The pursuit of a computer-animated movie
When the National
Academy of Engineering elected Alvy Ray Smith (MS 1966, PhD 1970 EE) as
a member in February 2006, they did it at a particularly newsworthy time.
He was the co-founder of Pixar, along with business partner Ed Catmull,
and Disney and Pixar had just announced their blockbuster $7.4 billion
merger.
Although Smith considers the founding of Pixar a particularly important
achievement in his career, the NAE was officially honoring Smith for innovations
in digital art, graphics, and animation technologies. Those same innovations
had also won him technical Academy Awards in 1996 and 1998. It is a happy
coincidence in Smith’s story that the Academy Awards are given about
the time of year that the NAE announces new members, because Smith says,
“I always considered myself half artist and half computer jock.”
Indeed his career straddled the worlds of art and engineering as he made
his way from studying parallel computing at Stanford to pioneering computer
graphics at Xerox PARC, to working for George Lucas, and then founding
Pixar.
A lot depended on serendipity, including meeting some of the giants of
science, technology, and entertainment, but it was Smith’s ingenuity
and drive to create a computer-animated movie that led to Pixar’s
founding. Below are edited excerpts of an interview in which he describes
how it happened.
From Stanford to an epiphany
My thesis at Stanford was cellular automata theory. CA, as it’s
now referred to, is a theoretical computer model. You can think of it
as an infinite chess board where every square represents an identical
copy of a computing module. The theory that I wrote my thesis on was about
what can you do with that model. It’s a very highly parallel computation
model.
I got the PhD and I went to NYU to teach. While there (in 1970) Scientific
American, which had always been one of my favorite magazines since
I was a child in New Mexico, came out, and Martin Gardner’s column
that month was about the Game of Life. I received my copy, turned to Martin
Gardner’s column and flipped out. I said this is cellular automata
theory. He doesn't know it, but it is. So I got in touch with Gardner
and said hey you know this Game of Life is an example of a cellular automaton
and there is a whole theory behind it. He got excited and said well I'll
come down and visit you. We had a great time together.
It turned out that the Game of Life column was the most popular article
that had ever been published in Scientific American and the publisher
had decided to make another issue based on the subject. It was going to
be the cover story (Feb. 1971). I designed the cover based on a theorem
I had proved as a result of my thesis work.
It was my first experience with any kind of fame whatsoever. Suddenly
people around the world were getting in touch with me. What it meant,
practically, was that the National Computer Conference contacted me and
asked me to chair a panel on highly parallel computation. Well I knew
some theory but I didn’t know any hardware, so I started asking
around for a hardware guru who knew highly parallel computation to be
on my panel. All the indicators pointed to Dick Shoup, who had just graduated
from Carnegie Mellon, and that was his thesis topic, modular computers.
We really hit it off on a personal level as a result of working together;
he’s still one of my closest friends. Then Dick came out and joined
this new outfit called Xerox PARC. And he started explaining to me what
he was doing. He was going to build these machines you could paint on.
I didn’t quite get it, you do what, you move down here on this tablet
and it paints on the screen. Everybody knows what that means now but at
the time people got hung up on this concept.
So I break my leg skiing in New Hampshire and I rethink my life and I
realize, I’m not using my art. This is no good. I have to do something.
I have to get out of this academic world and do something with my art
and my technology.
Back to Palo Alto
I just gambled and did it. I came out of the cast. I announced to NYU
I was leaving and went out to California just to see what would happen.
Shoup happened.
I had been asked to write an introduction to a book by John Von Neumann.
I decided to make it my swan song in CA. I would just write a review of
the whole field. I had come out to California and I was living in Berkeley.
I taught a course in CA at Berkeley, but their library wasn’t very
good on CA. I said well, I know the Stanford library is good and I know
they’ve got all the material I need. So I called my friend Dick
Shoup who lived down in Palo Alto and said, “I need to come down
to the library, can I bum a room off you?” He said sure.
I got all the references out of the (CS) library and then I felt a little
obligated to Dick since I had never been to see what he was doing. So
I go over and I see what he’s been trying to tell me about. He had
built the hardware and written the software for the first paint program
in the world — the first serious raster graphics. I flipped out.
I said this is it. This is what I came here to find. I knew there was
something where I could combine my computer background and my artistic
stuff. I got myself hired on.
About a year later the Xerox PARC people made a corporate decision that
they weren’t going to do color. So I went out searching for the
next frame buffer, which we now call a graphics card. Back then it took
two racks of equipment to do what a graphics card does now.
The first big break
That led me to a place called the New York Institute of Technology out
on Long Island. It was a privately owned college run by a very eccentric,
wealthy man. Dr. Alexander Schure was the first one of our several patrons
who paved the way over the many years it took us to get from the idea
to the fruition. He was the first visionary to step up there with the
money and see what we saw in the future too. He’s not given as much
credit as he should receive. He gave us our first big break.
He provided us with the world’s best laboratory on this gorgeous
estate on the North Shore of Long Island. We got this chance to make a
movie using computers. That’s what the guy wanted us to do. And
it was on this fabulous estate working in manor houses. I woke up everyday
thinking I was in a movie.
The New York Tech lab was the “must stop” place on the circuit
if you knew what was happening in computer graphics. You had to come visit
our studio. It was just the best. This guy gave us the best equipment
that was available. Everything we touched was paydirt. Anything to do
with RGB we were the first. More »
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