"You look at every animation studio and they started with the short film." "[pops and deflates]" "The mythology of Pixar goes back to five guys sitting in a hallway making Luxo Jr., making Red's Dream, making Tin Toy, and challenging each other." "[Carpenter] There was a pioneer spirit, like we were out in the wilderness making our own roads and there's really nobody to help." "We were one percent of Pixar's expenditures and 99 percent of its visibility." "[toy drums beating]" "[Catmull] We showed our stuff, which now I look back and think of as crude, but it blew people away at the time because it was so much advanced." "It's really fun to see all the films strung together." "You can see the medium evolve right before your eyes." "[Lasseter] The development of our talents, the development of our technology leading up to the first feature film." "Trying to make a feature film in the '70s and '80s was completely nuts because the computers at the time were way too slow." "Back when we were working on our very first films, it was a challenge to make even a single image in computer graphics." "[Good] Compute power was a huge limitation." "Rendering any kind of computer graphics was just incredibly expensive." "We had a VAX 780 which is a million instructions per second, which is less than one percent of what you find in a modern PDA." "The computer in a cell phone is 100 times faster than the one we had at Lucasfilm." "[Blinn] Doing anything was a pain." "In those days, computer animation was in the domain of guys in white lab coats." "All of the images in the animation were being created by the same people who wrote the software." "[Good] Like going to a museum where the paintings were done by the people who designed canvases and brushes." "[Carpenter] Pictures were simple cartoony, video game shapes." "[Blinn] The motions had to be plotted out on graph paper, counted squares, typed in a number into the computer and said," ""Go here, go here, go here and go here."" "Sometimes that looks good and sometimes it looks robot-like." "Our long-term goal was to make an animated film." "Everybody in the industry knew this group was dedicated to doing that." "[Carpenter] We knew to get there we had to have software that was robust and powerful and scaled properly." "[Catmull] Let's work on the technology and the software and speed will come." "When we made our first short, we based it on an idea that Alvy Ray Smith came up with." "It was at that time we went out and hired John Lasseter as animator for it." "Seems funny to say it, but officially I directed him in his first animation at Lucasfilm." "It was a piece called André and Wally B." "[Lasseter] Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith asked me to think about what a character would look like made up of simple geometric shapes." "Spheres, cones, cylinders, boxes, that kind of thing." "But I started looking at how simple Ub Iwerks drew those early Mickey Mouse cartoons." "And so I started drawing what became André as this character made of simple shapes." "Up until then, most of us nerdy types didn't know how to do soft characters nor was the technology capable of doing rubbery, moldable characters like a good animator needs." "[Lasseter]I remember saying to Ed," ""Boy, I would love to have something I could bend."" "Because the body is where a cartoon character gets so much of his expression." "And so he thought, in classic Ed Catmull style," ""Hmm, let me think about this." and he went away." "And he came back and he had invented the teardrop." "The bottom was a hemisphere." "The top was a hemisphere." "And then the computer filled in this section in the middle." "And it bent." "And I got so inspired by this that I got the idea for the second character, which was this big bumblebee with these big, jelly bean-like water balloon feet." "[Smith] Basically what happened in André and Wally B." "was the team of Bill Reeves and John Lasseter got established." "The part I worked on André and Wally the most was backgrounds, set, trees." "Bill Reeves delivered something called particle systems, an ability to create and control millions of individual particles to build up larger objects." "You could make it look like millions of leaves on a hillside full of trees." "It gave this richness that I wasn't used to." "[Lasseter] It was beautiful." "It was like a painting." "It was like pointillism." "I was working on this for a few months in the springtime of 1984." "The big deadline was this computer graphics convention called SIGGRAPH." "[Reeves] SIGGRAPH was a show where a lot of the industry got together." "You would show up once a year and show off what you'd done to your colleagues." "They had courses, they had panels, and they had the evening film show." "And this was like a geek fest rock 'n' roll concert or something 'cause it was always in a big arena." "It was a conference where everybody went "Wow" a lot." "'Cause every year things were new." "I remember Jim Blinn always coming every year." "He was working at Jet Propulsion Lab." "He would come with planetary stuff of some form or another." "[Guggenheim] Some of the companies started off by making logos." "You could have them spin around, put sparkles and do various things to have interesting logos." "Most of it was just technology demonstrations." "[Lasseter] Crystal balls over a checkerboard." "And everybody went crazy." "I'm sitting here going..." "What am I missing here?" "But everyone recognized the technical advances they were seeing." "[Smith] If it was a breakthrough, the house would come down, cheering and applause." "There's no story, no characters, no engagement." "We know how hard that was." "One technique we wanted to show off in André and Wally B..." "Well, there was two." "We wanted animation done by a real animator to be showcased." "We had the particle systems by Bill Reeves we wanted to show." "We had motion blur." "One of the most revolutionary things Pixar came up with." "You actually blur characters out in the direction of motion during a frame." "It made the difference between being commercially successful and not." "We showed up with it and the house went absolutely nuts." "The fact that I was animating just using my knowledge of animation principles, it had this snappy quality." "[Ostby] And both visually and story-wise was a step above anything people had seen before." "[Lasseter] I remember this guy." "He came up to me and he said, "John, what software did you use to animate André and Wally B.?"" "I said..." ""Just a key frame animation system much like other systems I've seen."" "He goes, "No, no, no." "It was so funny." "What software did you use?"" "André and Wally B. was proof that you could use this medium to tell a story." "Wasn't much of a story but there it was." "It worked." "But we didn't finish it in time for SIGGRAPH." "So it was partly rendered and then part of it was in wire frame." "What I found was that most people didn't notice that we hadn't finished the film." "They were so caught up in the characters, that they didn't notice that it switched to wire frame." "[whizzes and pops]" "[Lasseter] When I came to Lucasfilm to work with the computer graphics group," "I thought I was going to need to learn how to program to be able to animate." "There were no off-the-shelf software packages, there were no easy-to-use techniques." "I realized, you know what, I'm never gonna know what Eben Ostby or Bill Reeves or Ed Catmull knows because they're Ph.Ds." "They've invented this stuff." "Then I thought, well, wait a minute." "They can't bring something to life through pure movement and give it personality like I can." "So you know what, I'm just gonna sit right next to them and work in collaboration." "It was actually a great environment 'cause we could just yell across the room at each other when we had a problem or a question." "John, Bill and Eben were constantly pushing each other to do better." "[Lasseter] I'd come up with an idea and show it to them." "Can we do this?" "I don't know if we can." "Let me think and they'd go off and start working on it doing a little R  D and I'd look over their shoulder and I'd see something and they'd say, "That's a mistake."" "And I'd say, "That's amazing." "Can you do that again?" "'Cause then you could do this." And I'd draw something else and say, "How about this?"" "It's an idea I would've never thought of if I hadn't seen the technology." "It was this great back and forth." "I always felt like the other half of John's ability to make films." "We could do what he couldn't." "Art challenges technology and technology inspires the art." "That's it, in a nutshell, the way we work at Pixar." "[Catmull] Early years were hard." "We were selling hardware." "We've shown you just a few examples of applications waiting to be explored with the Pixar image computer." "[Catmull] We sold software." "In the background we had a group that kept on making animated shorts." "It was something Ed Catmull really loved but still, it was not our business." "I went to John and said, "Can we an animated short that's a Pixar" "Let's do something that really says who we are." "Eben Ostby and Bill Reeves were teaching me to use the modeling" "There was a Luxo lamp sitting on my drawing table." "[Ostby] The model itself was the world's simplest hierarchy." "It was a base and then an arm and another arm and then a head." "[Lasseter] And I started animating it as though it was alive." "And thinking about if a Luxo lamp was alive how would it move around?" "[Ostby] You could see him connect and say, "I see how this thing works."" "And I know one thing I was working on was the shadowing algorithm." "Self-shadowing was the lamp turning around and casting shadows on itself." "What would be a cooler way to show off this technology than having the moving light sources be these lamps moving so the shadows changed position." "Then the fateful day that Tom Porter came into the graphics room with Spencer, his son." "His proportions were totally different than that of an adult." "The head was so big." "Lift up the arm and he could barely reach the top of his head." "I started thinking, "What would a baby lamp look like?"" "And in the computer, I was able to scale different parts of the lamp differently." "[lamp squeaking]" "We didn't have the computer power to do camera moves or backgrounds." "So "how about a wood grain on the floor?" "We have that, right?"" ""Yeah, OK." I can work with this." "[Ostby] John had a clear idea of what the limitations of the medium were." "So he told a story he could tell in that medium and not have to invent stuff that was impossible to invent at the time." "[Lasseter] And we premiered it at SIGGRAPH." "As soon as the lamp moved, people started going crazy." "And then the ball came in and they were going nuts." "I remember shrinking down in my chair getting a little frightened thinking, "What's going to happen when the funny part gets here?"" "It's only a minute and a half long." "Before it was done, people were giving it a standing ovation." "Poor Gary Rydstrom, his sound work was never heard at that screening because the crowd was literally screaming their heads off." "And people were just talking about it forever as "the first."" "The first time they'd seen it." "The "it" they'd seen was the first time they had seen emotion and character and storytelling in a computer animated film." "There's curiosity, there's dismay, there's sympathy, there's bemusement." "A whole range of things he was able to get through to the audience using just a few triangles in this thing." "You realize it's no longer a test if it's actually touching you in some way." "They laugh." "They cry." "They go out singing the songs." "And I'll never forget Jim Blinn, one of the giants in the computer graphics resource world, came to me after the show." "And he said, "John, I have a question for you."" "I thought, "Oh, no, Jim Blinn." "He's gonna ask me about the self shadowing algorithm." "I know he is." "I don't know that."" "He goes, "John, was the parent lamp a mother or a father?"" "And I just smiled and I thought, "We did it."" "We did it, you know." "It's about the characters." "[Lasseter] Those early days at Pixar were really magical for me." "I was the only animator." "Ed Catmull and everybody said, "Here's the new research we're doing." "Let's make another film for SIGGRAPH."" "Six months doing a short and six months developing software, six months doing the next short." "What we were trying to do was to lay the foundation to do a feature film." "[Lasseter] SoRed's Dream,for instance, we wanted to show off this new rendering system." "We had the Pixar image computer." "We wrote a rendering system that ran on it." "Look, you can see it rendering right now in here." " This is actual speed..." " Oh, hey, cool." "Back in those days everyone didn't have their own computer." "The animation station that we used, we had one of in the building." "It was a big deal." "It was hundreds of thousands of dollars." "This is the picture system right here." "And this is a Pixar." "This is Java and Robbie's disc." "[Lasseter] Me and Eben and Bill and Ed, we would just kind of be sharing one computer." "And I would always take the midnight shift." "I got most of my animation done from 10:30 at night till 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning." "Then I had a futon under my desk and I would sleep there." "How come your car has the best parking spot?" "Because it hasn't moved in about three days." " I've been sleeping here." "In the car?" " No, in my office." "Oh." "This is kind of interesting." "This is how I tested out the animation of the tag." "See?" "Oh, that's great." "So you can see it." "I got the movement of the tags." "Would you make movies or just watch it?" "No, I just would watch it." "We had visitors walk in once and I was staring at this thing like this." "And they were kind of like, "John, are you busy?"" "How long did it take you to animate the sequence we just saw?" "That was about five days." "That was a little long." "Five days." "And how many hours a day were you working?" "[laughs]" "Oh, just a couple." "[Lasseter] Reeves, Ostby and I wanted to do night shots in the rain in a city." "These kind of neat, gritty shots, something that no one's ever seen before." "[Ostby]Red's Dream was the first film where we were trying to emulate a particular look... moody, dark." "[Lasseter] And I very much wanted to do something with kind of a sad ending, having more of a pathos." "And I always say that was Pixar's "blue period."" "Red's Dream was very popular in Europe." "[toy drums beating]" "Tin Toy was probably the hardest of the shorts." "It was this great little idea that I had gotten from looking at videotape of my nephew playing with his toys." "Everything he picked up went into his mouth and he slobbered on it." "I thought, imagine what it must be like to be a toy in the hands of a baby." "That baby is like a monster." " [toy drums clanging] - [baby squealing]" "[Lasseter] It was a challenge." "It was twice as long asRed's Dream,had twice as many shots." "It was using Mimvy or Marionette, our animation system, for the first time." "It was using RenderMan for the first time." "And it had our first human character, the baby, in it." "[Reeves] It was a much more organic kind of character:" "skin, facial animation." "When you look at it today you go, "Ooh, that's a weird looking baby."" "I had to write a whole system to do the modeling." "[Ostby] What now seems amazingly primitive at the time was the limit of what we'd figured out with the computer." "We were doing things like soft shadows and the textures of wood flooring and the cloth on the couch and a magazine on the couch." "So everybody who could model anything had to pitch in to make a toy to go under the couch." "I made the little airplane." " I built the fire hydrant." " I modeled a robot under the couch." "And Ed Catmull said, "I'll make something." "How about an elephant?"" "Great, we'd love an elephant." "So he went off and decided to do an elephant, first I need to implement bezier patches in our modeling language." "So he did that." "And then he sketched an elephant on a piece of graph paper." "And then he sat down with a text editor and manually entered the coordinates for every point on the elephant." "And out came..." "a perfect elephant." "And that was the most math geeky thing we'd ever seen." " [drumming] - [baby laughing]" "It was the first 3D computer animation ever to win an Academy Award." "But the most important thing that Tin Toy did was plant in our heads the idea of toys being alive." "And out of that grewToy Story." "[baby cooing]" "[Reeves] By the time we did Knick Knack we might have had 10 or 12 people." "In 1989 we all agreed." "Let's back off a little bit and make a film that's fun and not very demanding." "Consolidating our gains and making a film with techniques we knew." "John said, "This time I want to make a real Chuck Jonesy sort of cartoon."" "[Ostby] It was the first film where we worked on the story as a team." "When they were having discussions about the story of Knick Knack, what it might be or what would go on, we were all part of it." "[Good] I remember the story conference where the ending came up." "He falls and he ends up in a fish tank." "It was Deirdre Warin who said," ""And there will be a mermaid there, right?"" "And John said, "Yes, let's do it." "That's right."" "And I think that's a great indication of the collaborative spirit." "[Good] Knick Knack was again all hands on deck." "Everybody worked on a little bit of everything." "We had people designing their own characters." "John didn't do every bit of the animation as he had done on previous films." "But he let us do our personal characters." "Mine was the flamingo." "[Guggenheim] In Knick Knack, I believed I modeled the igloo." "[Good] I animated the dance cycle of the pyramid." "My giant contribution to the animation." "[Porter] We went through two or three very dark days during those times where you didn't know if we were going to make it as a company." "All these hardware guys are complaining we just spend money, we don't ever make money." "'Cause our shorts never made money." "In fact, from a business point of view, this company selling hardware had no business at all doing animation." "When's the shoe gonna drop?" "When are they gonna stop the animation?" "And the guy who's the head of software goes, "They never will, John."" "The world knows us from these little short films." "Each frame was computed in 8 to 10 minutes on the Pixar image computer." "[Guggenheim] People in oil exploration and medical imaging were buying them." "They liked that short films were made on them." "It added a bit of glamour to the quality of the product." "Ultimately we knew that the image processing market was doomed, which is why we got out of it." "And the animation business was actually doing OK." "And Steve felt that it was time to reorganize the company and to make some big changes." "So we went from 80 people to 50 people in the course of a week." "I can remember the meeting in the lunch room when they handed out the Pixar Animation Studios T-shirts." "That was such a huge..." "I cried." "We had gone from literally working in a hallway to owning the dump." "[Guggenheim] The goal from the time that I started working with Ed in 1978 through Lucasfilm and the formation of Pixar was we all wanted to make a feature length film." "And so it was time to stop making short films in a sense." "Here's what we'll do, we're gonna get into the TV commercial business, gain more production experience." "And then do something like a half hour TV special." "From that launching pad, go on to make a feature length film." "And right around that time is when Peter Schneider tried for the third time to hire John away from us." "So John turned down being a director at Disney to stay with a struggling startup and told Peter he should consider doing it with Pixar." "So Peter Schneider called me and said, "We'd like you to do a feature film."" "So I said, "We think that we should do a half hour TV special first."" "He said, "If you can do a half hour, you can do 90 minutes."" "I said, "OK, I'll buy that."" " Hello." " [screaming]" "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" "Did I frighten you?" "[Catmull] While we madeToy Story,we stopped making shorts at that time." "Near the end, we realized that was one of things that helped make us." "[Lasseter] Ed and I said we should continue doing short films." "Because for what it did for me as an artist, as a director," "I want to give that opportunity to other people in the studio." "We just realized we should always be doing this." "We should always figure out a reason to do shorts." "[Lasseter] This person may have a talent." "Give him a chance to direct." "Here are young animators." "Let's give them a chance to be a supervising animator." "Or let an artist become a production designer." "So from Geri's Game on, the short films were helping to develop our talent, was helping continue the research and development at the studio." "You want to be able to have an opportunity to experiment with things without committing to it for a full feature film." "[Catmull] We do think that people enjoy them and that's enough reason." "If people go to our films and have a great time then we will have succeeded." "The shorts are part of that enjoyment." "The gem of an idea that that little animation group represented, that's really the core of what Pixar turned out to be." "That core group..." "a lot of us are still here." "It could have fallen apart." "There were other people who had the same goal at the time." "And they didn't get there." "I mean, these are strong, good people, but there wasn't the right combination." "We were unique in that we had the support of Steve Jobs." "It's difficult to separate luck and talent when you have a fine result." "But we had a pretty good mix of the both."