How PIXAR Went From Broke To Billions | Edwin Catmull Pixar Story

PIXAR animation was hanging by a thread. They had the vision to create the very first completely computer-animated movie. With little funding and no knowledge in film making, they challenged the industry and made Toy Story their first featured film that led to Disney studios to buy them out in a record-setting deal.
This is PIXAR Animation's
In 1979, little me shook hands with George Lucas who shared the dream of revolutionizing the movie industry, by making a full-featured film 100% through computer-animation when neither the technology, software nor blueprints were even invented yet.
Today, we animate some of your favorite childhood movies continuing to bring to life worlds you never imagined were possible.
I was Vice President of Industrial Light and Magic digitally creating the X-wings you see flying in Star Wars films. The challenge wasn't just creating it, but creating it on computers that had less technology than an Apple Smartwatch. It took nearly 3 years but we hit our big milestone when we helped develop digital image compositing which combined multiple images together in a convincing and realistic way. But after seven years of research and development, we started costing more money than we made for George and we knew there was a high chance he would sell the division - and with it, our hopes of creating the first computer-animated movie.
Among colleagues, we all knew what we were: sacked. No backing, no direction, and no time. But just when I was going to tell my family that I was going to be unemployed, we met a man who'd just been ousted from his own company, and was looking for crazy, ambitious, individuals like us. He loved the technology we built, our vision to create something that many said wasn't possible. He, like us, was a pioneer and was the only person willing enough to invest in a company that was losing more money than we were making. So, we took our computers, floppy disks, and a team of 40 tech prodigies, and began working under our new leader; Steve Jobs.
Steve was impressed by our work, sure. But he believed we needed to learn to walk before we could run and instead of making movies, we were to sell our technology. "Inspire some backing and show them what we've been creating" - that sort of thing. And… well, that proved to be even harder than computer-generated images. With a history that includes George Lucas and Steve Jobs, expectations were sky-high for something revolutionary, something completely above the technological capabilities of that time. Worst of all, we learned the hard way that no one wanted to learn a completely new computer and different software despite what came out the other end.
Out of the thousands we had created, we sold less than 300 computers. Many called us failures saying the computer was too complicated and too expensive and that the animation was poor. Hearing those words broke me. It made me wonder if I had wasted my life on something completely worthless and if I would ever amount to anything. And just as I was believing my life was nothing but failure, we unexpectedly received a call that made me remember why we were fighting so hard to change the world.
It turned out, from that small 300 computers that we sold, Disney Animation Studios was one of the few that purchased one. They too did not like our computers but they loved our ideas and saw what we were capable of achieving. So, instead of trying to create computer-animated films themselves and buying individual computers from us, they proposed an entirely new deal but it would take years until they came back to us.
So we got straight to it. We designed and developed the tech, we modeled characters, we lit scenes, we calculated the trajectories of light rays. It was calculus mixed with caffeine and a side of too much pizza and Chinese take-out. It took days, weeks, months. By the end of it, I and my esteemed colleagues were more fried than the CPUs. But we had it ready, our most seminal short film: Luxo Jr. A two-minute animated short film about a lamp and a ball. It was slow and it was rough but it was the most beautiful creation we had ever created and it would serve as our future mascot.
We had to switch things up and we had no choice but to get creative. We couldn't develop our technology further because we were out of money, and we had no money because people didn’t want our technology. So, we... well, I don't want to say we sold out, but... we made animations for commercials. Yep, we used state-of-the-art computer technology... to help sell soda, bubble gum, and insurance. These animated commercials were successful enough, but it only kept us barely afloat.
#Rise #PIXAR