![]() ![]() ![]() They were so successful that in 2001, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' board of governors honored Cook, Catmull and Pixar engineer Loren Carpenter with an Academy Award of Merit "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering." It was the first Oscar awarded to a software package. "Nothing could really handle the complexity of what we were trying to do," says Rob Cook, one of the original authors of RenderMan. From the beginning, Catmull and Smith had a specific goal: Make the first computer-animated feature.Įd Catmull and John Lasseter looking at old fashioned story boards during production of "Toy Story." Courtesy Pixar ![]() The lab was based on Long Island, not far from the environs of Jay Gatsby, the fictional millionaire from "The Great Gatsby." Catmull and Smith's research was bankrolled by their own eccentric multimillionaire, the institute's president, Alex Shure. In 1975, Catmull hired Alvy Ray Smith, a charismatic computer graphics pioneer from New Mexico, to join his new Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology. Things might have turned out very differently. "After those movies, the idea of making a movie without a computer was ridiculous." Still light-years away "Before those three movies, the idea of making a movie with a computer was ridiculous," says Tom Sito, chair of animation at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. But film experts point to three movies from the mid-'90s that signaled the sea change for digital moviemaking: "Toy Story," "Jurassic Park" and "Terminator 2." RenderMan had a part in all of them. ![]()
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