Why Pixar Is the Apple of Hollywood
Steve Jobs let the animators at his other little company do what they do best with WALL*E: use breakthrough technology to bring a great idea to life, but don’t let it out of the lab until it’s perfect. Sound familiar? Inside the world’s top animation studio, Pixar’s chief says his CGI wizards work the Apple way.
WALL*E's robotic crush, EVE (left), reflects a touch of Apple design from the computer giant's celluloid siblings at Pixar. “They are incredible at producing software and hardware,” says the breakthrough studio's president. (Image Courtesy of Pixar)
By Peter Debruge
Published on: June 26, 2008
LOS ANGELES — To see the influence of Apple on Pixar, you don't have to look much further than
WALL*E—not the
cute trash-compacting robot from the studio's eponymous new film (though he does boot up to the Mac chime and own an iPod), but his polished white paramour, EVE. Part
iPhone 3G, part
Asimo, she's the animated equivalent of the next product that might be
unveiled by Steve Jobs, who effectively runs both companies. Except for the laser blaster, perhaps.
In many ways, Jobs's two brainchildren share the same strategies and values: strong brand identity, meticulous attention to detail and design, and perfectionism toward the end product, even if it means pushing back release dates and going a year without a major release. The result is a cult-like emotional attachment to the impersonal—engineering turned into art. But with studio brass insisting that the turtlenecked titan has a hands-off approach to toon details, instead allowing the veteran CGI gurus to develop their own industry standards, Pixar remains the orange to Apple's, well, apple.
"What
is in common there is a fundamental belief about uniqueness and making sure that something is really good," explains Pixar co-founder Edwin Catmull, who now serves as president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. "Apple computers and iPhone, they are what they are because Steve has put together this phenomenal team of people, and they are incredible at producing software and hardware—that's the driving philosophy."
Pixar's fate could have been different. In fact, were it not for Jobs, it might currently be an automotive design firm. Casual fans forget that the company originated under
George Lucas as the CG effects department of Lucasfilm—a cash-sucking venture that was all but stalled in the R&D phase during the mid-1980s. When Ewok action figures failed to cover the Computer Division's costly overhead, the
Star Wars director put that section of the company up for sale.
Named after that division's proprietary computer, Pixar might have gone to Philips or General Motors, with its technology being used for medical imaging or the next generation of Detroit's CAD software. But in January 1986, after being squeezed out of his position at Apple, Jobs bought it out for $10 million—a steal compared to the $7.4 billion that Disney ponied up to acquire the company 20 years later.
These were the days before the iPhone and Leopard, when Macintosh was still the scrappy personal computing choice of hipsters and higher education—back when the boxes were beige, the screens black-and-white and the disks floppy.
Just as Apple borrowed from Xerox's Smalltalk interface, which in turn shaped the industry-standard Windows operating system, Pixar wasn't the only destination for filmmakers who wanted to produce computer-animated films. But like Jobs, the now legendary animator John Lasseter had been let go from his day job (at Disney, in the animator's case), so he went off to refine his craft and later came back to run the company that had previously dismissed him.
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't
Toy Story that re-launched Pixar, but a program called RenderMan. Today, everyone from Weta to Industrial Light and Magic uses Pixar's breakthrough software to generate realistic-looking, computer-generated animation and effects shots. "Our view was that we had to solve a few problems before computer graphics could be used in making feature films," Catmull says. "One was motion blur, the other was complexity."
To create a convincing digital image, artists and engineers break down the animated world into tiny shaded polygons. When Catmull and his team got started, computers were capable of crunching anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 polygons per shot. To get the level of detail they wanted for a project like
Toy Story, the Pixar crew estimated they would need a program capable of managing 80 million polygons. "Part of our logic was that we wanted to have something so extreme that it forced us to think about the technical challenges," Catmull says.
Nearly everyone in the CGI industry has relied on Mac's OS for years, and these days they're mostly all using RenderMan, which has evolved at the source with each Pixar project's new functionality—fur in
Monsters, Inc., water for
Finding Nemo and ray tracing of reflective surfaces on
Cars. There is even an 800-mile gap between Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., and the RenderMan group separate in Seattle, so the company's software team can address the visual challenges posed by outside projects as diverse as
Spider-Man,
300 and
Happy Feet. That third-party F/X work for other studios benefits Pixar films in turn, especially since the primary challenges of
Ratatouille and
WALL*E involved the overall visual complexity of those two films more than specific technological hurdles.
Read more…
[Via
Popular Mechanics]
Interesting tidbits mentioned in this article that you might be interested in:
1. Jonathan Ive, the Senior VP of Industrial Design at Apple and designer of such products as the iMac, iPod and iPhone,
was consulted for the design of EVE, the love interest of Wall-E in the movie;
2. Wall-E is a Mac (he has to be; he has been working for 700 years); and
3. He owns an iPod.
Why Pixar Is the Apple of Hollywood
Linear Mode
