(01:36):
two thousand and twelve, a good old classic episode. That
episode is called tech Stuff looks at Industrial Light and Magic,
So Pixar in Industrial Light and Magic actually have a
shared history in some ways. Um, I'm gonna look at
that innovation of of Pixar, but it's not just a
story about computer animated films. Pixar has developed tons of
(01:56):
technology in the field of computer graphics and image processing.
When the company found out that there was no tech
that could do what they wanted to do, they started
building it and then selling it to other people. We'll
get into that in this episode. Now, to talk about
the history of Pixar, we first have to chat about
some of its founders. But I'm not talking about John Lastner,
(02:19):
I'm not talking about George Lucas, I'm not talking about
Steve Jobs. They will all factor into this discussion, but
those are not Those aren't the people who were there
at the very beginning. Uh, At the very beginning was
Dr edwind E Catmoll now Dr Catmull was born in
nine in West Virginia, and as a child he dreamed
(02:40):
of working for the Walt Disney Company, but eventually kind
of gave up on that dream. He felt that he
lacked artistic talent and felt that, you know, there's just
no room for me at Disney, which is kind of funny.
So he decided to study computer science and physics instead.
You know, if you can't be an animator for Disney,
going to co eater science in physics. He attended the
(03:02):
University of Utah and that's where he earned a bachelor's
degree in computer science. He earned another one in physics,
and he got a PhD in computer science. So he's
a smart dude, and he was granted his PhD in
nineteen seventy four. Now, in nineteen seventy two, while he
was still in school, Dr Catmill created a computer animated
(03:23):
version of his own left hand that was incorporated into
the film Future World, and that marked the first full
length feature film to have computer animation in it. Now,
this was just a tiny little segment that was featured
in part of the movie. It wasn't like it wasn't
like they made a feature length movie about a guy's
left hand. They've they've since done movies like that, but
(03:46):
that was not what this one was about. And you
can actually view the animation and how it was made
on YouTube. There's the clip available right there. The title
is called a Computer Animated Hand nineteen seven two, and
then the video you see that they started with a
physical model of Captain Bill's hand. I'm guessing they cast
(04:06):
in his hand, so, in other words, they made a
mold and then filled that mold with some sort of
resin or something along those lines, and the finished product
was a copy of Captain Mill's left hand. Then they
drew polygons on the surface of the model hand, so
they physically drew these polygon shapes so that it could
(04:30):
be translated into a digital form. They digitized the model
by scanning it with a tiny little scanner that was
kind of a attached to an arm, so they could
like a like a like a mechanical arm, not a
not a human arm, but almost like one you would
see on a lampstand, and they traced out the hand.
(04:51):
This created the digital model, so they ended up with
a wire model inside the computer. They then did a
halftone sequence on top of this wire model, and then
a smooth shading sequence, and that ended up creating a
three D model of the hand, which they then could
animate and make it do different gestures and rotated and
(05:13):
that kind of stuff and give it that sort of
three dimensional appearance. Now, that and other projects that he
was working on that Ketmol was working on got the
attention of a somewhat eccentric, wealthy entrepreneur named Alexander Shure,
and Sure had founded a technical college, the New York
(05:38):
Institute of Technology, one of the first dedicated higher learning
institutions that specifically looked at technology, and he ended up
hiring Dr Katmull to come over and become the director
of a brand new division called the Computer Graphics Lab.
This was in nineteen so right after he got his PhD,
(06:01):
Dr Cammel came over to New York and began to
work at the New York Institute of Technology. At that
Computer Graphics Lab, Ketmel met with other pioneers in computer
graphics and one of those was ALV. Ray Smith. Now,
Smith is also a name we have to mention when
you talk about the beginnings of Pixar. Smith is is
(06:23):
as important to those early days as cat'n Moll. He's
a co founder of the company and he earned a
bachelor's degree in nineteen sixty five and electrical engineering from
New York. It's from New Mexico State University rather, and
in nineteen sixty uh he also earned his PhD in
computer science from Stanford. He taught electrical engineering and computer
(06:48):
science at New York University and the University of California
at Berkeley before joining Xerox Park. Xerox Park, by the way,
fascinating place. We mentioned it on a few previous episodes
of tech Stuff from way back. It's one of those
R and D divisions that really shaped computers. Things like
the graphical user interface and the mouse all came out
(07:11):
of Xerox Park. They were not invented by Apple. It
was actually a Xerox invention first and then eventually made
its way into other devices and personal computers. Now, when
he was at Park, uh Smith actually helped develop a
computer graphics paint program, which he would continue to to
(07:32):
uh you know, work in that field after moving over
in the computer graphics lab at the n y I
t Now, also that lab was another guy named David
Di Francesco who graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He
would become a founding member of Pixara as well, and
in nineteen seventy seven some other folks joined. Ralph Guggenheim,
(07:57):
who had freshly graduated from Carnegie In University with a
degree in communications, joined the lab and he also would
become part of Pixart later on. So they start working
in this graphics lab. They're working to UH TO to
push the boundaries of computer graphics, which was a very
very young discipline at that point. They were actually kind
(08:19):
of defining the rules as they were going along. And
this went for a couple of years until nineteen seventy nine,
and that's when George Lucas was putting together Industrial Light
and Magic. Lucas really wanted to push film editing and
production technology forward. He felt that Hollywood had been relying
upon the same tools for decades, and he felt that
(08:43):
because of the rise of computers and other technologies, the
industry was ripe for change. He just had to find
the right people to do it. So he created UH
Lucasfilm Computer Division in Industrial Light and Magic, and he
recruited doctor ed Catmull from the New York Institute of
Technology to head the new department. So here's cat Moll.
(09:07):
He's been working at n y i T for a
few years. He was named the director immediately upon being hired, Like,
imagine this. Imagine going to college and then immediately after
you get your bachelor's degree, imagine pursuing your post graduate
work and getting your PhD. Then imagine you're immediately hired
(09:27):
to be the head of a brand new department in
the first Technical Institute of the United States of America.
Then imagine that George Lucas wants you to go and
work for him. Now, it's pretty charmed life if you
ask me. At any rate. Uh, he recruited Dr ca'm
moll and Camill came along, and then he brought along
(09:50):
Alvi ray Smith, David D. Francesco, and Ralph Guggenheim from
the Graphics Computer Lab to join the new departments. So,
in a way, I'm not saying that he necessarily intended
to do this, but Lucas raided the Graphics computer Lab
at n y I T to create his own computer
division and Industrial Light and Magic. So cat Will became
(10:12):
vice president of the division and managed development and not
just film editing, but also computer graphics, digital audio, and
video games. One of his earliest projects it was actually
coming up with a method to imitate motion blur with
computer graphics so that looks more like a fast moving
action that's usually cut on film, because if you're using
(10:33):
film and things are moving quickly, you get this blur effect.
And without that blur, the graphics would remain too sharp
and then seem fake or unrealistic. If you've ever watched
uh a television set that has a really high refresh
rate and you just feel like things don't look right,
even though everything's very clear and very sharp, it doesn't
(10:54):
look right. That might be part of it. It's the
removal of that blur. Well, that a camel was actually
learning how to insert a blur so that things would
look more natural when they were on screen. Over the
next few years, Cammell's team pioneers computer graphics for film,
and they published more than one hundred papers on the
(11:14):
subject in various publications. So they continue doing this work,
developing the technology necessary to do computer graphics, but they
realized there's a big, big problem. Computer graphics requires a
decent amount of processing and the technology just wasn't up
to speed to do this in an efficient way. It
(11:37):
was really expensive to produce computer animation and really difficult
as well, very time consuming because processors just weren't fast
enough to handle data at the speeds necessary to turn
this stuff out quickly, and so there was actually real
discussion about how Moore's Law would eventually solve this problem,
(11:57):
but it would require them to wait a round a
bit in order to get to it. So they kept
on pushing against those barriers, but they acknowledged that there
was only so much you could do without spending ridiculous
amounts of money. And in fact, this entire department within
Lucas's empire was a money losing proposition. It costs more
(12:21):
money to develop and produce the computer animation than the
division was generating, or at least you could argue that.
In nine three, John Lastner joined Capt. Moll's team as
a contract employee. Here's the thing about John Lastner. He
had worked for Disney two times already, although that's kind
(12:44):
of misleading. The first time John Lastner worked for Disney
he was a skipper for the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland.
So if you've ever ridden the Jungle Cruise ride, you
know who these people are. There, the folks who are
your host as you get on the the boat, and
they mostly pepper you with puns and really wacky jokes.
(13:06):
As you go through the ride, so they might say
things like, uh, you know, that's an African elephant. How
can you tell? And the answer is because we're in Africa,
instead of you know the ears or anything like that.
Or you go behind the waterfalls, is everyone look here,
(13:27):
it's the backside of water. A joke so old and
repeated so frequently that weird Al Yankovic worked it into
his song Skipper Dan. So John Laster was a skipper
on the Jungle Cruise ride and uh, he you know,
that was a job he had when he was a
young man, like a teenager. Uh. And then later on
(13:49):
John Lastner would join Disney as an animator. So he
worked there for a while but was eventually let go
or fired if you prefer. And they're different reasons that
have been given for this, but the one that I
see that seems to be repeated the most frequently is
that he was so interested in computer animation. He was
(14:09):
really pushing for Disney to start looking into computer animation
as a means of telling stories, but the company wasn't interested,
and eventually they just didn't have anything for him, so
they let him go. But Captain Bull and Smith were
frequent visitors to Disney. They would go to Disney to
check things out, and they met John Lassen when they
(14:31):
went to Disney Animation. So as soon as Laster was fired,
cat Will said, Hey, you should come over here and
work for us. So he joined the graphics group and
worked on a short film titled The Adventures of Andre
and Wally b. Now, at that time he was a
contract employee. He was not a full time employee because
cat Will only had certain amount of authority to do
(14:55):
things like higher on new people. He would join as
a full time employee the Computer division in nine and
his title at that time became Interface designer. And the
reason he was an interface designer is because Captain Will
didn't have the authority to hire on an animator, so
(15:15):
they made up the title, or they gave him a
title that wasn't really what he did in order to
be able to hire him. At the conference of the
a c m S Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics
better known as siggraph S I g g R A
p H, seven of the thirty papers that were accepted
(15:35):
for publication for that conference came from this Lucasfilm team
headed by Captain Bill so. In other words, they were
dominating the space. They were providing a lot of the
uh most forward thinking ideas in computer graphics, and they
(15:57):
were defining the process more than anyone else was at
that time. So they were instrumental in getting computer animation
and computer graphics integrated into entertainment. It was pretty impressive.
Some of the movies that the team worked on during
their time there included Star Trek to the Wrath of Cohn.
(16:20):
If you're familiar with the movie, you know there's a
sequence in which, uh, the Genesis program, the Genesis device
transforms a dead planet into one that's just teeming with
life and you get this, um this interesting effect as
you watch the plant kind of sprout life everywhere. That
(16:40):
was one of the sequences that this group worked on.
In fact, Alvi ray Smith himself directed that sequence. He
was the one in charge of it. It was also
used in some stuff in Return of the Jedi, and
they provided a sequence in Young Sherlock Holmes that ended
up being a first So Young Sherlock Holmes is the
(17:03):
story of Sherlock Holmes when he's a young man. He's
attending a school and John Watson ends up being put
into the same school and the two of them have
to try and solve a mystery, and at one point
a character is hit with a dart that has a
hallucinogenic on it, and the hallucinogenic makes these terrible things
(17:26):
seem to happen to people, and it mostly drives them
to do terrible things like jump in the way of
a of a carriage that's racing down the street, and
thus they end up dying. But it looks like they're
committing suicide, but in reality they are trying to escape
this freaky vision they have. In this case, the freaky
vision was a figure in a stained glass window appears
(17:48):
to come to life, jump free of the window and
attack a person. And this marked the first time computer
graphics were incorporated into a scene with live action actors
and done in a convincing way. Before when you had
computer graphics in movies, it was essentially the entire frame
you're looking at a computer graphic. It's not something that's
(18:12):
interacting with live action characters, or it might be something
that's on a screen within a scene, but not something
that's actually supposed to be in the physical space along
with the actors. This marked the first time that happened
uh if you have not seen Young Sherlock Holmes, I
recommend it. It's not the best film, but it is
(18:34):
interesting and it is entertaining. I think it gets a
little um, maybe a little self satisfied, but it's worth watching.
I actually saw it in the theater, So this is
one of those moments where I think I witnessed history.
I saw a movie in which the first computer generated
(18:55):
character had an interaction with a live action actor. Didn't
know that that at the time, but now it's true. Now,
the technology that the team needed to produce these sorts
of effects didn't really exist, at least not in a
way that was attainable for a a division within a
production studio. So the group began to develop a specialized
(19:18):
computer called the Pixar Image Computer. So that this is
where they get their name of the company. Spoiler alert,
but Pixar Image Computer. The name came from Alvi ray
Smith and Lauren Carpenter, who were trying to brainstorm and
name for this device. Uh. Alvi ray Smith wanted to
(19:40):
come up with a name that had almost kind of
a Spanish verbs sound to it, and he wanted to
be a little, um, a little uh futuristic sounding too,
and they decided to go with pixar as if it
were a verb to to make a picture. But it
was all on at it and ultimately they thought Pixar
(20:02):
sounded kind of cool, and that's what they called the computer,
the Pixar Image Computer. The computer allowed for both image
processing and computer graphics development on the same device. So
up to that point, those processes had to be done
separately on different machines, which limited the sort of stuff
you could actually produce. But the Pixar Image Computer changed
(20:23):
that and created a new discipline called image computing. So
it's sort of a combination of the two previously existing
disciplines and it allows you to do a lot more
interesting stuff. The Pixar Image Computer had a chap channel processor,
which is a four parallel processor chip capable of performing
(20:44):
forty million instructions per second, which was not bad for
the mid nineties, and it had a twenty four megabyte
picture memory AH and that memory could be expanded to
forty eight megabytes UH memory bus could access that memory
and a blistering two forty megabytes per second, and the
(21:05):
system was also expandable. Two additional chaps could be added
to provide up to a hundred twenty million instructions per
second um. This is, you know, obviously not state of
the art compared to today's standards, but in the eighties,
to be able to create this device specifically so you
could do image computing was pretty impressive. The video controller
(21:27):
bus was twice as fast as the memory bus at
four eighty megabytes per second, and depending upon the software
load out, the computer would work with in TSC PAL
and ten twenty four by seven r GB displays. The
Pixar Image Computer required a host computer, so it wasn't
a standalone device on its own, and you actually had
(21:48):
to pair it with another computer in order to control it.
This typically was a big, expensive computer that was not
meant for personal you. So this wasn't a personal computer.
It's not like it was a an Apple one or
anything like that. It wasn't anywhere along those lines. We're
talking about like a Sun system or a similar computer,
(22:13):
where uh, it's a pretty massive, powerful system all on
its own, and then you would connect that, you would
network it to the Pixar Image Computer and it would
communicate over cables a transmission rate of eighty megabytes per second. Uh.
The computer was not cheap. It cost one thirty five
(22:35):
thousand dollars, and keep in mind this is the mid
nineteen eighties, so it would be significantly more than that
today if you adjust for inflation. And also keep in
mind that a hundred thirty five thousand dollars just gets
you the Pixar image computer. You still need that host computer,
which could cost another thirty five thousand dollars. So hundred
seventy thousand dollars just for this one method of image
(22:59):
computer geting, it's pretty pretty expensive. The list of customers
was small, but it included some very influential ones, and
in fact, the company envisioned, or rather the division at
this time within LucasArts or Lucasfilm, envisioned six different markets
for its image computer, and that included medical imaging, remote
(23:22):
sensing and mapping, seismic imaging, design and animation, graphic arts
and science, and scientific visualization. So that's kind of incredible
when you think about it, like this was a company
that eventually becomes known for creating computer animated films, but
early on they were trying to generate revenue through developing
(23:47):
hardware and selling it to a diverse group of clients,
not just other entertainment companies, but medical industries, you know,
and and scientific research centers. So it was kind of incredible.
One of the customers that was interested in this technology
was Disney that the Walt Disney Company and Walt Disney
(24:11):
Company approached the Computer Graphics division over at Lucasfilm and said, hey,
we have this idea, but we can't put it together.
We need someone else to design it for us, but
we want a computer animation production system or CAPS, And
this was their attempt to update the cell animation process.
(24:34):
It was to digitize the cell animation animation process. So
in other words, they still weren't going away from hand
drawn animation. They still wanted to do that, but they
wanted an updated method to process each of those cells
to make it more efficient and uh more effective. So
(24:55):
the process of creating the system CAPS spanned a couple
of years. By the time it was ready, the division,
this computer Graphics division was no longer part of Lucasfilm.
It actually would take so long for them to finish
the CAP system that it was when it was done
when Pixar became its own entity. Now, Smith continued to
(25:21):
work on other projects, including creating a new channel for pixels.
So by channel, I mean how do you describe a pixel?
You already had the color channels of red, green, and blue,
but Smith added an alpha channel, and the alpha channel
allowed you to tag pixels with extra data that could
(25:41):
be used for matting, for a compositing, for overlays, and
for anti aliasing. So you can think of it as
here's an extra way of being able to describe this pixel,
to get a specific effect beyond just what color is it?
That's kind of cool Now around, Alvie Smith was looking
(26:03):
into creating the first feature length computer animated film, and
he started actually having some serious conversations about it. It
was going to be a collaboration with a Japanese company,
and the movie they had decided to try and make
would be a story inspired by the famous Chinese novel
Journey to the West. But when Alvi Ray Smith sat
(26:27):
down to seriously look at how much would that cost?
What would the film's budget need to be, he realized
that the industry wasn't efficient enough to allow for a
realistic budget. It's just that it would be too expensive,
it would never get made, and he came to the
reluctant conclusion that they would continue to wait for Moore's
law to keep on being Moore's law and bring down
(26:50):
those costs. Keep in mind, Moore's law at its heart
really isn't about how quickly computer power increases. It's really
about how quickly computer power becomes more affordable. Uh. When
Gordon Moore made the observation, it was really from an
(27:10):
economic standpoint, not a technological capability standpoint. He said that
when the price of developing more powerful processors comes down,
then obviously people develop more powerful processors. And he's noticed
that that tends to happen every eighteen to twenty four months.
So it's interesting to think that More's laws really more
(27:32):
about economics than it is about how many discrete elements
you can cram onto a square inch of a silicon wafer.
But at any rate, UH Smith recognized there just was
not going to be a full length computer animated feature
film until the technology was caught up to make it,
(27:53):
you know, economically feasible. In February six, the Computer Graphics
Division was spun off from Lucasfilm. The technology the team
had developed had applications beyond the film industry, like we mentioned,
you know, was the medical field and seismic studies as
well as things like meteorology. All of them had different applications,
(28:16):
so the technology was valuable, but Lucas was ready to
get rid of it because while the division was accomplished,
it had been losing money for several years and it
was really expensive to make good computer graphics. But on
top of that, Lucas had other reasons that he didn't
want to have this financial drain hitting him. For one thing,
(28:39):
Return of the Jedi had come out in nineteen eight three.
Now we're talking about nineteen eight six, three years later.
Star Wars merchandise sales were starting to slack off pretty
big time. By so the huge checks that had been
coming in we're starting to dry up at this point.
(28:59):
On up of that, Lucas had had a very expensive
divorce in nine three, and he was having lots of issues,
uh surrounding that, which is an entirely different episode that
doesn't involve technology, So I don't know who will ever
cover it, but it is a fascinating story. Oh and
(29:19):
and Lucas also had one other albatross around his neck.
He made a little movie called Howard the Duck, and
it didn't perform quite as well. As he had hoped.
You remember I mentioned that if you haven't seen young
Shelock Holmes, it's worth seeing. The same is not true
for Howard the Duck, although if you've got a bunch
(29:41):
of friends over and you just want to make fun
of a movie, it's a pretty decent candidate. So Lucas
wanted to dump this computer graphics division, and cap'n mill
and Smith knew about this. They knew that this was coming,
They saw the writing on the wall, and so for
about a year before for this happened, they began to
(30:03):
talk to potential investors who might be able to give
some capital to the spun off company. And uh they
ended up courting a certain Steve Jobs as a potential
backer for that new company. And it had happened for
about a year and Captain Bill Smith became co founders
of this new company, which they now named Pixar. So
(30:26):
they took the name from the computer they had developed,
which wasn't an easy decision, by the way, there were
a lot of internal disagreements within Pixar about what to
call the new company. Uh, the temporary name on the
documents at around that time was actually g f X,
so I'm glad that they dropped that and went with Pixar.
Steve Jobs provided capital for the company. He signed a
(30:49):
five million dollar check specifically to Smith and to Captain Mill,
who then signed it over to Lucas. Now that five
million dollars was to essentially pay Lucas for the the company.
He gave the company another five million dollars to act
as starting capital for Pixar itself. And like I said,
(31:11):
Jobs wasn't the only person that they talked to about
the possibility of investing in this new company. Another person
who almost funded Pixar. This story would be different if
this had come to pass. The person who almost funded
Pixar was Ross Pero. And guys, if you're old enough
to remember, you know Ross Pero was an entrepreneur and
(31:34):
a former presidential candidate, independent candidate UM and certain character too. Man.
I mean Saturday Night Live had a lot of fun
imitating Ross Pero for a few months. Anyway, Ross Perrow
almost was the one to fund Pixar, but that deal
fell through at the last minute and Steve Jobs stepped in. Meanwhile,
(31:57):
Steve Jobs himself was going through a bit of a transition.
He had co founded Apple computers in the seventies. But
by this time Apple had more or less forced him
out of the company. The board had made his life
incredibly difficult. They kind of removed all of his responsibilities,
(32:17):
so he didn't have anything to do, and they kind
of sent him off off to the side, so he
was more or less forgotten. So he just kind of
left and they paid for it. That company did not
do so well without Steve Jobs. In fact, Apple began
to lose focus. At one point the company was in
danger of completely going bankrupt. And only then was really
(32:39):
Steve Jobs asked to come back and try and work
on fixing that. And he did come back and eventually
was made CEO of Apple and turned everything around. But
that's another story. In fact, we've covered that on Tech Stuff.
We've talked about the story of Steve Jobs and his
exodus from Apple, his his exile, and then his triumphant
(33:01):
returned later on. Now you might have heard that Steve
Jobs has been referred to as a founder or the
founder of Pixar, or the owner of Pixar, and technically
neither of those were true at the time that Pixar
was founded. Now he had a majority stake in the company.
He had seventy ownership of the company and the employees
(33:21):
had the other thirty percent. But it was Smith and
cat Moll who actually founded the company and ran the operations.
They were the the president or well, Catmill was the
president and Smith was the vice president of the company.
They managed the company. So what Steve Jobs did was
provide that starting capital. And he also was a master
(33:43):
marketing genius type. We all know this if you've ever
seen any Steve Jobs presentation. The guy knew how to
sell like he was really good at expressing interesting ideas
and getting you excited about them. So what he started
to do with Pixar is marketed as a computer hardware company,
(34:04):
like the makers of the Pixar Image computer, and that
became a major product under his watch, and Pixar sold
several to various entities, including the Walt Disney Company. Now
Steve Jobs was technically providing money to Pixar to buy
the technology rights to the systems that they built that
picks our image computer and other technologies that they built
(34:24):
while they were at Lucasfilm. That was where that first
five million dollars went. And uh, like I said, they
he had seventy of the ownership and the employees had
thirty ed. Catmill and Alvie Smith owned the majority of
that thirty percent, and that's how they ended up also
becoming the managers, or rather they were also the managers
(34:49):
for Pixar, the president and vice president respectively. And they
weren't really as keen on the idea of being a
hardware company. They lies that there was a necessity for
it in order for them to remain afloat while waiting
for Moore's Law to kick in so that they can
actually start doing what they wanted to do in the
(35:10):
first place, which was produced computer animation in an economical way.
And when Pixar formed, Catmill and Smith brought along around
thirty eight employees of the computer graphics division with them
from Pixar. That included John Lasseter, so Lasted was one
of forty Lucasfilm employees who became Pixar employees, and Lasted
(35:37):
also really wanted to push computer animation, just as he
was still doing a Disney before they fired him. He
really wanted computer animation to become a thing, and he
got the freedom to work on a few projects. Now,
it wasn't that Steve Jobs was interested in having this
company produced computer animated shorts or films. That wasn't the case.
(36:02):
Lasseter was able to make the argument, Hey, we have
this equipment, this Pisar image computer, and you need to
be able to sell it to people. So you need
to show them some interesting demonstrations of what the computer
is capable of doing. How about we shoot some computer
animated shorts and that will act as almost like a
(36:24):
sales pitch, a demo of the technology itself. And he
got the go ahead. So Laster kind of found a
work around in order to get to do what he
wanted to do, which was to make computer animated films. Uh,
but these weren't intended at least not originally to reach
a wider audience. It was really meant to pitch to
(36:44):
potential customers. But that did change. So in a little
bit later on, after it spun off and started It's
It's shaky first Steps, Pixar premiered the film Luxo Junior
at Siggraph. Now that's the short that introduces the famous
(37:06):
Luxo desk lamp. That little lamp that bounces into frame
with the Pixar logo, jumps up and down, on the
ball and then becomes the eye for Pixar. Uh, this
is where that that character comes from. And the short
received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film,
(37:27):
so people took notice of it. The award actually ended
up going to a different film called a Greek Tragedy.
But it's okay because Pixar would end up getting a
lot of Academy Awards over its history, and I'll mention
quite a few of them in both this one and
more importantly in the second episode about the Pixar story.
(37:52):
So by getting that notoriety of being a nominative for
an Academy Award, it helped the company lands some commercial
get pigs and design animation for other studios, so it
kept business going, although Pixar as a company was still
losing money, and when it would lose money, Steve Jobs
would invest a little more money to keep it going
(38:14):
in the hopes that it would eventually pay off big time.
Um more on that in just a minute. So in
nineteen eight seven, Pixar debuts a short film titled Red's
Dream r e. D Red's Dream, also directed by John Laster,
and they premiered that at the seven cigagraph in they
(38:38):
have another short film come out. This one is called
Tin Toy t I n Tin Toy, and it won
an Academy Award for Best Best Animated Short. That exposure
helped the company a lot and led to the eventual
partnership with the Walt Disney Company. It got Disney's attention
(38:58):
and eventually would lead to discussions between the two companies now.
That same year, Night Pixar finished development on an animation
system called mens M E n V, which stands for
Modeling Environment. Um. I'll go into more detail on some
of the technologies they developed in our second episode. In nine,
(39:20):
Pixar completed work on a new short called knick Knack,
one of my favorites. It features a very determined plastic
snowman inside a snow globe and he's trying so hard
to get to a Hawaiian themed like a tropical themed
setting including a a a lovely young lady toy. So
(39:43):
you've got the snowman who gets a crush on this
on this whole you know, sort of tropical uh toy,
and is trying really hard to break out of his
snow globe in order to get over to there. That's
an adorable little short pixel. Pixar also started work on
some commercials at that time. My favorite commercial that pixarre,
(40:05):
or actually it's really it was an ad campaign that
Pixar worked on, because it wasn't just a single commercial
came out in the early nineties around that was an
ad campaign for a cool mint, Listerine. So if you've
ever seen those commercials, those are the ones where you
see a little bottle of listerine swinging through the jungle
(40:28):
and Baltimore's Tarzan Boy is playing in the background, which
is an awesome poppy song. So I remember those distinctly
because I remember seeing those commercials come on and they
actually affected me, Like I thought, well, it's a neat commercial.
Most of the time, I ignore them, but I like those.
So pis are just kind of had this ability to
(40:49):
inject personality into objects that otherwise would be inanimate, and uh,
it was something that would serve them very well as
they moved forward into the feature films later on. Getting
back to the nineteen eighties, in nineteen eighty nine, Pete
Doctor and Andrew Stanton both joined Pixar, and they both
(41:10):
become very important later on. Both of them end up
writing and directing films for Pixar. According to the book
To Infinity and Beyond, by this time or around this time,
Steve Jobs had invested more than fifty million dollars into
Pixar over the years, mostly as an attempt to just
keep the business going. Sales of the Pixar Image Computer
(41:33):
had really dropped off by this point, the computer, the company,
rather it was losing money, so Jobs ended up doing
a round of downsizing, in other words, firing a lot
of employees, and Jobs was also in the middle of
dealing with another troubled venture, his company, Next Incorporated, which
produced the Next Computer, which is incredibly expensive but pretty
(41:56):
impressive machine. The machine itself failed to make a large
impact in the market, but it was the thing that
convinced Apple's board to bring Steve Jobs back a little
bit later. So by nine Steve Jobs decided he wanted
to sell off the hardware division of Pixar to refocus
Pixar into an animation studio and no longer be a
(42:18):
company that's developing hardware for other industries. So he sold
that hardware division for two million dollars to a company
called Vicom Systems. Didn't do so well, for Vicom Systems.
They filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy the following year. In ninete,
(42:38):
Steve Jobs fired half of Pixar's employees. The company was
still losing money in he demanded all employees stock shares
of the company, so he essentially bought the employees shares.
In fact, he kept doing that throughout the years that
fifty million he invested in the company. Uh, most of
(42:58):
the time that ended up him being him purchasing employee
stock share, So little by little he was increasing his
ownership of Pixar. But it wasn't necessarily because he thought
it was going to be a huge hit. It was because, uh,
he had to keep investing money for it to stay around,
and he wanted to have that that investment payoff. If
(43:20):
he let the company just die, he would lose all
that money, he would not have recaptured it at all.
So at one point he technically shut down Pixar like
Pixar was done, but he formed a new company called Pixar,
so really it was shut down on paper only it
wasn't really shut down. And he hired on all the
(43:43):
people that he had not fired in that round of downsizing,
and he had full ownership of the company. The employees
did not get shares in the company. That would end
up benefiting Steve Jobs big time in just a few years.
One of the employees who left Pixar in was its
(44:04):
co founder alv Ray Smith, so he had been there
from the very beginning. His name was on the founding
documents along with Ed Catnill. But this was his time
to leave, so he departed Pixar and went on to
co found a company called Altamira Software Corporation, which was
later acquired by Microsoft. Then he worked for Microsoft for
(44:28):
a while until he retired in nine so he kind
of departs our story at this point. It was also
right around this time that Pixar got a message from
a little company called Disney, and they decided that Disney
would fund Pixar in making the first feature length computer
(44:50):
animated film. By those those conversations had developed a little further,
Pixar actually agreed to go into a partnership with Disney
and minute to a three picture deal three movies for
twenty one million dollars. So the three movies essentially each
had a budget of seven million if you just divide
(45:11):
it up evenly. The first movie that was to be
produced under that deal. Is the movie that became Toy Story.
Now that came out in Steve Jobs had still been
shopping the company around in those last couple of years,
kind of seeing if anyone wanted to buy it. But
he wasn't ready to just give up on it. He
(45:32):
wanted to recapture the money he had invested in the
in the company that fifty million dollars, which is a
little tricky to do, you know, if people don't think
that the company is worth that much. And he almost
sold it a couple of times. He almost sold it
to Microsoft at one point, but instead he held onto
it and he wanted to see how Toy Story would
(45:53):
do at the box office. Uh. They had screened Toy
Story to critics it had not come out in theaters yet,
and the early response was overwhelmingly positive. It was looking
pretty good. So right around that time, Steve Jobs named
himself Pixar CEO. According to several sources, this was mostly
(46:18):
done out of necessity. The idea was put a recognizable
name as CEO of the company. Steve Jobs was someone
that people they knew who he was, so it's almost
like having a celebrity as the head of your company
to get that recognition out there. Technically, Cat Moll was
really still the one calling the shots for Pixar, but
(46:41):
the question was would Steve Jobs hold onto the company
or not. It all would depend on the success of
Toy Story. And here's where we end part one a cliffhanger.
Will Toy Story be a hit? This is the problem
(47:02):
with making a cliffhanger for a show that's about a
stuff that's already happened. You guys already know the answer
to that question, but play along with me. Join me
for the next episode where I really focus on Pixar
as it becomes a power player in computer animation and
(47:22):
feature films. UH, in pushing technology forward an innovation. There's
some great stories in there, including UH stories that transform
not just Pixar, but the Walt Disney company itself. These
are big deals. I mean, we're talking about billions of
dollars from a financial standpoint, millions of people entertained from
(47:45):
another perspective. So UH, tune in next week to hear
part two. And if you guys have any suggestions for
future episodes of Text Stuff, maybe there's a topic you've
always wanted to hear. More about Maybe you've got a
specific technology you would like me to explain, or there's
someone you would like me to interview, or if you
(48:08):
have an idea of someone that should be a perfect
guest host in the future, let me know. Send me
an email. The address is tech stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook
for Twitter, the handle of both of those is tech
stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again, really sick.
(48:34):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, stuff
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