Steve Jobs speaks to the BBC about Pixar (1987)

1987-02-033:38English

Transcript

Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.

Happy birthday Pixar and happy first anniversary.
You can come out and get a piece of cake and we'll bring the drinks around.
Also, would you sort of mix it up and introduce yourself to the new people?
Ed Catmull, Pixar's joint vice president, opening a party to celebrate the company's first year of independent operations selling the computer.
They also found out today they had something else to celebrate.
Luxo Jr. has been nominated in the 1987 Academy Awards.
The owner of the company is Apple founder Steve Jobs.
How did he feel about the nomination?
I think it's only the second time that a computer animated film has ever been nominated.
And the first one was sort of a, not a completely computer animated one.
The computer, I guess, just did the in-betweening.
So this is the first time a truly computer animated film has been nominated.
I think that's great.
And I think it portends much more of this stuff in the future.
The future, why we want to implement things in hardware and computer graphics is because
the basic algorithms are very, very complex.
In order to get any work done in our lifetime, we have to get a speed up now and not wait
for general purpose machines to finally catch up to us.
I think they'll catch up to us, by the way, in about 2000 or 2010, cost effectively.
So we've got to drop it into hardware now.
Rob Cook and I, who's one of the senior scientists around here, invented a process
for doing this sort of thing.
And it's somewhat radical.
We've written it up for SIGGRAPH this year, finally, after four years of thinking about
it.
But we're currently putting it in hardware.
And it should enable us to make pictures on the order of 100 to 1,000 times faster
than a vax, which means for the first time
that the cost of the machinery is no problem,
is not the driving force in making an animated film.
The rendering part now becomes cheap
and what becomes expensive is the people time,
the animators, the model building,
and so I'm gonna turn my attention to that in the future.
The animation at a high level of perfection
is not economically feasible anymore,
like in the heydays of Disney
where there were thousands of artists
that you could hire very cheaply, that was wonderful.
Maybe not for the artists, but for Disney.
And now the only way to do it is going to be
with a computer.
So it'd be nice to get rid of all that trashy animation
and get back to some Fantasia quality stuff.
Our business is visualization.
And animation of complex processes falls out of that.
And there are several steps in animation.
One is that you have to model what you're going to move.
You have to animate it, which is adding the time to the model.
And then you have to render the result.
Now the rendering of the result, which
is the part that has taken everybody's best brains
for the last 15 years.
But it's the least human part.
I mean, it's physics.
You say, here are the light sources.
Here are the colors.
Here's the textures we want on the surface
and the kind of glossy finish or matte finish we want.
Go render it, machine.
You want that just to happen, just instantaneous if possible,
so that the real work of doing a piece of art or a piece of scientific education
is the design of the piece and the creation of the storyline and the look,
and the human part.
So that's where we're headed.

Transcript

Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.

Happy birthday Pixar and happy first anniversary.

You can come out and get a piece of cake and we'll bring the drinks around.

Also, would you sort of mix it up and introduce yourself to the new people?

Ed Catmull, Pixar's joint vice president, opening a party to celebrate the company's first year of independent operations selling the computer.

They also found out today they had something else to celebrate.

Luxo Jr. has been nominated in the 1987 Academy Awards.

The owner of the company is Apple founder Steve Jobs.

How did he feel about the nomination?

I think it's only the second time that a computer animated film has ever been nominated.

And the first one was sort of a, not a completely computer animated one.

The computer, I guess, just did the in-betweening.

So this is the first time a truly computer animated film has been nominated.

I think that's great.

And I think it portends much more of this stuff in the future.

The future, why we want to implement things in hardware and computer graphics is because

the basic algorithms are very, very complex.

In order to get any work done in our lifetime, we have to get a speed up now and not wait

for general purpose machines to finally catch up to us.

I think they'll catch up to us, by the way, in about 2000 or 2010, cost effectively.

So we've got to drop it into hardware now.

Rob Cook and I, who's one of the senior scientists around here, invented a process

for doing this sort of thing.

And it's somewhat radical.

We've written it up for SIGGRAPH this year, finally, after four years of thinking about

it.

But we're currently putting it in hardware.

And it should enable us to make pictures on the order of 100 to 1,000 times faster

than a vax, which means for the first time

that the cost of the machinery is no problem,

is not the driving force in making an animated film.

The rendering part now becomes cheap

and what becomes expensive is the people time,

the animators, the model building,

and so I'm gonna turn my attention to that in the future.

The animation at a high level of perfection

is not economically feasible anymore,

like in the heydays of Disney

where there were thousands of artists

that you could hire very cheaply, that was wonderful.

Maybe not for the artists, but for Disney.

And now the only way to do it is going to be

with a computer.

So it'd be nice to get rid of all that trashy animation

and get back to some Fantasia quality stuff.

Our business is visualization.

And animation of complex processes falls out of that.

And there are several steps in animation.

One is that you have to model what you're going to move.

You have to animate it, which is adding the time to the model.

And then you have to render the result.

Now the rendering of the result, which

is the part that has taken everybody's best brains

for the last 15 years.

But it's the least human part.

I mean, it's physics.

You say, here are the light sources.

Here are the colors.

Here's the textures we want on the surface

and the kind of glossy finish or matte finish we want.

Go render it, machine.

You want that just to happen, just instantaneous if possible,

so that the real work of doing a piece of art or a piece of scientific education

is the design of the piece and the creation of the storyline and the look,

and the human part.

So that's where we're headed.