When did Pixar come about?
Well, George Lucas didn’t really want to have a computer company – which was what this was turning into – within his filmmaking studio. Because it takes a lot of financial investment.
Steve Jobs had just left Apple computers, so he purchased our group and we called it Pixar. Pixar was the name that he had come up with for our first computer: ‘Pixar Image Computer’, and Pixar is sort of a combination of the words 'pixel' and 'art'.
But didn’t Jobs buy the company more for the technology than the animation?
He loved the potential of the animation, and the people, but initially I think yes it was pure software and computer hardware that he was interested in. Pixar had two lives: for the first 10 years it was more of a technology company.
Although you were actually involved with a feature film that first year: Young Sherlock Holmes.
Yes, the Barry Levinson film [exec-produced by Steven Spielberg]. We worked with ILM on the knight coming out of the stained glass window.
It was only six shots but we worked on it for about nine months. It was the very first FX where the computer was used to make something that was meant to be real.
It was a lot of long nights and all-nighters but the sequence was so successful, it really started the explosion of using computers in the FX world. The film itself was okay but I realised I didn’t want to stay with ILM, I wanted to be a storyteller with Pixar.
Which led to Luxo Jr. which had a huge impact.
Absolutely. It got a standing ovation at SIGGRAPH [influential computer graphics convention) but the thing that was pivotal is that straight afterwards this pioneer in computer science came up to me and said, 'Can I ask you a question?’
I thought he was gonna ask me about the software or the soft shadowing algorithm or something like that. But he goes, ‘Was the big lamp the mother or the father?’
At that moment I realised that we’d achieved something, for the very first time in computer animation history, the story and the characters were the thing that was entertaining the audience.
You were still a few years away from being able to do a feature film, though.
Yeah, we didn’t have the technology yet. It wasn’t until 1988 that RenderMan [software interface that describes three-dimensional scenes and turns them into photorealistic digital images] got used for the first time.
It’s pretty amazing to think it’s 20 years old and we’re still using it. It’s become the standard for the industry – although just now we have a long research project that we’ve developed called E-System that’ll be online for future films. It’s taken years to develop but it’s really amazing.
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