Steve Jobs - The future of animation
Transcript
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It's with great pleasure that we're able to introduce to you the SIGGRAPH 95 keynote speaker, Steve Jobs.
As many of you know, Steve co-founded and was chairman of Apple Computer.
He led Apple to become a $2 billion company, during which time he co-designed the Apple II
and led the development, marketing, and manufacturing of the Macintosh and LaserWriter printer.
Steve also co-founded and currently serves as chairman and CEO of Next Computer.
Steve attended Reed College in my hometown, Portland, Oregon.
He went on to receive the National Technology Medal from President Reagan in 1985
in recognition of his pioneering work in technology,
and in 1989 was named Entrepreneur of the Decade by Inc. Magazine.
About 10 years ago, Steve purchased the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Research Group
from George Lucas and spun it off into an independent company we know today as Pixar.
Steve serves as chairman and CEO of Pixar today as well.
In 1988, Pixar won the Best Animated Short Academy Award for Tin Toy, the first time
a computer animated film was awarded with an Oscar.
Pixar, together with Walt Disney Company, is currently in production on the first ever
completely computer generated feature length film in history, which is called Toy Story
and it will come to life this Thanksgiving.
Please give a warm welcome to Steve Jobs.
There's gonna be a test on that last stuff
after this keynote.
Can we, okay, great.
I'm really privileged to be here this morning
and my colleagues and I feel really special
to be able to talk to you today
about some really exciting stuff.
I wanna talk about three things today.
The first one is the centenary.
Second one is scale and complexity.
And the third is a place in history.
Let's start with the first one.
As I was doing some research for today, I discovered a really startling fact that is
all the more relevant since computer graphics is making major contributions to the motion
picture industry and seems quite appropriate since we are in Los Angeles, which is the
worldwide center for motion pictures.
And that fact was that this year is the 100th anniversary, the centenary year, of the first
motion picture.
The first motion picture was shown in 1895.
It was created by two brothers, Antoine and Louis Lumiere,
and it was projected below the Grand Café in Paris, France,
100 years ago, December 28, 1895.
So we are at the centenary of this incredible invention.
Now, what I'd like to do is examine how technology has influenced the motion picture since that time.
How has the incorporation of technology progressed, and how has it changed the way we view motion pictures?
Well, the invention of the motion picture was an amazing feat of technology.
The Lumiere brothers invented their own cameras, their own projectors.
We went along for almost 40 years before we saw the next major technological innovation.
which was sound. In 1927, the Jazz Singer premiered, starring Al Jolson. It was mostly a silent
picture with a few songs, but in it Al Jolson spoke several lines, and with those lines ended
the era of silent pictures forever. As a measure of how revolutionary this was, U.S. movie attendance
went from 60 million persons in 1927, when the Jazz Singer premiered, to 110 million persons in 1929.
Incidentally, the jazz string was immensely popular and saved the studio that produced it,
which was on the verge of bankruptcy, and that studio was Warner Brothers.
If Warner Brothers had not taken a major gamble on new technology, there would be no Time Warner today.
The next major incorporation of technology was in 1932.
In 1932, Technicolor had perfected their three-strip color film process
after having had many problems with some earlier technology.
Unfortunately, they could not interest any major studio at that time
in making a color film.
Can you believe that?
The studios treated it as an outrageously risky expense
and refused to pony up the money to make color films.
There was only one studio at the time that decided to go for it, and that was Walt Disney.
And Walt Disney trained their animators in color theory and produced the first color films,
the Silly Symphony cartoons, which won several Academy Awards and ushered in the age of color.
The next major breakthrough was in 1937 with Snow White, the world's first animated feature film produced by Walt Disney.
It incorporated many innovations, including the multi-plane camera, and really was the first new form of motion picture entertainment since the invention of the motion picture itself some 42 years earlier.
Animation would never be the same again, and Disney's led the way since then.
The next innovation was two years later.
While there were a half a dozen live-action films which incorporated Technicolor before The Wizard of Oz,
none of them were either commercially successful nor did they ignite the public's demand for color.
The Wizard of Oz changed all that and became the icon of bringing color into live-action films.
We then progress almost 40 years before the next major incorporation of new technology,
which was Star Wars in 1977.
Star Wars not only totally redefined the science fiction motion picture film genre,
but it also elevated special effects to become an equal partner to live action
in storytelling and motion pictures.
Now, although Star Wars' effects were produced pre-computer graphics,
they really opened the door for everything that followed,
and we are still living in their shadow today.
We then progressed a little over a decade to Terminator 2.
Although Terminator 2 was the first film to bring computer graphics special effects into the mainstream,
although there were a few films to incorporate computer graphics special effects,
like Alien and the Abyss before Terminator 2,
Terminator 2 was what captured the public and elevated computer graphics special effects to the mainstream.
This was followed two years later by Jurassic Park,
which carried the art a little further and created the most commercially successful film of all time
because of the computer graphics special effects.
And that brings us to 1995.
In 1995, the centenary year of the invention of the motion picture itself,
we have another major milestone,
something I think will go down as a landmark in motion picture history, and
that is the first completely computer-generated feature-length motion
picture, completely computer synthetic, on the hundredth anniversary of the motion
picture itself, and that of course is Toy Story. Toy Story represents the computer
graphics community contributing not just special effects to a motion picture, but
to a motion picture, but the entire motion picture itself.
It's a breakthrough on the scale of Technicolor, Snow White,
and Star Wars.
It is way beyond what we've seen in computer graphics
special effects.
Without diminishing Jurassic Park in any way,
let me illustrate.
If you take Jurassic Park and stack all of the frames
that contain any computer synthetic element back to back,
you get about 5 and 1⁄2 minutes.
Of course, these frames do not include background sets
or anything, usually just one computer synthetic element.
Toy Story is 79 minutes in length,
and every frame is totally synthetic.
Major, minor characters, background sets, et cetera.
An order of magnitude leap.
And again, most importantly, we see computer graphics
not just playing a supporting role to live action,
but actually providing the entire vision
for the motion picture.
Now, I know a lot of you have seen Toy Story,
a clip in the film show.
I have that clip here today on film
if you'd like to see it again.
Would you like to see it or would you like to skip it?