Pixar Animation

'Audacibus Annue Coeptis'

Ascent to my bold undertakings - Virgil, Aeneid IX

In 1979 Ed Catmull  left the New York Institute of Technology and was hired to work at Lucasfilm as part of 'The Graphics Group', which, unbeknownst to him, would serve as the foundations for the building of the animation behemoth we know today as Pixar.

The team was tasked with the research and development of items on Director George Lucas' 'wishlist': A Digital non-linear film editing system, a digital sound editing system and a digital film printer. 

During this period Catmull and the team worked on a prototype for an Application Programming Interface known as RenderMan.

 3 years later, they started working on special effects sequences with Industrial Light & Magic, at which point a man named John Lasseter was asked to join. John worked on the beginnings of 'The Adventures of André & Wally B', which in 1984 became the first short animation film created by the humble team of 40. It was praised for it's innovations in character complexity, motion blur and texturing.

In 1986, in a radical turn of events, newly resigned Apple founder Steve Jobs purchased the computer division of Industrial Light & Magic for $10 million, 5 of which, for technology rights, the other half - into the company as capital. Catmull became president of the newly formed corperation, along side Jobs as chairman.
 In August the same year, Lasseter made his directorial debut unveiling Luxo Jr, becoming the first CGI film to be nominated for an Academy Award and the origin of the iconic Pixar lamp.
Pixar continued to break ground in the animation world, when in 1988 they released Tin Toy, which became the first Computer Animation to receive the Best Animated Short Film Academy Award. A true milestone for a medium in it's infancy. The film gained much attention from Disney, who offered Lasseter a Directorial position at their studios, however, he opted to stay with Pixar and Jobs approved the production of another short.


In 1989 Lasseter released Knick Knack, one of the last animations that he would produce during Pixars independent years.



The film received great critical acclaim, dubbed by The Independant "a four minute masterpiece".
Pixar took a break from short films after this, to pursue commercials and generate more income.
In this year they also released the first commercial version of RenderMan, which went on to become an industry-wide standard for CGI rendering.


There's no doubting Pixars creative genius. It has produced some of the most successful and popular animations ever, and shows no signs of stopping. One of the secrets to it's success is described by it's president Catmull as "Collective Creativity". He argues that some companies "don't understand creativity". The following are the principles Pixar operates with:
1. "Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. (they've even gone so far as to design their buildings to "maximise inadvertent encounters")
2. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas. (via email etc)
3. "Stay close to innovative ideas in academia" (through publishing research)

In Pixar, power is entrusted to those who are at the forefront of the creative process (Lasseter for example).
In conjunction with the principles, this system gives it an immense 'support structure', and has been applied to the technical side of the company as well.

Pixar has had some wildly successful films - In terms of critical reception, 'Toy Story', it's first film partnered with Disney and the first film ever to be entirely computer generated, was the most successful. It has received 100% on Rotton Tomatoes, 92/100 on Metacritic and currently sits at 111 on IMDB's Top 250 films of all time. Since then it has gone on to produce other hits such as Finding Nemo, Cars and Monsters Inc.

But Pixar are no strangers to advertisement and commercials -

Throughout their history they have done promotional work for various companies, and one of the most recent and successful of those is the 'Toy Story of Terror' promo. This was made to promote TV giant Sky's new fibre broadband service, and Disney / Pixars latest animation - Toy Story of Terror. It features everyone's favourite Toy Story characters!

At the very core of Pixar's technological might is their Supercomputer or Renderfarm.
It's a data centre full of humming servers, it would be considered one of the top 25 supercomputers in the world should it be tested. At the time of the production of Monsters University, the 2000 computers have combined, more than 24,000 cores all running their software 'RenderMan' This is the beating heart of the movie's tech, and it is speculated that Pixar Animation Studios has more computer power than any other American organisation except NASA.

Although, according to Supervising Technical Director Sanjay Bakshi - It still takes 29 hours to render a single frame of Monsters University. This is due to the highly complex textures and movement simulations. For example, sully has 5 times the individual hairs on his fur than in the first film, giving him a coat comprised of around 5.5 million hairs.
One of the major recent breakthroughs in Pixar's production technique is 'Global Illumination'. It is a lighting system designed for maximum realism, meaning that all sources of light in the scene are accurately simulated, bouncing around the scene countless times casting realistic shadows. This is one of the main reasons the Renderfarm had to be upgraded for Monsters University.

All in all, if you used one computer to do the job of rendering Pixars latest export - Monsters University, it would take about 10,000 years to finish rendering!