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Participant[quote=AN]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.[/quote]
Big difference — in Toy Story, the entire world is rendered. Everything else up until that point involved overlaying CGI on top of film. The difficulty in a 100% rendered film is that all of the physics have to be simulated, every object interacting with every other object, every surface, every shadow, everything. Motion, collision, deformation, etc… This is unbelievably complex and can probably only be appreciated by people who have studied or worked with the technology. And to do a full length movie in 1995 when a $20K workstation ran at 100MHz and had only 64MB of RAM! You needed banks and banks of these expensive machines to render the frames, you needed tons of special software to manage the huge job of rendering everything, this was huge but they pulled it off.
I’m actually not a big fan of animated films but some of them are great. I am a big fan of software though and I appreciate the difficulty of doing things like this…
Participant[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.
Participant[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.
Participant[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.
Participant[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.
Participant[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.
Participant[quote=briansd1]
What’s wrong with films with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic scenes?[/quote]Nothing is wrong with them, but that is irrelevant to the discussion. The point was that Jobs and Pixar took a fringe technology and reinvented filmmaking with it. “Titanic” is a film with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic (they actually happened) scenes, and it couldn’t have been made the same way without CGI. And as I explained before, that technology would not have the same place in Hollywood when Titanic was made in 1997 if Steve Jobs had not purchased Pixar in 1986.
Participant[quote=briansd1]
What’s wrong with films with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic scenes?[/quote]Nothing is wrong with them, but that is irrelevant to the discussion. The point was that Jobs and Pixar took a fringe technology and reinvented filmmaking with it. “Titanic” is a film with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic (they actually happened) scenes, and it couldn’t have been made the same way without CGI. And as I explained before, that technology would not have the same place in Hollywood when Titanic was made in 1997 if Steve Jobs had not purchased Pixar in 1986.
Participant[quote=briansd1]
What’s wrong with films with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic scenes?[/quote]Nothing is wrong with them, but that is irrelevant to the discussion. The point was that Jobs and Pixar took a fringe technology and reinvented filmmaking with it. “Titanic” is a film with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic (they actually happened) scenes, and it couldn’t have been made the same way without CGI. And as I explained before, that technology would not have the same place in Hollywood when Titanic was made in 1997 if Steve Jobs had not purchased Pixar in 1986.
Participant[quote=briansd1]
What’s wrong with films with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic scenes?[/quote]Nothing is wrong with them, but that is irrelevant to the discussion. The point was that Jobs and Pixar took a fringe technology and reinvented filmmaking with it. “Titanic” is a film with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic (they actually happened) scenes, and it couldn’t have been made the same way without CGI. And as I explained before, that technology would not have the same place in Hollywood when Titanic was made in 1997 if Steve Jobs had not purchased Pixar in 1986.
Participant[quote=briansd1]
What’s wrong with films with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic scenes?[/quote]Nothing is wrong with them, but that is irrelevant to the discussion. The point was that Jobs and Pixar took a fringe technology and reinvented filmmaking with it. “Titanic” is a film with real actors depicting real human emotions in realistic (they actually happened) scenes, and it couldn’t have been made the same way without CGI. And as I explained before, that technology would not have the same place in Hollywood when Titanic was made in 1997 if Steve Jobs had not purchased Pixar in 1986.
Participant[quote=AN]
A world without Pixar, we still have Kungfu Panda, Shrek, Aladin, Lilo & Stitch, Mulan, the Lion King, etc. Doesn’t sound too miserable to me. Aladin and Kungfu Panda > Toy Story IMHO.[/quote]Sure those are great films, but you’re missing a little of the point. Before Pixar, computer animation was not a commercial technology. It was the exclusive realm of the SIGGRAPH geeks. I know because some of my friends were in this field in the late 80s/early 90s. There was little funding for the research as it was not seen as having much commercial potential beyond flight simulators and videogames. Steve had a vision that this technology could change the way movies were made years before anyone else did. When Pixar was started in 1986, it took days to render even short 20 second raytraced animations on the most expensive hardware available. You needed megabucks, tons of hardware and manpower to make a crummy short 5-minute film that no one would pay to see. To think that you could make a commercially-viable feature-length film with this technology was just nuts. Steve was exactly that kind of crazy though, and his Pixar team made “Toy Story” not only a technological breakthrough (first feature film created entirely using CGI) but a box-office mega-smash beloved by people everywhere.
Pixar basically invented modern computer animation, it took them 9 years from when Jobs bought them to produce their first real product, “Toy Story”. In that time they had to design and develop all of the software and techniques necessary to pull it off. Who else would have ever funded such a crazy idea for nine years with no payoff? And what if it hadn’t succeeded? Computer animation would be a joke rather than the very serious business it is today.
Aladdin, Mulan, The Lion King, and Lilo & Stitch were all made using traditional cel animation by Walt Disney. WD basically had a lock on the animated film industry using this expensive, old-fashioned technique that they pioneered many decades ago.
Shrek (2001, 6 years after Toy Story) and Kung Fu Panda (2008, 13 years after Toy Story) are from DreamWorks and were made using CGI technology. Without Pixar, it is unlikely that other companies would have undertaken the enormous expense necessary to design the tools and techniques necessary to make films like this. Without Pixar, WD would probably still have a virtual monopoly on animated films. Now however, more companies can compete in this arena.
Pixar really changed the way movies are made. You probably wouldn’t have had the same sort of special effects in “The Matrix” because Hollywood wouldn’t have invested as much in CGI without the success of “Toy Story”.
Participant[quote=AN]
A world without Pixar, we still have Kungfu Panda, Shrek, Aladin, Lilo & Stitch, Mulan, the Lion King, etc. Doesn’t sound too miserable to me. Aladin and Kungfu Panda > Toy Story IMHO.[/quote]Sure those are great films, but you’re missing a little of the point. Before Pixar, computer animation was not a commercial technology. It was the exclusive realm of the SIGGRAPH geeks. I know because some of my friends were in this field in the late 80s/early 90s. There was little funding for the research as it was not seen as having much commercial potential beyond flight simulators and videogames. Steve had a vision that this technology could change the way movies were made years before anyone else did. When Pixar was started in 1986, it took days to render even short 20 second raytraced animations on the most expensive hardware available. You needed megabucks, tons of hardware and manpower to make a crummy short 5-minute film that no one would pay to see. To think that you could make a commercially-viable feature-length film with this technology was just nuts. Steve was exactly that kind of crazy though, and his Pixar team made “Toy Story” not only a technological breakthrough (first feature film created entirely using CGI) but a box-office mega-smash beloved by people everywhere.
Pixar basically invented modern computer animation, it took them 9 years from when Jobs bought them to produce their first real product, “Toy Story”. In that time they had to design and develop all of the software and techniques necessary to pull it off. Who else would have ever funded such a crazy idea for nine years with no payoff? And what if it hadn’t succeeded? Computer animation would be a joke rather than the very serious business it is today.
Aladdin, Mulan, The Lion King, and Lilo & Stitch were all made using traditional cel animation by Walt Disney. WD basically had a lock on the animated film industry using this expensive, old-fashioned technique that they pioneered many decades ago.
Shrek (2001, 6 years after Toy Story) and Kung Fu Panda (2008, 13 years after Toy Story) are from DreamWorks and were made using CGI technology. Without Pixar, it is unlikely that other companies would have undertaken the enormous expense necessary to design the tools and techniques necessary to make films like this. Without Pixar, WD would probably still have a virtual monopoly on animated films. Now however, more companies can compete in this arena.
Pixar really changed the way movies are made. You probably wouldn’t have had the same sort of special effects in “The Matrix” because Hollywood wouldn’t have invested as much in CGI without the success of “Toy Story”.
Participant[quote=AN]
A world without Pixar, we still have Kungfu Panda, Shrek, Aladin, Lilo & Stitch, Mulan, the Lion King, etc. Doesn’t sound too miserable to me. Aladin and Kungfu Panda > Toy Story IMHO.[/quote]Sure those are great films, but you’re missing a little of the point. Before Pixar, computer animation was not a commercial technology. It was the exclusive realm of the SIGGRAPH geeks. I know because some of my friends were in this field in the late 80s/early 90s. There was little funding for the research as it was not seen as having much commercial potential beyond flight simulators and videogames. Steve had a vision that this technology could change the way movies were made years before anyone else did. When Pixar was started in 1986, it took days to render even short 20 second raytraced animations on the most expensive hardware available. You needed megabucks, tons of hardware and manpower to make a crummy short 5-minute film that no one would pay to see. To think that you could make a commercially-viable feature-length film with this technology was just nuts. Steve was exactly that kind of crazy though, and his Pixar team made “Toy Story” not only a technological breakthrough (first feature film created entirely using CGI) but a box-office mega-smash beloved by people everywhere.
Pixar basically invented modern computer animation, it took them 9 years from when Jobs bought them to produce their first real product, “Toy Story”. In that time they had to design and develop all of the software and techniques necessary to pull it off. Who else would have ever funded such a crazy idea for nine years with no payoff? And what if it hadn’t succeeded? Computer animation would be a joke rather than the very serious business it is today.
Aladdin, Mulan, The Lion King, and Lilo & Stitch were all made using traditional cel animation by Walt Disney. WD basically had a lock on the animated film industry using this expensive, old-fashioned technique that they pioneered many decades ago.
Shrek (2001, 6 years after Toy Story) and Kung Fu Panda (2008, 13 years after Toy Story) are from DreamWorks and were made using CGI technology. Without Pixar, it is unlikely that other companies would have undertaken the enormous expense necessary to design the tools and techniques necessary to make films like this. Without Pixar, WD would probably still have a virtual monopoly on animated films. Now however, more companies can compete in this arena.
Pixar really changed the way movies are made. You probably wouldn’t have had the same sort of special effects in “The Matrix” because Hollywood wouldn’t have invested as much in CGI without the success of “Toy Story”.
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