uter Graphics Story- A Personal Overview of Computer Animation in the Movies

pOirea~JGcob- tth:rkinwgetrheiprq:b~tim~s Onf d i~trh:sti::d a~U::e things that are to be expected when the With the help of a 30-second test piece realms of software development and full- produced in 199 I, the Toy Story deal was blown production collide under deadline signed. Back then, Pixar had less than 50 pressure. Despite this, overall, the system employees, and Jurassic Park had not yet that used to be called Menv and is now been released. That particular summer, called Marionette came through. To use a the computer graphics group at metaphor, Marionette was born during the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was build- short films, grew through childhood during ing on the earlier work done by the peo- the time we spent doing commercials and ple that were to form the nucleus of the put on its teenage growth spurt during Toy Toy Story crew, creating some incredible Story. Now, thanks to our ongoing develop- imagery for The Abyss, Willow and ment efforts, it is still growing and maturing Terminator (T2). But Hollywood in gen- into adulthood. But, remarkably, the system eral had still not awakened to the full held together, the film got made and proba- potential of computer generated WoodyWoo~ and Buzz become best buddies in Toy Story. © Disney. Property bly the main reason for this is that imagery. Many of us in the graphics of Pixar. Marionette was designed as an open system. industry remember The Abyss and T2 as deal with a need for large amounts of CPU the pivotal point, when the evidence of what power in our industry is to call up Silicon Open Systems computer graphics could do for film was real- Graphics (SGI). A few weeks later, a truck What does open systems mean? Open sys- ized. However, the Hollywood community pulls into the company parking lot and unloads tems is one of those buzzphrases that is often seems to have needed more convincing; and a lot of boxes with computers inside that are tossed around in the always vocabulary- for those people did just that. Jurassic Park always painted in fun and exciting colors. But volatile circles of the computer-savvy ILM went through a rather rapid growth in this case, we had two separate needs: inter- cognoscenti. In this case, it means that our period to and has never complete Jurassic Park active stations had to be as fast as possible animation system was built on top of a pro- looked back. Counting everyone at ILM today, (what else is new?) and they had to be usable gramming language,which in turn was created they have somewhere in the ballpark of 700 over a three-year production cycle. solely for the purpose of doing three dimen- employees, but it took nearly a decade of Meanwhile, our rendering needs were pro- sional computer graphics. Having a full general growth to reach that point. At Pixar, during jected to be large enough to keep several hun- language underneath our system allowed us to the summer of there were still Jurassic Park, dred CPUs going 24 hours a day for nearly the create custom deformations for our charac- less than 50 people working on Toy Story, but entire last year of production. ters, build pseudo-interactive tools for creat- we knew that we had to grow much larger to After much investigation and negotiation, ing muscular deformations of faces, integrate finish the project. I recall talking to several Sun came out as the best source for raw CPU the commercial package Alias as yet another ILM employees about the staffing for T2 -- compute power, but SGI still won the desktop modeling tool and adapt our production one of them said that their group was already workstation competition. At the peak of pro- process in general to cope with whatever 12 people in size. How would it ever grow to duction, we ended up with more than 100 Sun new, unanticipated tasks might show up 30? That problem presented itself to us time pizza-boxes (with two or four CPUs per box) around the corner. and time again as we grew eventually to fill the in a machine room, computing round the It is certainly true that many other pro- credit list with more than a hundred people. It clock. Wired into a quarter-terabyte diskfarm. duction companies use a similar strategy when seemed like every company in the world was Connected with fiber. Buzzword followed setting up their in-house production pipelines; growing rapidly in 1993, but the growth pat- by buzzword. Suffice to say that we had a but unfortunately, many third-party software terns a few years ago do not compare at all lot of hardware, and the care and feeding of developers seem more interested in market- with what we see today. all of this equipment was more than a full- ing cool, whizzy features for SIGGRAPH floor- Growing a production group from 30 to time job for our systems group -- especially show demos than producing software that is 100 and now to nearly 300 is a difficult so since we no longer had a homogeneous useful in actual production. One commercially process. At Pixar, we went from what was environment. available package has shown particular essentially l0 people making short films (and Taking a look at the software that we used promise recently by releasing an expression not making a lot of money doing it) to a full- for television commercials, it was clear to us builder in its recent versions. However, build- sized feature film production crew in just a that we had an excellent system for creating ing closed systems where the users cannot get few short years. Software updates needed to character animation; but it was also clear that at all the data that they need to is, in my opin- happen, hardware had to be upgraded and we had quite a lot of development work to do ion, inexcusable in this day and age. hundreds of employees had to be trained and before attempting to generate 75 minutes of Some of the directory structures for user given the skillset necessary to contribute film resolution footage. Tools were created to data that other packages force users into are effectively to a production of the size that Toy deal with takes, shots, sequences, audio, revi- at best silly, and at worst frustrating. Why Story was going to become. sions and the rather immense problem of don't all of the major packages have reason- On the hardware front, the typical way to

26 February1997 Computer Graphics able, ASCII-based output file formats that can respective field, now have the responsibility to think that our feature ~ be readily parsed and sent through the sad, share their knowledge with the new generation film division will cer- awk and perl scripts that are an everyday part of Pixarians so that the company can continue tainly be releasing a film of high end CG production? And why, when to grow and try to get more than one major every two years, and perhaps using one of the so-called neutral file formats project into production at the same time. once a year within the next that are supposed to allow free data fiow Other CG houses like Disney, gearing up for its decade. This is probably an opti- between environments and platforms, do they dinosaur film, are trying to hire even larger mistic projection, but knowing that o always seem to have a bug in them that is only numbers. "600 new hires!" was overheard in CEO Steve Jobs has a history of takir discovered when the conversion process is the hallways at SIGGRAPH this year. Numbers companies places, this could happen. ~,,,,,~ finished, and it is too late to go back? like that were unheard of even 12 months ago. on the coattails of the feature film releases will The single most important feature of open be direct-to-video sequels, interactive prod- systems (like those found in most production Production ucts and the obvious marketing tie-ins. companies) is the ability to adapt. The soft- During the production of Toy Story, the work- However, all of this relies comp/ete/y upon ware has to be flexible enough to allow new ing hours were kept surprisingly sane. Until the fact that we tell interesting stories that the techniques to be incorporated, experiments the last six months or so, most of the people public wants to see. Pixar's business, while to be conducted to decide the best way to do were working a remarkably normal 40 hours a sprinkled with phrases like high tech, photore- things and new interfaces to be created on the week= Coming from a background in televi- alistic computer graphics and other terms that fly. At Pixar, animators and technical directors sion commercials, I found this amazing to wit- seem to make some members of the invest- ('l'Ds) fulfill separate functions, and the deci- ness firsthand. Forty hours a week is a myth ment community eager to buy more shares, sion to do this was a conscious one. in commercial production; I prefer to call a actually all boils down to a single, unifi/ing con- Animators spend years studying the subtleties decision to work in commercials a lifestyle cept -- good storytelling. If we are not telling of motion, and technical directors spend years choice as opposed to a career choice. But the compelling stories in an interesting way, our studying computer science along with the film got made, and it was even finished on films will nor succeed. That, and that alone, finer aspects of modeling, shading and lighting. schedule. would spell nearly certain death, not only for Having a platform that allows these two After the film, and many much-needed our own company, but our industry as a whole. groups of people to contribute equally to the vacations, all the departments got together to It will be interesting to observe the reac- production process is an enormous asset_ do post-mortems and make improvements to tion when the other CG films currently in With the modeling language that I mentioned the production process. We all found this production, such as Ants and Dinosaur, make it before, which sits underneath our animation process partly cathartic but, more importantly, to distribution and release. Once those films system, TDs can construct very complicated, a productive way to make our next film, Bugs, do get into your neighborhood google-plex custom-built deformations of a given model work better than our first- As a company, theatre (much like Toy Story did in 1995), it will (for instance the up-and-down curl on the left Pixar has proven to be very responsive to be interesting to see how the public will side of Woody from Toy Story's mouth). The feedback from the employees. This is critical receive them. Since animation in general is animators do not have to know about the at a time in our industry when having even going through an almost unprecedented variety of parallelized array operations, vector one or two of your key employees leave is a growth period, the fruits of all of this labor will dot products or Fourier analysis that might be major blow. certainly be in theatres by the turn of the cen- going on behind the scenes. In addition, the We, (and I use we to mean most of us folk tury. How will companies like Pixar, Disney, TDs don't have to know about the anticipa- at Pixar that are not SeniorVice President Of PDI, DreamWorks, Sony, Fox,Warner and oth- tion, secondary motion and, more generally, This Or That), sincerely appreciate that Pixar ers do in a marketplace that is not nearly this the acting and emotion that the animator is has chosen a stock option plan as a way to crowded today? giving to the model. keep all of us around as opposed to the sign- My father spent many of the early days of your-life-away-on-a-contract method more his career involved with NASA in the sixties. Training prevalent in Los Angeles. Not only does this This was a huge boom-time for the space Hare important even than hardware or soft- have the obvious effect of making us all want industry, as government funding to send some- ware, is the training of employees. With so to make our next film even more successful one to the moon became a national priority. many production houses growing so fast in the than the $190 million domestic that Toy Story Students were recruited right out of school past few years, the number of qualified appli- took in, but it also means that we are all at and given jobs with the best hardware -- cants out there is vanishingly small. As a Pixar because we want to be. Maybe this is a when hardware meant actual rockets, space result, production companies are having to generally obvious point, but by treating capsules and mission control organisations, as hire animators after only a year or two in ani- employees well and making them a part of the opposed ro the computer workstations that mation school, and technical directors right profits as well as the process, employees don't can run a pretty cool flight simulator today. out of their undergraduate engineering pro- want to leave. I wonder why some of the They were paid well and they received a lot of grams. other production houses have not chosen this press coverage; mothers and fathers all over These new employees have to go through path. It seems like a win-win situation to me. America were proud to tell their neighbors training programs that take them to the level of that their sons and daughters were working expertise required to create the imagery that The Future on the space program. Now, it appears as if the CG industry is today's films need. To do this, many companies, When preparing this article, I was asked to going through a similar phase. How many of Pixar included, have created training programs address the future of Pixar. Before doing so, your parents go around their home town for their new employees. Our Pixar University let me make it pointedly clear that I am not an proudly announcing that their sons and daugh- is actually a 10 week, completely immersive officer of the company, nor do I expect to ters work in computer graphics? Probably training class that is basically each new become one anytime soon. In other words, many. And most of them don't understand employee's job for their first semester at the don't hold me to any of this! exactly what computer graphics is, but that company- full body contact CG! Guest lec- Where might we all be 10 years in the doesn't really matzer. They didn't understand turers, each of whom is an expert in their future? Speaking about Pixar in particular, I

Computer Graphics February i 997 27 ~how rockets went to biting their heads off for messing up the beau- / the'moon, but that in no tiful scheduling spreadsheet that you con- J way stopped them from structed oh-so-carefully in Excel, take a being proud. Unfortunately minute and realize that what they are trying to though, like the Detroit automo- do is bring a better film to the audience. tive employment boom, the NASA In my opinion, that is what really matters. J space program boom and the defense J contracting boom, most things come to an end. My guess is that if that day ever comes, Oren Jacob is a Senior Technical Director at and animation (and computer graphics in par- Pixar. He has been with the company for ticular) does go through a difficult few years, more than six years and has worked on then it will be because we have failed at our numerous award-winning commercials like primary mission as filmmakers: to tell stories. It Listerine Arrows, Mission and Jungle, Levi's will not be because we didn't produce a special Khakis, ChipsAhoy Balloon and Hallmark effect that was even more impressive than last Magnet. He has also worked on many com- summer's blockbuster. mercials that did not win any awards, but his While I was certainly terribly impressed mother still loves him. Jacob did quite a lot of with the technology behind Jurassic Park, and I lighting and special effects work on the chase marvelled at the imagery that ILM created in sequence in Toy Story, creating the smoke con- that film, the single, most important part of trail effects and assembling the overhead heli- making the effects in that film work for me, copter shots of a suburbia a little too much was having the audience perceive a real threat like the one that he grew up in. More recently, from the dinosaurs. The T-rex was hungry, and Jacob finished a new THX logo for LucasFilm, he was going to eat that lawyer -- enough taught the first Pixar University, a 10-week, said. Additional elements like rain, smoke or intensive training program for newly hired extra jeeps all added to the tone and mood of technical directors and is now a Supervising the shots, but if the main actor, the T-rex, did Technical Director on the Toy Story Sequel pro- not present a real threat, especially in the ject. sequence when he first appears, the rest of the film would have had a difficult time keeping the Oren Jacob attention of the audience. Instead, when that do Pixar T-rex let loose that epic scream, right after 1001 West Cutting Blvd. breaking through the fence, we were all on the Pt. Richmond, CA 94804 edge of our seats, watching this monster try Tel: + 1-510-215-3478 to eat the kids in the car and eventually con- Fax: +1-510-236-0388 suming the lawyer in a very satisfying mid- Email: oreo@pixar, corn sequence climax! Similarly, in Toy Story when Woody yells at Buzz: "You are a toy!" I saw two characters acting. I didn't see a SIGGRAPH demonstra- tion of rendering techniques and trimmed Nurbs surfaces with antialiased procedural shaders, but I saw a moment in film. It was a moment where two characters, each with their own set of desires and emotions, were at a turning point. It was a moment filled with tension and conflict. This is what filmmaking is all about. Often I have been asked if CG will replace cell animation, clay animation, sand animation, stop motion animation or many of the other disciplines of our artform. I sincerely hope not. Whether a scene can be realized through one or another of these techniques is of sec- ondary importance to me. If we lose the abil- ity to make our characters act, emote and touch audiences, we can expect a future where there suddenly is no longer a huge dearth of qualified applicants out there. This is particularly important for those of us who are working on entire CG films. We are, in a sense, in control of our own destiny. So when the story department comes out with yet another revision at the last minute, instead of

28 February1997 Computer Graphics