[quote=CONCHO]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.[/quote]
You’re right, I wasn’t there, so I don’t understand all the difficulties that they run into and have to solve to get Toy Story out. I gave Jobs mad props for sticking with Pixar and allow them to come up with all the tools that would make Toy Story happen in 1995. I’m not in the industry, so I could be wrong, but to say “Computers were a joke in Hollywood” is a little misleading, no? Consider the history of CGI and how it progress over the years, I still think it would bound to happen as technology improve. Pixar just have a single vision and problem they’re trying to solve, which is creating a movie that’s 100% CGI. Which would explain why they’re so far ahead than the rest of the field in this type of movie making. It seems like the rest of the field of CGI are spending more time and resources in using CGI in conjunction with human in the movie. Do you think the 2 usage of CGI are different? BTW, Casper was the first CGI lead character in feature-length film (preceded Toy Story by six months). First CGI characters to interact realistically with live actors. How do you think they made Casper if Pixar is the only company that was developing characters 100% in CGI? I guess I’m just not in awe about a movie 100% in CGI as you are. I actually prefer seeing CGI being used to improve the conventional movies with human in it (along the line of Avatar, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, etc). So, as a movie loving general public, I’m not sure if my movie enjoyment would be worse w/out movies made 100% in CGI.
