[quote=AN]
In response to CONCHO and Pixar, I view CGI is just another technology in a long line of technologies that improve our way of watching movies. I group CGI with color film, audio added to silent film, HD recording, 3D films, surround sound, etc. They all are ground breaking for their time, but I wouldn’t say one technology is greater than another. BTW, Pixar didn’t invent CGI. Here’s a history of CGI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_animation_in_film_and_television.
So, although Pixar came out with the first movie fully done in CGI, I would say, sooner or later, it was found to happen, since CGI started in the 70s and Toy Story came out when the technology was mature enough to support a feature-length film. In 1996, Dragonheart came out. It was the first 2D all-CGI backgrounds with live actors. Basically, what I’m trying to say is, CGI is much bigger than Pixar and have a much longer history. I wouldn’t lay the credit for CGI in film at the foot of Pixar. They’re just one of many companies that help advance CGI. This is not even giving credit to the chip makers for designing and releasing CPUs that are fast enough to do these kind of calculation.[/quote]
I never said Pixar invented CGI. Pixar turned that technology into something that could be used to make movies. Big difference. And again, it was bound to happen? Jobs funded Pixar for nine years with no product to sell, no revenue coming in. Zero. Nada. Zilch. In that time they invented all of the tools and techniques necessary to make movies with it cost-effectively. Again, if you weren’t there at the time, you wouldn’t understand this, but no one ever thought that you would actually be able to make a movie with this stuff. There was no money to fund the research. There was no one willing to pay the bills to develop the software necessary for rendering these complex scenes on a massive scale, for animating all of those characters, for modeling all of the physics in a cost-effective manner, etc… — no one except Pixar and Jobs.
Lion King was made with a staff of 800 people and a $45M budget. Toy Story had a staff of 110 and a budget of $30M. If you have not been involved in this technology, if you didn’t live through that time, you may not be able to appreciate just how bold of a move Pixar was. It was literally viewed as insanity. Computers were a joke in Hollywood, they were still stuck in the 1960s, doing things the old-fashioned way with Panaflex cameras and miniatures. Pixar changed all of that in 1995.
