June 2, 2023 • 47 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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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio, and how the tech
are you? Well, it's Friday, so it's time for a
tech Stuff classic. Today we're going to do part one
(00:25):
of a three part series about Pixar, the animation company
that is now part of Disney. But it wasn't always
that way. And this first episode originally published on July
twenty seventh, twenty sixteen. Obviously, Pixar's done a lot since
(00:46):
twenty sixteen, and I could very likely do a Part
four follow up, but for now, let's sit back, relax,
listen to this classic episode from twenty sixteen, The Pixar Story,
Part one. Now, to talk about the history of Pixar,
we first have to chat about some of its founders.
(01:07):
But I'm not talking about John Lassner, 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 are there at the very beginning.
At the very beginning was doctor Edwin E. Catmole and
now doctor cat Moole was born in nineteen forty five
(01:28):
in West Virginia, and as a child, he dreamed of
working for the Walt Disney Company, but eventually he 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, you can't be an animator for Disney. Go
(01:50):
into computer science and physics. He attended the 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,
(02:11):
Doctor Catmill created a computer animated 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
(02:32):
length movie about a guy's left hand. They've since done
movies like that, but 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 seventy two, and in the video you see that
(02:53):
they started with a physical model of Katmill's hand. I'm
guessing they cast in his hand, so, in other words,
they made a mo and then filled that mold with
some sort of resin or something along those lines, and
the finished product was a copy of Catmill's left hand.
Then they drew polygons on the surface of the model hand,
(03:14):
so they physically drew these polygon shapes so that it
could 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 mechanical arm, not a human arm,
(03:36):
but almost like one you would see on a lampstand,
and they traced out the hand. This created the digital model,
so they ended up with a wire model inside the computer.
They then did a half tone sequence on top of
this wire model, and then a smooth shading sequence, and
(03:56):
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 that kind of stuff and
give it that sort of three dimensional appearance. Now, that
and other projects that he was working on that Katmull
was working on got the attention of a somewhat eccentric,
(04:19):
wealthy entrepreneur named Alexander Shure. And Shure had founded a
technical college, the New York Institute of Technology, one of
the first dedicated higher learning institutions that specifically looked at technology,
and he ended up hiring doctor Catmull to come over
(04:42):
and become the director of a brand new division called
the Computer Graphics Lab. This was in nineteen seventy five,
so right after he got his PhD, doctor Campbill came
over to New York and began to work at the
New York Institute of Technology. At the Computer Graphics Lab,
Kemmel met with other pioneers in computer graphics, and one
(05:04):
of those was Alvi Ray Smith. Now Smith is also
a name we have to mention when you talk about
the beginnings of Pixar. Smith is as important to those
early days as Cat and 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
(05:25):
from New Mexico State University rather, and in nineteen sixty
five he also earned his PhD in computer science from Stanford.
He taught electrical engineering and computer science at New York
University and the University of California at Berkeley before joining
Xerox Park. Xerox Park, by the way fascinating place. We
(05:47):
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 of Xerox Park.
They were not invented by Apple. It was actually a
Xerox invention first and then eventually made its way into
(06:10):
other devices and personal computers. Now, when he was at Park,
Smith actually helped develop a computer graphics paint program, which
he would continue to work in that field after moving
over in the computer graphics lab at the NY. Now,
(06:33):
also at that lab was another guy named David Di
Francesco who graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He would
become a founding member of Pixar as well, and in
nineteen seventy seven some other folks joined. Ralph Guggenheim, who
had freshly graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree
in communications, joined the lab and he also would become
(06:55):
part of Pixar later on. So they start working in
this graphics lab. They're working to push the boundaries of
computer graphics, which was a very very young discipline at
that point. They were actually kind 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
(07:18):
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 because of the
rise of computers and other technologies, the industry was ripe
(07:38):
for change. He just had to find the right people
to do it. So he created 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 katmull. He's been working at NYA
(08:00):
IT 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 to be the head of
a brand new department in the first technical Institute of
(08:24):
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,
he recruited doctor capmmell and Campmeill came along, and then
he brought along Alvi Ray Smith, David D. Francesco, and
(08:44):
Ralph Guggenheim from the Graphics Computer Lab to join the
new department. So, in a way, I'm not saying that
he necessarily intended to do this, but Lucas raided the
graphics computer Lab at ny to create his own computer division,
Austrial Light and Magic. So cam Will became vice president
of the division and managed development and not just film editing,
(09:07):
but also computer graphics, digital audio, and video games. One
of his earliest projects was actually coming up with a
method to imitate motion blur with computer graphics so that
it looks more like a fast moving action that's usually
cut on film, because if you're using film and things
are moving quickly, you get this blur effect, and without
(09:28):
that blur, the graphics would remain too sharp and then
seem fake or unrealistic. If you've ever watched 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 look right, that
might be part of it. It's the removal of that blur. Well,
(09:50):
doctor Camill 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, Catpmell's team pioneers
computer graphics for film, and they published more than one
hundred papers on the subject in various publications. So they
continue doing this work, developing the technology necessary to do
(10:13):
computer graphics, but they realize 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 was really expensive to produce computer
animation and really difficult as well very time consuming because
(10:35):
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, but it would require them to
wait around a bit in order to get to it.
So they kept on pushing against those barriers, but they
(10:57):
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 money to develop and produce the computer
animation than the division was generating, or at least you
(11:20):
could argue that. In nineteen eighty three, John Lassener joined
Catmull's team as a contract employee. Here's the thing about
John Lassener. He had worked for Disney two times already,
although that's kind of misleading. The first time John Lassener
worked for Disney he was a skipper for the Jungle
(11:41):
Cruise ride at Disneyland. So if you've ever ridden the
Jungle Cruise ride, you know who these people are. They're
the folks who are your host as you get on
the boat, and they mostly pepper you with puns and
really wacky jokes as you go through the ride. So
(12:01):
they might say things like, 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 waterfall and says, everyone,
look here, it's the backside of water. A joke so
old and repeated so frequently that weird Al Yankovic worked
(12:26):
it into his song Skipper Dan. So John Laster was
a skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride and he you know,
that was a job he had when he was a
young man, like a teenager. And then later on John
Lasterer would join Disney as an animator. So he worked
there for a while but was eventually let go or
(12:48):
fired if you prefer. And there are 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 anime. He was
really pushing for Disney to start looking into computer animation
as a means of telling stories, but the company wasn't interested,
(13:08):
and eventually they just didn't have anything for him, so
they let him go. But Katmull and Smith were frequent
visitors to Disney. They would go to Disney to check
things out, and they met John Lassiter when they went
to Disney Animation. So as soon as Laster was fired,
kat Moll said, Hey, you should come over here and
work for us. So he joined the graphics group and
(13:31):
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
kat Will only had certain amount of authority to do
things like higher on new people. He would join as
a full time employee in the computer division in nineteen
(13:52):
eighty five and his title at that time became Interface designer.
And the reason he was an interface design is because
Catmill didn't have the authority to hire on an animator,
so 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. We'll be back with
(14:13):
more about the Pixar story in just a moment. At
the nineteen eighty four conference of the ACM's Special Interest
Group on Computer Graphics, better known as Siggraph Siggraph. Seven
(14:36):
of the thirty papers that were accepted for publication for
that conference came from this Lucasfilm team headed by Catmill. So,
in other words, they were dominating the space. They were
providing a lot of the most forward thinking ideas in
(14:58):
computer graphics, and they 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
(15:20):
two The Wrath of khn. If you're familiar with the movie,
you know there's a sequence in which the Genesis program,
the Genesis device, transforms a dead planet into one that's
just teeming with life, and you get this interesting effect
as you watch the plant kind of sprout life everywhere.
(15:43):
That 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
(16:06):
story of Shelick 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
(16:29):
seem to happen to people, and it mostly drives them
to do terrible things like jump in the way 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 to come
(16:51):
to life, jump free of the window, and attack a person.
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
(17:12):
computer graphic. It's not something that's 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. If you have not seen
Young Sherlock Holmes, I recommend it. It's not the best film,
(17:36):
but it is interesting and it is entertaining. I think
it gets a little 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 character had an interaction with a live
(18:00):
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
division within a production studio. So the group began to
develop a specialized computer called the Pixar Image Computer. So
(18:25):
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 a name for this device. Alvi ray Smith wanted
to come up with a name that had almost kind
(18:46):
of a Spanish verb sound to it, and he wanted
to be a little a little futuristic sounding too, and
they decided to go with Pixar as if it were
a verb to make a picture. But it was all unvented,
and ultimately they thought Pixar sounded kind of cool, and
(19:06):
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 that and created a
(19:27):
new discipline called image computing. So it's sort of a
combination of the two previously existing disciplines and it allowed
you to do a lot more interesting stuff. The Pixar
Image Computer had a chap channel processor, which was a
four parallel processor chip capable of performing forty million instructions
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per second, which was not bad for the mid nineteen eighties.
And it had a twenty four megabyte picture memory and
that memory could be expanded to forty eight megabytes. The
memory bus could access that memory at a blistering two
hundred and forty megabytes per second, and the system was
(20:08):
also expandable. Two additional chaps could be added to provide
up to one hundred and twenty million instructions per second.
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 bus was
(20:30):
twice as fast as the memory bus at four hundred
and eighty megabytes per second, and depending upon the software
load out, the computer would work with NTSC PAL and
ten twenty four by seven to sixty eight RGB displays.
The Pixar Image computer required a host computer, so it
wasn't a standalone device on its own. You actually had
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to pair it with another computer in order to control it.
This typically was a big, expensive computer that was not
meant for personal use. This wasn't a personal computer. It's
not like it was an Apple one or anything like that.
It wasn't anywhere along those lines. We're talking about like
(21:11):
a Sun system or a similar computer where 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. The computer was
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not cheap. It cost one hundred and thirty five 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
one 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 one hundred
(21:57):
and seventy thousand dollars just for this one method of
image computing, 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
(22:21):
for its Image computer, and that included medical imaging, remote
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
(22:44):
early on they were trying to generate revenue through developing
hardware and selling it to a diverse group of clients,
not just other entertainment companies, but medical industries, you know,
and scientific research centers. So it's kind of incredible. One
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of the customers that was interested in this technology was Disney,
the Walt Disney Company, and Walt Disney 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
(23:26):
want a computer animation production system or CAPS, And this
was their attempt to update the cell animation process. It
was to digitize the animation process. So in other words,
they still weren't going away from hand drawn animation. They
(23:46):
still wanted to do that, but they wanted an updated
method to process each of those cells to make it
more efficient and more effective. So the process of creating
the system CAPS spanned a couple of years. By the
time it was ready, the division, this computer Graphics division
(24:07):
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 work on other projects,
including creating a new channel for pixels. So by channel,
(24:31):
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 be
used for matting, for a compositing, for overlays, and for
anti aliasinc. So you can think of it as here's
(24:52):
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 nineteen eighty five, Alvi
Smith was looking into creating the first feature length computer
animated film, and he started actually having some serious conversations
(25:14):
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 down to seriously look at how much
would that cost, what would the film's budget need to be,
(25:35):
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 those costs. Keep in mind, Moore's law at
(25:57):
its heart, really isn't about how quickly computer power increases.
It's really about how quickly computer power becomes more affordable.
When Gordon Moore made the observation, it was really from
an economic standpoint, not a technological capability standpoint. He said
that when the price of developing more powerful processors comes down,
(26:23):
than 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 law is really
more 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, Smith recognized there just
(26:48):
was not going to be a full length computer animated
feature film until the technology was caught up to make
it economically feasible. In February nineteen eighty six, the Computer
Graphics Division was spun off from Lucasfilm. The technology the
team had developed had applications beyond the film industry, like
(27:10):
we mentioned, you know, was the medical field and seismic
studies as well as things like meteorology. All of them
had different applications. 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.
(27:33):
But on top of that, Lucas had other reasons that
he didn't want to have this financial drain hitting him.
For one thing, Return of the Jedi had come out
in nineteen eighty three, Now we're talking about nineteen eighty six,
three years later. Star Wars merchandise sales were starting to
slack off pretty big time by nineteen eighty six, so
(27:56):
the huge checks that had been coming in first learn
to dry up at this point. On top of that,
Lucas had had a very expensive divorce in nineteen eighty
three and he was having lots of issues surrounding that.
Which is an entirely different episode that doesn't involve technology,
(28:18):
So I don't know who will ever cover it, but
it is a fascinating story. Oh 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 Sherlock Holmes, it's worth seeing.
(28:41):
The same is not true for Howard the Duck, although
if you've got a bunch 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 Katmull 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 this happened,
(29:05):
they began to talk to potential investors who might be
able to give some capital to the spun off company,
and 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 Katamull and Smith became
co founders of this new company, which they now named Pixar.
(29:28):
So 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. The temporary name on the documents
at around that time was actually GFx, So I'm glad
that they dropped that and went with Pixar. We're going
(29:48):
to take a quick break and then we'll finish out
the Pixar story Part one. Steve Jobs provided capital for
the company. He signed a five million dollar check specifically
to Smith and to Catmull, who then signed it over
(30:12):
to Lucas. Now that five million dollars was to essentially
pay Lucas for the company. He gave the company another
five million dollars to act as starting capital for Pixar itself.
And like I said, Jobs wasn't the only person that
they talked to about the possibility of investing in this
(30:33):
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 Perrot. And guys,
if you're old enough to remember, you know Ross Perot
was an entrepreneur and a former presidential candidate, independent candidate.
(30:58):
Certain character too, man, I mean, Saturday Night Life had
a lot of fun imitating Ross Perot for a few months. Anyway,
Ross Perrot almost was the one to fund Pixar, but
that deal fell through at the last minute and Steve
Job stepped in. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs himself was going through
a bit of a transition. He had co founded Apple
(31:19):
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, so he didn't have anything
to do, and they kind of set him off off
to the side, so he was more or less forgotten.
(31:40):
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 Steve Jobs asked to come back
and try and work on fixing that. And he did
(32:01):
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 exile
and then his triumphant return later on. Now you might
have heard that Steve Jobs has been referred to as
(32:22):
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 percent ownership
of the company and the employees had the other thirty percent.
But it was Smith and Catmull who actually founded the
(32:43):
company and ran the operations. They were 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 marketing genius type. We all know this
if you've ever seen any Steve Jobs presentation. The guy
(33:08):
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, 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
(33:30):
Disney Company. Now Steve Jobs was technically providing money to
Pixar to buy the technology rights to the systems that
they built, that Pixar Image Computer and other technologies that
they built while they were at Lucasfilm. That was where
that first five million dollars went. And like I said,
they he had seventy percent of the ownership and the
(33:51):
employees had thirty percent ed Kettmull and Alvi 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 for Pixar, the president and vice president respectively.
And they weren't really as keen on the idea of
(34:14):
being a hardware company. They realized 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 first place, which was produced computer animation in
an economical way. And when Pixar formed, Catmill and Smith
(34:36):
brought along around thirty eight employees of the computer graphics
division with them from Pixar. That included John Lassiter. So
Lassner was one of forty Lucasfilm employees who became Pixar
employees and Lassener also really wanted to push computer animation,
(34:56):
just as he was still doing at 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 produce computer animated shorts or films. That wasn't the case.
(35:18):
Lassen was able to make the argument, Hey, we have
this equipment, this Pixar 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
(35:41):
sales pitch, a demo of the technology itself. And he
got the go ahead. So Lassener kind of found a
workaround in order to get to do what he wanted
to do, which was to make computer animated films. But
these weren't intended at least not originally to reach a
wider audience. It was really meant to pitch to potential customers.
(36:03):
But that did change. So in nineteen eighty six, a
little bit later on, after it spun off and started
its shaky first Steps. Pixar premiered the film Luxo Junior
at Siggraph. Now that's the short that introduces the famous
Luxo desk lamp. That little lamp that bounces into frame
(36:28):
with the Pixar logo, jumps up and down on the ball,
and then becomes the eye for Pixar. This is where
that character comes from. And the short received an Academy
Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film, so people took
notice of it. The award actually ended up going to
a different film called a Greek Tragedy. But it's okay
(36:52):
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. So by getting
that notoriety of being an nominative or an Academy award,
(37:14):
it helped the company land some commercial gigs 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 in the hopes that
it would eventually pay off big time. More on that
(37:36):
in just a minute. So in nineteen eighty seven, Pixar
debuts a short film titled Red's Dream Reed Red's Dream,
also directed by John Lassner, and they premiered that at
the nineteen eighty seven Sigraph. In nineteen eighty eight, they
have another short film come out. This one is called
(37:58):
ten Toy ti in ten Toy and it won an
Academy Award for 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 and eventually
it would lead to discussions between the two companies now.
(38:19):
That same year, nineteen eighty eight, Pixar finished development on
an animation system called men me E and V, which
stands for Modeling Environment. I'll go into more detail on
some of the technologies they developed in our second episode.
In nineteen eighty nine, Pixar completed work on a new
short called nick Knack, one of my favorites. It features
(38:42):
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 lovely young lady toy.
So you've got the snowman who gets a crush on
(39:02):
this whole, you know, sort of tropical toy and is
trying really hard to break out of his snow globe
in order to get over to there. It's an adorable
little short. Pixar also started to work on some commercials
at that time. My favorite commercial that Pixar, or actually
(39:23):
it's really was an ad campaign that Pixar worked on,
because it wasn't just a single commercial came out in
the early nineties, around nineteen ninety three. 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
(39:44):
and Baltimora'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, a lots of neat
commercial most of the time I ignore them, but I
like those. So Pixar just kind of had this ability
(40:06):
to inject personality into objects that otherwise would be inanimate
and 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'd
(40:26):
both 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
(40:49):
Image Computer had really dropped off by this point, the computer,
the company rather 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
(41:12):
pretty 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 nineteen ninety Steve Jobs decided
he wanted to sell off the hardware division of Pixar
to refocus Pixar into an animation studio and no longer
(41:34):
be a 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 nineteen ninety one, Steve Jobs fired half of Pixar's employees.
(41:59):
The company still losing money. In nineteen ninety one, he
demanded all employees stock shares of the company, so he
essentially bought the employees's shares. In fact, he kept doing
that throughout the years that fifty million he invested in
the company. Most of the time that ended up him
being him purchasing employee stock share, so little by little
(42:21):
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 he had to keep investing
money for it to stay around, and he wanted to
have that investment payoff. If 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
(42:46):
shut down Pixar. 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 that 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
(43:09):
the company. That would end up benefiting Steve Jobs big
time in just a few years. One of the employees
who left Pixar in nineteen ninety one was its co
founder Alvi Ray Smith, so he had been there from
the very beginning. His name was on the founding documents
along with ed Ketmell, but this was his time to leave,
(43:33):
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 a while
until he retired in nineteen ninety nine, so he kind
of departs our story at this point. It was also
right around this time that Pixar got a message from
(43:56):
a little company called Disney, and they decided that Disney
would fund Pixar in making the first feature length computer
animated film. By nineteen ninety two, those conversations had developed
a little further. Pixar actually agreed to go into a
partnership with Disney and committed to a three picture deal,
(44:19):
three movies for twenty one million dollars. So the three
movies essentially each had a budget of seven million if
you just divide 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 nineteen
ninety five. Steve Jobs had still been shopping the company
(44:41):
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 wanted to recapture
the money he had invested 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
(45:03):
almost sold it to Microsoft at one point, but instead
he held onto it and he wanted to see how
Toy Story would do at the box office. By nineteen
ninety four, 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
(45:27):
right around that time, Steve Jobs named himself Pixar CEO.
According to several sources, this was mostly 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
(45:49):
out there. Technically, cat Moll was really still the one
calling the shots for Pixar, but the question was would
Steve Jobs hold on to the company or not. It
all would depend on the success of Toy Story. And
(46:09):
here's where we end part one. Hope you enjoyed that
classic episode of tech Stuff. As I said, we're going
to have two more episodes in about Pixar coming up
in the next couple of weeks in the classics. And yeah,
maybe I'll do an update to kind of talk about
what the company has done since twenty sixteen. There have
(46:31):
been several more movies that have released to varying degrees
of success, both critically and at the box office. So
maybe we'll revisit that, but for now, I hope you
are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(46:55):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to.
Your face were chops
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio, and how the tech
are you? Well, it's Friday, so it's time for a
tech Stuff classic. Today we're going to do part one
(00:25):
of a three part series about Pixar, the animation company
that is now part of Disney. But it wasn't always
that way. And this first episode originally published on July
twenty seventh, twenty sixteen. Obviously, Pixar's done a lot since
(00:46):
twenty sixteen, and I could very likely do a Part
four follow up, but for now, let's sit back, relax,
listen to this classic episode from twenty sixteen, The Pixar Story,
Part one. Now, to talk about the history of Pixar,
we first have to chat about some of its founders.
(01:07):
But I'm not talking about John Lassner, 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 are there at the very beginning.
At the very beginning was doctor Edwin E. Catmole and
now doctor cat Moole was born in nineteen forty five
(01:28):
in West Virginia, and as a child, he dreamed of
working for the Walt Disney Company, but eventually he 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, you can't be an animator for Disney. Go
(01:50):
into computer science and physics. He attended the 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,
(02:11):
Doctor Catmill created a computer animated 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
(02:32):
length movie about a guy's left hand. They've since done
movies like that, but 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 seventy two, and in the video you see that
(02:53):
they started with a physical model of Katmill's hand. I'm
guessing they cast in his hand, so, in other words,
they made a mo and then filled that mold with
some sort of resin or something along those lines, and
the finished product was a copy of Catmill's left hand.
Then they drew polygons on the surface of the model hand,
(03:14):
so they physically drew these polygon shapes so that it
could 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 mechanical arm, not a human arm,
(03:36):
but almost like one you would see on a lampstand,
and they traced out the hand. This created the digital model,
so they ended up with a wire model inside the computer.
They then did a half tone sequence on top of
this wire model, and then a smooth shading sequence, and
(03:56):
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 that kind of stuff and
give it that sort of three dimensional appearance. Now, that
and other projects that he was working on that Katmull
was working on got the attention of a somewhat eccentric,
(04:19):
wealthy entrepreneur named Alexander Shure. And Shure had founded a
technical college, the New York Institute of Technology, one of
the first dedicated higher learning institutions that specifically looked at technology,
and he ended up hiring doctor Catmull to come over
(04:42):
and become the director of a brand new division called
the Computer Graphics Lab. This was in nineteen seventy five,
so right after he got his PhD, doctor Campbill came
over to New York and began to work at the
New York Institute of Technology. At the Computer Graphics Lab,
Kemmel met with other pioneers in computer graphics, and one
(05:04):
of those was Alvi Ray Smith. Now Smith is also
a name we have to mention when you talk about
the beginnings of Pixar. Smith is as important to those
early days as Cat and 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
(05:25):
from New Mexico State University rather, and in nineteen sixty
five he also earned his PhD in computer science from Stanford.
He taught electrical engineering and computer science at New York
University and the University of California at Berkeley before joining
Xerox Park. Xerox Park, by the way fascinating place. We
(05:47):
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 of Xerox Park.
They were not invented by Apple. It was actually a
Xerox invention first and then eventually made its way into
(06:10):
other devices and personal computers. Now, when he was at Park,
Smith actually helped develop a computer graphics paint program, which
he would continue to work in that field after moving
over in the computer graphics lab at the NY. Now,
(06:33):
also at that lab was another guy named David Di
Francesco who graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He would
become a founding member of Pixar as well, and in
nineteen seventy seven some other folks joined. Ralph Guggenheim, who
had freshly graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree
in communications, joined the lab and he also would become
(06:55):
part of Pixar later on. So they start working in
this graphics lab. They're working to push the boundaries of
computer graphics, which was a very very young discipline at
that point. They were actually kind 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
(07:18):
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 because of the
rise of computers and other technologies, the industry was ripe
(07:38):
for change. He just had to find the right people
to do it. So he created 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 katmull. He's been working at NYA
(08:00):
IT 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 to be the head of
a brand new department in the first technical Institute of
(08:24):
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,
he recruited doctor capmmell and Campmeill came along, and then
he brought along Alvi Ray Smith, David D. Francesco, and
(08:44):
Ralph Guggenheim from the Graphics Computer Lab to join the
new department. So, in a way, I'm not saying that
he necessarily intended to do this, but Lucas raided the
graphics computer Lab at ny to create his own computer division,
Austrial Light and Magic. So cam Will became vice president
of the division and managed development and not just film editing,
(09:07):
but also computer graphics, digital audio, and video games. One
of his earliest projects was actually coming up with a
method to imitate motion blur with computer graphics so that
it looks more like a fast moving action that's usually
cut on film, because if you're using film and things
are moving quickly, you get this blur effect, and without
(09:28):
that blur, the graphics would remain too sharp and then
seem fake or unrealistic. If you've ever watched 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 look right, that
might be part of it. It's the removal of that blur. Well,
(09:50):
doctor Camill 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, Catpmell's team pioneers
computer graphics for film, and they published more than one
hundred papers on the subject in various publications. So they
continue doing this work, developing the technology necessary to do
(10:13):
computer graphics, but they realize 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 was really expensive to produce computer
animation and really difficult as well very time consuming because
(10:35):
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, but it would require them to
wait around a bit in order to get to it.
So they kept on pushing against those barriers, but they
(10:57):
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 money to develop and produce the computer
animation than the division was generating, or at least you
(11:20):
could argue that. In nineteen eighty three, John Lassener joined
Catmull's team as a contract employee. Here's the thing about
John Lassener. He had worked for Disney two times already,
although that's kind of misleading. The first time John Lassener
worked for Disney he was a skipper for the Jungle
(11:41):
Cruise ride at Disneyland. So if you've ever ridden the
Jungle Cruise ride, you know who these people are. They're
the folks who are your host as you get on
the boat, and they mostly pepper you with puns and
really wacky jokes as you go through the ride. So
(12:01):
they might say things like, 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 waterfall and says, everyone,
look here, it's the backside of water. A joke so
old and repeated so frequently that weird Al Yankovic worked
(12:26):
it into his song Skipper Dan. So John Laster was
a skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride and he you know,
that was a job he had when he was a
young man, like a teenager. And then later on John
Lasterer would join Disney as an animator. So he worked
there for a while but was eventually let go or
(12:48):
fired if you prefer. And there are 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 anime. He was
really pushing for Disney to start looking into computer animation
as a means of telling stories, but the company wasn't interested,
(13:08):
and eventually they just didn't have anything for him, so
they let him go. But Katmull and Smith were frequent
visitors to Disney. They would go to Disney to check
things out, and they met John Lassiter when they went
to Disney Animation. So as soon as Laster was fired,
kat Moll said, Hey, you should come over here and
work for us. So he joined the graphics group and
(13:31):
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
kat Will only had certain amount of authority to do
things like higher on new people. He would join as
a full time employee in the computer division in nineteen
(13:52):
eighty five and his title at that time became Interface designer.
And the reason he was an interface design is because
Catmill didn't have the authority to hire on an animator,
so 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. We'll be back with
(14:13):
more about the Pixar story in just a moment. At
the nineteen eighty four conference of the ACM's Special Interest
Group on Computer Graphics, better known as Siggraph Siggraph. Seven
(14:36):
of the thirty papers that were accepted for publication for
that conference came from this Lucasfilm team headed by Catmill. So,
in other words, they were dominating the space. They were
providing a lot of the most forward thinking ideas in
(14:58):
computer graphics, and they 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
(15:20):
two The Wrath of khn. If you're familiar with the movie,
you know there's a sequence in which the Genesis program,
the Genesis device, transforms a dead planet into one that's
just teeming with life, and you get this interesting effect
as you watch the plant kind of sprout life everywhere.
(15:43):
That 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
(16:06):
story of Shelick 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
(16:29):
seem to happen to people, and it mostly drives them
to do terrible things like jump in the way 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 to come
(16:51):
to life, jump free of the window, and attack a person.
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
(17:12):
computer graphic. It's not something that's 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. If you have not seen
Young Sherlock Holmes, I recommend it. It's not the best film,
(17:36):
but it is interesting and it is entertaining. I think
it gets a little 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 character had an interaction with a live
(18:00):
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
division within a production studio. So the group began to
develop a specialized computer called the Pixar Image Computer. So
(18:25):
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 a name for this device. Alvi ray Smith wanted
to come up with a name that had almost kind
(18:46):
of a Spanish verb sound to it, and he wanted
to be a little a little futuristic sounding too, and
they decided to go with Pixar as if it were
a verb to make a picture. But it was all unvented,
and ultimately they thought Pixar sounded kind of cool, and
(19:06):
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 that and created a
(19:27):
new discipline called image computing. So it's sort of a
combination of the two previously existing disciplines and it allowed
you to do a lot more interesting stuff. The Pixar
Image Computer had a chap channel processor, which was a
four parallel processor chip capable of performing forty million instructions
(19:48):
per second, which was not bad for the mid nineteen eighties.
And it had a twenty four megabyte picture memory and
that memory could be expanded to forty eight megabytes. The
memory bus could access that memory at a blistering two
hundred and forty megabytes per second, and the system was
(20:08):
also expandable. Two additional chaps could be added to provide
up to one hundred and twenty million instructions per second.
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 bus was
(20:30):
twice as fast as the memory bus at four hundred
and eighty megabytes per second, and depending upon the software
load out, the computer would work with NTSC PAL and
ten twenty four by seven to sixty eight RGB displays.
The Pixar Image computer required a host computer, so it
wasn't a standalone device on its own. You actually had
(20:51):
to pair it with another computer in order to control it.
This typically was a big, expensive computer that was not
meant for personal use. This wasn't a personal computer. It's
not like it was an Apple one or anything like that.
It wasn't anywhere along those lines. We're talking about like
(21:11):
a Sun system or a similar computer where 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. The computer was
(21:34):
not cheap. It cost one hundred and thirty five 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
one 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 one hundred
(21:57):
and seventy thousand dollars just for this one method of
image computing, 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
(22:21):
for its Image computer, and that included medical imaging, remote
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
(22:44):
early on they were trying to generate revenue through developing
hardware and selling it to a diverse group of clients,
not just other entertainment companies, but medical industries, you know,
and scientific research centers. So it's kind of incredible. One
(23:05):
of the customers that was interested in this technology was Disney,
the Walt Disney Company, and Walt Disney 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
(23:26):
want a computer animation production system or CAPS, And this
was their attempt to update the cell animation process. It
was to digitize the animation process. So in other words,
they still weren't going away from hand drawn animation. They
(23:46):
still wanted to do that, but they wanted an updated
method to process each of those cells to make it
more efficient and more effective. So the process of creating
the system CAPS spanned a couple of years. By the
time it was ready, the division, this computer Graphics division
(24:07):
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 work on other projects,
including creating a new channel for pixels. So by channel,
(24:31):
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 be
used for matting, for a compositing, for overlays, and for
anti aliasinc. So you can think of it as here's
(24:52):
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 nineteen eighty five, Alvi
Smith was looking into creating the first feature length computer
animated film, and he started actually having some serious conversations
(25:14):
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 down to seriously look at how much
would that cost, what would the film's budget need to be,
(25:35):
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 those costs. Keep in mind, Moore's law at
(25:57):
its heart, really isn't about how quickly computer power increases.
It's really about how quickly computer power becomes more affordable.
When Gordon Moore made the observation, it was really from
an economic standpoint, not a technological capability standpoint. He said
that when the price of developing more powerful processors comes down,
(26:23):
than 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 law is really
more 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, Smith recognized there just
(26:48):
was not going to be a full length computer animated
feature film until the technology was caught up to make
it economically feasible. In February nineteen eighty six, the Computer
Graphics Division was spun off from Lucasfilm. The technology the
team had developed had applications beyond the film industry, like
(27:10):
we mentioned, you know, was the medical field and seismic
studies as well as things like meteorology. All of them
had different applications. 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.
(27:33):
But on top of that, Lucas had other reasons that
he didn't want to have this financial drain hitting him.
For one thing, Return of the Jedi had come out
in nineteen eighty three, Now we're talking about nineteen eighty six,
three years later. Star Wars merchandise sales were starting to
slack off pretty big time by nineteen eighty six, so
(27:56):
the huge checks that had been coming in first learn
to dry up at this point. On top of that,
Lucas had had a very expensive divorce in nineteen eighty
three and he was having lots of issues surrounding that.
Which is an entirely different episode that doesn't involve technology,
(28:18):
So I don't know who will ever cover it, but
it is a fascinating story. Oh 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 Sherlock Holmes, it's worth seeing.
(28:41):
The same is not true for Howard the Duck, although
if you've got a bunch 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 Katmull 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 this happened,
(29:05):
they began to talk to potential investors who might be
able to give some capital to the spun off company,
and 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 Katamull and Smith became
co founders of this new company, which they now named Pixar.
(29:28):
So 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. The temporary name on the documents
at around that time was actually GFx, So I'm glad
that they dropped that and went with Pixar. We're going
(29:48):
to take a quick break and then we'll finish out
the Pixar story Part one. Steve Jobs provided capital for
the company. He signed a five million dollar check specifically
to Smith and to Catmull, who then signed it over
(30:12):
to Lucas. Now that five million dollars was to essentially
pay Lucas for the company. He gave the company another
five million dollars to act as starting capital for Pixar itself.
And like I said, Jobs wasn't the only person that
they talked to about the possibility of investing in this
(30:33):
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 Perrot. And guys,
if you're old enough to remember, you know Ross Perot
was an entrepreneur and a former presidential candidate, independent candidate.
(30:58):
Certain character too, man, I mean, Saturday Night Life had
a lot of fun imitating Ross Perot for a few months. Anyway,
Ross Perrot almost was the one to fund Pixar, but
that deal fell through at the last minute and Steve
Job stepped in. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs himself was going through
a bit of a transition. He had co founded Apple
(31:19):
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, so he didn't have anything
to do, and they kind of set him off off
to the side, so he was more or less forgotten.
(31:40):
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 Steve Jobs asked to come back
and try and work on fixing that. And he did
(32:01):
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 exile
and then his triumphant return later on. Now you might
have heard that Steve Jobs has been referred to as
(32:22):
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 percent ownership
of the company and the employees had the other thirty percent.
But it was Smith and Catmull who actually founded the
(32:43):
company and ran the operations. They were 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 marketing genius type. We all know this
if you've ever seen any Steve Jobs presentation. The guy
(33:08):
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, 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
(33:30):
Disney Company. Now Steve Jobs was technically providing money to
Pixar to buy the technology rights to the systems that
they built, that Pixar Image Computer and other technologies that
they built while they were at Lucasfilm. That was where
that first five million dollars went. And like I said,
they he had seventy percent of the ownership and the
(33:51):
employees had thirty percent ed Kettmull and Alvi 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 for Pixar, the president and vice president respectively.
And they weren't really as keen on the idea of
(34:14):
being a hardware company. They realized 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 first place, which was produced computer animation in
an economical way. And when Pixar formed, Catmill and Smith
(34:36):
brought along around thirty eight employees of the computer graphics
division with them from Pixar. That included John Lassiter. So
Lassner was one of forty Lucasfilm employees who became Pixar
employees and Lassener also really wanted to push computer animation,
(34:56):
just as he was still doing at 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 produce computer animated shorts or films. That wasn't the case.
(35:18):
Lassen was able to make the argument, Hey, we have
this equipment, this Pixar 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
(35:41):
sales pitch, a demo of the technology itself. And he
got the go ahead. So Lassener kind of found a
workaround in order to get to do what he wanted
to do, which was to make computer animated films. But
these weren't intended at least not originally to reach a
wider audience. It was really meant to pitch to potential customers.
(36:03):
But that did change. So in nineteen eighty six, a
little bit later on, after it spun off and started
its shaky first Steps. Pixar premiered the film Luxo Junior
at Siggraph. Now that's the short that introduces the famous
Luxo desk lamp. That little lamp that bounces into frame
(36:28):
with the Pixar logo, jumps up and down on the ball,
and then becomes the eye for Pixar. This is where
that character comes from. And the short received an Academy
Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film, so people took
notice of it. The award actually ended up going to
a different film called a Greek Tragedy. But it's okay
(36:52):
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. So by getting
that notoriety of being an nominative or an Academy award,
(37:14):
it helped the company land some commercial gigs 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 in the hopes that
it would eventually pay off big time. More on that
(37:36):
in just a minute. So in nineteen eighty seven, Pixar
debuts a short film titled Red's Dream Reed Red's Dream,
also directed by John Lassner, and they premiered that at
the nineteen eighty seven Sigraph. In nineteen eighty eight, they
have another short film come out. This one is called
(37:58):
ten Toy ti in ten Toy and it won an
Academy Award for 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 and eventually
it would lead to discussions between the two companies now.
(38:19):
That same year, nineteen eighty eight, Pixar finished development on
an animation system called men me E and V, which
stands for Modeling Environment. I'll go into more detail on
some of the technologies they developed in our second episode.
In nineteen eighty nine, Pixar completed work on a new
short called nick Knack, one of my favorites. It features
(38:42):
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 lovely young lady toy.
So you've got the snowman who gets a crush on
(39:02):
this whole, you know, sort of tropical toy and is
trying really hard to break out of his snow globe
in order to get over to there. It's an adorable
little short. Pixar also started to work on some commercials
at that time. My favorite commercial that Pixar, or actually
(39:23):
it's really was an ad campaign that Pixar worked on,
because it wasn't just a single commercial came out in
the early nineties, around nineteen ninety three. 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
(39:44):
and Baltimora'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, a lots of neat
commercial most of the time I ignore them, but I
like those. So Pixar just kind of had this ability
(40:06):
to inject personality into objects that otherwise would be inanimate
and 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'd
(40:26):
both 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
(40:49):
Image Computer had really dropped off by this point, the computer,
the company rather 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
(41:12):
pretty 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 nineteen ninety Steve Jobs decided
he wanted to sell off the hardware division of Pixar
to refocus Pixar into an animation studio and no longer
(41:34):
be a 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 nineteen ninety one, Steve Jobs fired half of Pixar's employees.
(41:59):
The company still losing money. In nineteen ninety one, he
demanded all employees stock shares of the company, so he
essentially bought the employees's shares. In fact, he kept doing
that throughout the years that fifty million he invested in
the company. Most of the time that ended up him
being him purchasing employee stock share, so little by little
(42:21):
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 he had to keep investing
money for it to stay around, and he wanted to
have that investment payoff. If 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
(42:46):
shut down Pixar. 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 that 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
(43:09):
the company. That would end up benefiting Steve Jobs big
time in just a few years. One of the employees
who left Pixar in nineteen ninety one was its co
founder Alvi Ray Smith, so he had been there from
the very beginning. His name was on the founding documents
along with ed Ketmell, but this was his time to leave,
(43:33):
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 a while
until he retired in nineteen ninety nine, so he kind
of departs our story at this point. It was also
right around this time that Pixar got a message from
(43:56):
a little company called Disney, and they decided that Disney
would fund Pixar in making the first feature length computer
animated film. By nineteen ninety two, those conversations had developed
a little further. Pixar actually agreed to go into a
partnership with Disney and committed to a three picture deal,
(44:19):
three movies for twenty one million dollars. So the three
movies essentially each had a budget of seven million if
you just divide 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 nineteen
ninety five. Steve Jobs had still been shopping the company
(44:41):
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 wanted to recapture
the money he had invested 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
(45:03):
almost sold it to Microsoft at one point, but instead
he held onto it and he wanted to see how
Toy Story would do at the box office. By nineteen
ninety four, 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
(45:27):
right around that time, Steve Jobs named himself Pixar CEO.
According to several sources, this was mostly 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
(45:49):
out there. Technically, cat Moll was really still the one
calling the shots for Pixar, but the question was would
Steve Jobs hold on to the company or not. It
all would depend on the success of Toy Story. And
(46:09):
here's where we end part one. Hope you enjoyed that
classic episode of tech Stuff. As I said, we're going
to have two more episodes in about Pixar coming up
in the next couple of weeks in the classics. And yeah,
maybe I'll do an update to kind of talk about
what the company has done since twenty sixteen. There have
(46:31):
been several more movies that have released to varying degrees
of success, both critically and at the box office. So
maybe we'll revisit that, but for now, I hope you
are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(46:55):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to.
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