The Pixar Story Page #2

NARRATOR:
While the animation

department felt stagnant,

Tron, a live-action foature

using the latest computer technology,

was screened for employees

at the studio.

(ENGINES REWING)

Watch it, watch it! Auuughhh!

There Tron was, these light-cycles. . .

Moving in and out of the scene

and it's. . .

And we came back to my room

and just sat there

and the depression

started to turn towards a frustration,

like, "Well, why can't we?"

"Why can't we do that?

Wouldn't it be cool, if?"

LASSETER:
Computer animation

excited me so much,

and not excited

about what I was seeing,

but the potential I saw in all this.

I was just amazed by it.

And we started thinking,

"Wouldn't it be cool if

"we had a background

that was moving like Tron did,

"but we animated

the character by hand."

It had never been done before,

but there's something about John

that you kind of get the feeling

that that doesn't matter

I mean,

if it had never been done before,

doesn't mean it can't be done.

NARRATOR:
John and Glen

soon got approval

to experiment with animation

and computerized backgrounds.

But at the studio

there was a growing fear

that the computer was

going to make animators obsolete.

THOMAS:
I'd say 95% of the fellas

at the studio were saying,

"You'd never get me to do anything

like that, they're ruining everything!"

And I talked to John Lasseter

about the things he was doing,

I said,

"'Gee, if you get that much imagination

"and new types of movement

done on a computer,

"but not by the pencil,

you'll be ahead of the game."

The potential was there at that time,

but no one wanted to do it

except for Lasseter.

NARRATOR:
John and his story team

were given the approval

to develop a script

based on the short story,

The Brave Little Toaster.

It would mark

John's feature directorial debut,

and his own opportunity

to further explore the blending

of computer and traditional animation.

After eight months of development,

John was finally asked to present

the story to the head of the studio.

LASSETER:
They'd said,

"Okay, it's time to show

"the head of the studio at the time

Brave Little Toaster."

So we got the presentation together,

he walks in with Ed Hansen,

and he had this scowI on his face

from the beginning, no laugh,

we pitched the whole thing

and he stood up and he asked,

"Well, how much is this gonna cost?"

And I said,

"Well, it's with computer animation,

"it's gonna be, you know, no more than

the regular budget of a film."

And he went, "The only reason

to do computer animation

"is if we could do it faster or cheaper."

And he walked up and he walked out.

And it was like, "What?" You know?

And so about five minutes later

I get this call,

and Ed Hansen

calls me down to his office.

And I come down, and he said,

"Well, John,

your project is now complete,

"so your employment with

the Disney Studios is now terminated."

DON HAHN:
He got let go, he got fired,

because, honestly, the studio

didn't know what to do with him.

Even at that early day,

this Disney Studio

that he dreamed about working at,

turned out to be a really

dysfunctional place, in reality.

And he was a born director,

he was a born leader,

and his expectation and passion

excelled what the studio

was doing then.

During a lot of the early days,

artists were frightened of the computer,

because they were

under the impression

that it somehow

was gonna take their jobs away.

And we spent a lot of time

telling people,

"No, it's just a tool, it doesn't take. . .

"It doesn't do the creativity,

that's a misconception."

But there was this fear,

and it was everywhere.

ANNOUNCER:
We interrupt

this program

for an important announcement.

A state of emergency

has been declared

and the entire police force

put on 24-hour duty,

(CROWD SCREAMING)

in an effert to stop

the mounting hysteria.

ANNOUNCER 2:
There is no

reasonable cause for alarm.

These rumors are absolutely false!

(BEEPING)

NARRATOR:
The reality of technology

was very different from the fear.

It was the computer

that would take us to new frontiers.

JOHN F. KENNEDY:
I believe that

this nation should commit itself

to achieving the goal,

before this decade is out,

of landing a man on the moon

and returning him safely to the Earth.

ASTRONAUT:
Lift off on Apollo 11 .

NARRATOR:
The space race

ignited funding in computer research

for a select number of universities

around the country.

In the 1960s,

the University of Utah set up one

of the first labs in computer graphics,

headed by the top scientists

in the field.

Ed Catmull, an aspiring artist,

was among the few drawn

to the potential in computer graphics.

CATMULL:
I drew a lot,

I wanted to be an animator.

I wanted to be an artist.

But at the same time, I believed that

I wasn't good enough

to be an animator,

so I switched over

to physics and computer science.

As soon as I took the first class,

I just fell in love with it,

it just blew everything else away.

'Cause here was a program in which

there was art, science, programming,

all together in one place, in a new field,

and it was wide open.

You could just go out

and discover things and explore,

you were right at the frontier.

NARRATOR:
Ed's computer-animated

film of his own left hand

was the first step in the development

of creating curved surfaces,

wrapping texture

around those surfaces,

and eliminating jagged edges.

The footage debuted years later

in the science-fiction film Futureworld,

which became the first use

of 3-D animation in a live-action film.

Ed graduated with a PhD

in a new technology ahead of its time.

There was only one institution

in the country

willing to put millions of dollars

into its further development.

The word of any center of activity

spread rapidly,

and it quickly became known

that the place was New York Tech.

CATMULL:
There the charter was

"Let's make computer graphics

usable in filmmaking."

That's exactly what I wanted to do.

NARRATCR:
Alex Schure,

the president of New York Tech,

hired Ed to spearhead the new

computer graphics department

to develop paint programs

and other tools

to create art and animation

using the computer.

Ed himself developed software

called "Tween"

that transformed hand-drawn

animation into a digital medium.

Artists could now draw and paint

directly into the computer.

We were creating a revolution

and the older techniques

were really gonna be pass.

NARRATOR:
These developments led

Ed to the far-reaching goal of someday

creating the first feature-length,

computer-animated film.

SCHURE:
We were impacting

the conventional industry

and it was gonna be tremendous

because of the applications

that it would have.

NARRATOR:
The applications

of Ed's developments

led Stor Wars director, George Lucas,

to see their potential

in live-action filmmaking.

LUCAS:
After I did Stor Wars,

I decided that I would begin to move

into the world of computer animation.

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