[HN Gopher] The Real Story of Pixar
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The Real Story of Pixar
Author : Hell_World
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-08-03 20:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Back in 2017 a "Humble Bundle" package included the Lawrence Levy
| book "To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to
| Make Entertainment History"[0]. I got the book there and really
| enjoyed it.
|
| Levy was brought in, by Jobs, as CFO of Pixar prior to the IPO
| and the book is concerend with more of the business side of Pixar
| pivoting from hardware company to studio.
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28114529-to-pixar-and-
| be...
| NotSwift wrote:
| This article focuses on the technical side of Pixar, which was
| truly revolutionary. But the thing that makes Pixar a really
| amazing company is that they also have great graphical designers
| and story writers. It is the integration that makes Pixar movies
| so great.
| mcast wrote:
| When I attended WWDC 2018, one of Pixar's lead lighting
| engineers gave a high-level presentation on the intertwining of
| math/physics/art to shade animated scenes in their movies. I
| would love to walk through one of their internal scene files
| and inspect all the polygon's on Woody's shirt. It's a
| fascinating intersection of programming not many people relate
| to.
| diskzero wrote:
| You won't find a lot of polygons, but you would find many
| interesting surface textures, shaders, lighting effects,
| simulations and more.
| Arelius wrote:
| Correct, Pixar is notorious for using fairly low detail
| SubD surface control cages for almost everything.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Do you know any link to this talk?
|
| Edit: I could not find similar to here:
| https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc2018/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There's a story told by (if memory serves) Lasseter that when
| they showed Luxo Jr. in 1986 at SIGGRAPH, someone came up to
| him afterwards with a question. He was dreading the
| conversation, because he thought they were going to ask some
| terribly technical question and he'd have to flag down one of
| the studio members for help, but the questioner just asked "So
| is the big lamp the mom or the dad?"
|
| ... and that's when he knew they'd succeeded.
| gumby wrote:
| I don't really follow computer graphics much less SIGGRAPH
| and yet after Luxo Jr was shown there even I heard about it.
| It really was a huge deal.
| leoc wrote:
| > This wouldn't be the first time we'd talked to Jobs. Three
| months earlier, on August 4, Steve had invited Ed, me, and Ajit
| Gill, our financial manager, to his mansion in Woodside, Calif.
| Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy
| us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no,
| that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept
| his money in the form of a venture investment. And he agreed.
|
| That wasn't the first time they'd talked to Jobs either:
|
| > It's probably worth mentioning how Steve Jobs was introduced to
| (what became) Pixar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687900
|
| > https://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-1...
|
| >> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan
| Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had
| expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said
| let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay
| brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm.
| That's when we first got to know each other. I had actually had
| one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on
| the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting
| sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business
| possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.
|
| >> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile,
| Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from
| Lucasfilm for $5 million.
|
| > So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact,
| in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model
| that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and
| commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.
|
| As a side note, that Stanford link sadly no longer works any
| more:
|
| > Page Not Found
|
| > Oops! We can't find that page!
|
| > We have a new site and things have moved around a bit. Here are
| some good places to start.
|
| Oopsie doopsie! They seem to have moved the Alvy Ray Smith
| interview into oblivion, because search doesn't seem to find it.
| It doesn't seem to be archived on the Wayback Machine or
| archive.is or replicated anywhere else on the internet. For all I
| know my HN comment is the last record of the quoted text
| anywhere. STANFORD ENGINEERING did this.
| prpl wrote:
| This has some of that towards the end:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPXkRzY26eg
| tigertigerbb wrote:
| Being in that business, I think I remember them working on a
| goofy sort of film recorder.
|
| Didn't they have that shop in Richmond in a bad part of town?
| hondo77 wrote:
| It was in an industrial park. I didn't think it was a bad part
| of town when I visited but the Pixar folks considered all of
| Richmond to be the bad part of town.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| Another part of the story easily forgotten because it doesn't
| show in glossy management books:
| https://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/pixars-ed-catmull-emerg...
| mprovost wrote:
| And another one:
| https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/john-las...
| bleair wrote:
| Also relevant
|
| https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage...
| dahart wrote:
| I worked for two separate studios, one at DreamWorks and one
| at Disney, that were both involved in this saga, and both
| have since been shuttered. (Edit: to clarify they were
| involved as part of the class, not to my knowledge involved
| in collusion.)
|
| Full disclosure, I also received a check from the class
| action suit. Of course getting money is nice, but it was like
| $4k or something, not enough to make any real difference,
| significantly smaller than the film bonus plans, and on top
| of that, I never felt like I'd been underpaid or cheated even
| after this all went public.
|
| Even as an employee, I don't think I ever knew the full
| story, but the Cartoon Brew articles always struck me as
| going out of their way to stoke anger and frame things in the
| most negative possible light, not particularly fair or
| unbiased.
|
| While I do not in any way intend to defend what Catmull or
| others did, the fact that not just one but two studios I
| worked for did close, I've always felt like it is plausible
| that Catmull truly believed he was doing a good thing for
| employees in the long term by trying to keep the doors open,
| and that the threat that they might close was real, that his
| refusal to apologize was out of genuine belief that he wasn't
| being selfish. I'm sure it'd be hard to fully buy that if you
| saw his tax return, but nonetheless is how I still feel when
| I read these articles again.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| Of course, another way to read this is that these studios
| weren't viable if they had to play by the rules. So they
| broke the rules and violated the rights of their staff.
|
| Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules,
| they closed.
|
| The film industry didn't die that day - just some bad
| studios.
| dahart wrote:
| > Once the law showed up and made them play by the rules,
| they closed.
|
| I happen to know for a fact that's not true in either
| case of the two studios I worked for.
|
| I also don't particularly appreciate your presumptuous
| and uninformed conclusion about them being bad studios.
| Both I worked for were quite good studios, one of them
| being PDI which made the Shrek & Madagascar movies. No
| idea to what degree the studios were involved at all,
| only the parent companies were named. (Edit: actually I'm
| certain the other studio was not participating in any
| way, but was still part of the class, being Disney owned.
| I've edited my upper comment to clarify.)
|
| The truth of the CG & VFX industry is that it was always
| bad margins in the US. Pretty much the whole industry
| imploded in the US some time after this lawsuit. Not in
| response to the lawsuit, just because the business is
| hard to sustain, and subsidies in Canada, Europe, India,
| and China, has made outsourcing a much bigger part of the
| picture. The CG film industry hasn't died exactly, but in
| the US it's definitely still on life support.
|
| And I'm not entirely sure, but I don't feel like the
| lawsuit really changed salaries either. It was then and
| is now still true that working in digital entertainment
| doesn't pay on average and for entry level employees as
| well as working in other areas of tech.
| trangus_1985 wrote:
| > your presumptuous and uninformed conclusion about them
| being bad studios
|
| they were abusing their workers rights in a surreptitious
| manner - not sure how that's a "good studio"
| dahart wrote:
| > they were abusing their workers rights
|
| No they weren't. The C-level staff of the parent
| companies named as defendants in the lawsuit were, and
| the parent companies are all still in business. The
| studios that closed were pawns, just like the employees.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _I don't feel like the lawsuit really changed salaries
| either_
|
| A couple years ago I talked to a few of my friends in the
| 2d animation industry and they were like "all the studios
| are constantly trying to stretch the job descriptions to
| get more work out of what's already a punishing
| workload". It's a brutal business all around, even in
| their side of things where they actually have a union.
| There's a _lot_ of people willing to work for peanuts
| because they get to be part of the _magic_ , including me
| twenty years ago.
|
| I look from outside and I really dunno if I feel like the
| broad cg/vfx/animation industry's sustainable. Everything
| costs so damn much and the field's increasingly crowded,
| despite it all slowly turning into divisions of Disney
| competing with itself.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| The bad studios comment wasn't meant to be a judgement of
| the product or your work. I had meant bad businesses
| (costs exceed revenues). Take even that with a grain of
| salt - I was taking all my facts from the comment I
| responded to and the link. I'm not familiar with this
| particular saga.
| dahart wrote:
| I realize the way I wrote my first comment led you to
| believe the studios were knowingly involved in the
| collusion, but that's not what I intended to say, which
| is why I clarified. It's just best not to make
| assumptions or try to make strong statements about
| something you're not familiar with. The narrative summary
| you left is entirely backwards, because good studios
| closed while the suits' defendants are still here and
| still operating. The studios I was in weren't bad
| business either. Revenues exceeded costs. These closures
| happened for other reasons, despite the fact that CG as a
| whole isn't very profitable for most players.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Part of the fraud triangle is rationalization. People who
| commit fraud often believe they're justified in doing it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Ultimately, this is why we have regulation: because if
| behavior is allowed that lowers the cost to do business,
| businesses in a highly competitive space _will_ eventually
| do it.
|
| It's important to hold regulators responsible for policing
| these companies, because otherwise market forces will tend
| to drag quality-of-life down for employees.
|
| (Whether no-poaching agreements should be considered price-
| fixing is a separate question, but _assuming_ they are,
| they _must_ be enforced or the end result is employee harm
| across the industry, because prices are a function of what
| the competitor will pay too).
| dahart wrote:
| I fully agree about the need for regulation, especially
| because it matters more in other commodity industries
| (farming, food, construction, etc.) much more than it
| does in computer graphics.
|
| There wasn't a noticeable reduction in my own quality of
| life, but that's not to say others didn't feel it, nor
| that it wouldn't have happened left unchecked, I don't
| know.
|
| Once after a movie's crunch time, I wanted to trade my
| accumulated overtime bonus for comp time (time off)
| instead. The studio refused, and I was initially upset
| but then discovered that in California it was illegal for
| them to agree to it. The reason is that labor jobs in the
| past had abused comp time by rewarding employees who were
| working too much with forced time off in which they
| weren't getting paid. This would be awful for farm
| workers or any labor job, really, and more damaging the
| lower the pay. I'm happy this law is protecting them even
| when I didn't want it applied to me.
| nickjj wrote:
| I vaguely remember a paragraph from a Pixar interview around the
| topic of attention to detail.
|
| I can't find the interview but maybe someone knows which one I'm
| talking about. It was around how the graphical designers put a
| lot of effort around designing the under side of a draw inside of
| a desk which no one will see. It was around the topic of going
| the extra mile for the things that don't matter to set the stage
| on how much they must care about the things that do matter.
| jecel wrote:
| While the Pixar people are probably not aware, they were actually
| in a race. There was a small group in Brazil using computer
| graphics for TV commercials that decided to do a full length
| movie:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiopeia_(film)
|
| They had very limited resources and were using commercial tools
| instead of building their own like Pixar. They cheated by having
| their characters be aliens who were mostly blobs without legs or
| arms, though they like to complain about Pixar cheating by having
| many objects be physical models or sculptures that were then
| digitized instead of fully designing them in the computer.
|
| They reached the big screen second after Pixar, but even if they
| had been first I doubt they would have been remembered.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Wondered what "the whiteboard incident" was....
|
| "One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and
| other top Pixar executives for the delay in getting the circuit
| boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer.
| At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own
| computer boards, and Smith pointed that out: "Hey, you're even
| later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us." Jobs went
| ballistic, or in Smith's phrase, "totally nonlinear." When Smith
| was feeling attacked or confrontational, he tended to lapse into
| his southwestern accent. Jobs started parodying it in his
| sarcastic style. "It was a bully tactic, and I exploded with
| everything I had," Smith recalled. "
|
| "Before I knew it, we were in each other's faces--about three
| inches apart--screaming at each other."
|
| Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a
| meeting, so the burly Smith pushed past him and started writing
| on it. "You can't do that!" Jobs shouted. "What?" responded
| Smith, "I can't write on your whiteboard? Bullshit." At that
| point Jobs stormed out."
|
| Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. "Steve Jobs."
| pseudosudoer wrote:
| I'm glad someone stood up to Jobs, what a complete and utter
| asshole. Nothing says job security like telling your boss that
| their demands are "bullshit"
| soperj wrote:
| complete megalomaniac.
| finwhat wrote:
| its so interesting to me how so much of entrepreneurship today is
| showing up with a narrowly defined problem, and building a
| solution around it. then there is the huge trap of building a
| solution without a problem.
|
| what's touched on here seems to me as the best approach - showing
| up with a passion / vision with talented colleagues, then working
| towards that through any means possible.
| ralph84 wrote:
| This is why I hate the "sell shovels to miners" advice. No, the
| biggest winners are the ones who vertically integrate and capture
| the full value stack, not the tools vendors.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Vertical integration is so clearly the best path when you are
| operating in technology, and _especially_ when dealing with
| pure software plays. If you control everything down to the bare
| metal, no one can ever fuck with you. Your common denominator
| is your adversaries common denominator too. Only super exotics
| like Apple have actually captured a true 100% vertical down
| through the hardware, and the impact of this shows in the
| market.
|
| Vertical integration can be a massive mistake too. Usually
| manifesting itself as rewriting external dependencies to use
| in-house functionality before you have established happy
| customers, cash flow and/or business value propositions.
| teslafire124 wrote:
| The metaphor works for some scenarios like crypto. It
| definitely doesn't apply to the rise of Pixar
| quelsolaar wrote:
| For anyone interested in the history of Pixar (and lucas films
| sprockets) I would recommend the books "Droid maker" and
| "Creativity inc". Droid maker is more historical about the early
| years, and creativity inc is more about how Pixar works.
| salamanderman wrote:
| They tried to sell my dad some machines. He was in the oil
| industry. The sale didn't work out. My dad later had a job
| interview with them. That didn't work out either. Both were
| probably for the best, but what a different life I would have had
| if either had gone the other way.
| edge17 wrote:
| Why was oil and gas a target for sales for them? I'm sure the
| industry has a ton of money, but back then what was the use
| case?
| gumby wrote:
| They do a lot of seismic work to see what's underground (set
| off explosions, map the results) and need to crunch and
| visualize a lot of data.
| mark-r wrote:
| Same reason high-powered graphics boards are used today for
| cryptocurrency - high throughput calculations.
| hiei wrote:
| What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to him?
| Same with the job interview?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > What kind of work was he doing for them to try to sell to
| him? Same with the job interview?
|
| My understanding is that the oil and gas industry is pretty
| heavy needs for scientific computation and data
| visualization. That's how they discover new places to drill.
| edge17 wrote:
| What year are we talking? I get that is a pretty big use
| case now, but back then (mid 1980s?) was it also the case?
| tablespoon wrote:
| When I was a kid in the early 90s, a nearby university
| had a Cray 1. We went on field trip to see it. IIRC, they
| got it because some oil company had gotten a better
| supercomputer and didn't need it anymore, so it was
| probably originally purchased sometime in the 80s or
| earlier.
|
| Also a quick search found this from 1985: https://journal
| s.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400...:
|
| > Supercomputers are becoming a useful and important tool
| in the finding and developing of oil and gas reserves.
| Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry
| involve two important aspects: enormous computational
| power and massive data management. Vector computers are
| being used in petroleum engineering to simulate the flow
| of oil and gas in a reservoir, the faster performance of
| the vector machines making many, heretofore, unmanageable
| calculations possible. In exploration for oil and gas,
| supercomputers are being used to store, classify, and
| interpret huge amounts of geophysical seismic data.
| edge17 wrote:
| Funny, I just found that link myself. I guess it makes
| sense, there was data and there was a need to comb
| through it. Seems like little to do with graphics
| directly, and more to do with being able to manage large
| amounts of data.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Seems like little to do with graphics directly, and more
| to do with being able to manage large amounts of data"
|
| And since we are visual beings, managing large amounts of
| data is best done in a graphical way. But it is not easy
| to do that right. You can create super beautiful looking,
| but total missleading visualisations.
| tudorw wrote:
| My father worked in the sugar industry, his first
| computer came with an operator :)
| gumby wrote:
| When Fairchild got out of the computing business (84/85
| ish) it was the huge oilfield services company
| Schlumberger that bought the AI lab run by Marty
| Tenenbaum. IIRC S had some Crays and a Connection
| Machine. Schlumberger Palo Alto was across the street
| (other side of Foothill Expwy) from PARC. IIRC they had a
| lot of interesting visualization work; I turned them down
| (despite their excellent research staff) for PARC because
| I wanted to work on theory of computation.
| yardie wrote:
| Oil and gas industries are data crunching monsters. While I
| thought it was impressive I got to work with < terabyte
| datasets I've met so many data scientists crunching
| petabyte seismic datasets that could give backblaze a run
| for their money.
|
| I'm convinced if SV hadn't happened in SV it would have
| happened in Dallas or Houston.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I'm convinced if SV hadn't happened in SV it would have
| happened in Dallas or Houston.
|
| Part of what attracted investors and innovators to the
| bay were the non-compete laws and counter culture of the
| time.
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