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The technology allows us to build fanciful kinds of worlds
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where toys can come alive, or fish can talk or monsters can roam the world.
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While it's common knowledge that Pixar's movies are the
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product of computer animation, you might be surprised by
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the amount of technology that was necessary to make them
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possible. In fact, Pixar is largely responsible for some of
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the most significant developments in computer graphics
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history. A lot of people look at the product and they say,
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oh it's the artwork and so they focus on that. But they
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don't understand what went behind it. It's a blend of the
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technology and the art that really makes it work. Behind
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every one of Pixar's films and the visual effects of many
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iconic movies to come out in the past 30 years, is a piece
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of software called RenderMan.
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RenderMan is a renderer, the final tool at the end of a
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production pipeline that compiles all the 3D assets created
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for a film. It's what translates the virtual camera the
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artists work with during an animated or visual effects
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production into the final image that we see of the movie.
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There's lots of tools that companies and Pixar write to do
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the 3D modeling, the animation, motion, camera definitions,
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all flow into the very end of this software pipeline and that's the renderer.
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Pixar got its start during computer graphics' infant stages.
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When the most advanced CG images were primitive polygon
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shapes. At this time, animation was strictly done through
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illustration. It was an artist's medium, with every frame
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drawn by hand and photographed into a film reel. But in the
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late 70s, that began to change. In 1979 after the success
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of Star Wars, George Lucas wanted to bring high technology
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into the film industry and he was the only person in the
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film industry who thought this was a good thing to be spending money on.
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Ed Catmull was part of a small group of people in the
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industry who recognized the potential of computer graphics
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to create animated films. He joined LucasFilm to head its
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computer division and set to work solving some of the
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challenges in CGI, such as motion blur. The engineers had
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to start square one, developing all the software and tools
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needed to create characters and animations, everything
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that's commonplace today. During this process, they
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developed the precursor to RenderMan called REYES, which
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stood for "Renders Everything You Ever Saw."
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They built this renderer and that's what we used on the
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early films like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. We used
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it on Sherlock Holmes. We used it on our early short films, Luxor Jr.
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Lucas' group eventually spun off as an independent company
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purchased by Steve Jobs, which marked the beginning of
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Pixar. They would continue to go on making animated shorts,
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creating the iconic Luxo lamp characters and receiving the
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first Academy Award for a computer generated short. With
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each and every project, they slowly evolved their tools and
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the REYES renderer, eventually creating RenderMan, which
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would go on to have a monumental impact in animation and
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visual effects. As part of the sale to Steve Jobs, Lucas
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had the rights to use Pixar's technology for their VFX
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projects. Using it to create the groundbreaking CGI scenes
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for the genesis sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of
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Khan, the pseudopod creature in The Abyss, the T-1000 in
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Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.
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When Jurassic Park came out in '93 it changed everything.
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Within about a two year period, this industry which had
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been very digital averse threw the switch on everything,
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digital audio, digital video and computer graphics.
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People thought of us like this overnight phenomenon, but in
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fact, we'd been working on it for 20 years. And then Toy
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Story came out two years later which changed animation history.
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We always knew from day one, we wanted to do a feature. We
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wanted to get into that arena. We did all the short films
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because that was our stepping stone towards that. So when
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we finally got Toy Story out there that was sort of like,
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agh we did it. And then you go, well what's next?
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Toy Story was a knockout success and launched the once
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struggling company into a future filled with box office hits.
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Pixar focused its efforts full-time on making more animated
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feature length films. And with that came a slew of demands
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to push its animation technology to new heights.
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Every film represents both the directors and the artists
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wanting to push in some new technical direction. And so the
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rendering technology, and indeed all the tools, are sort of
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structured in a way that they can be remade and remade and
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remade over time to meet the artistic requirements that the
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directors and artists bring to the table. New and more
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elaborate ways of specifying crowds or foliage or fur on
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animals. That stuff is constantly changing.
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RenderMan is basically our artist's tool to create the
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images that we want. Every new thing they come up with it
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makes all these different images and worlds possible. It's
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just sort of making the paintbrush better and better. A
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film like Monsters Inc. its like, OK, we want the main
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monster to have hair on him. Sullivan should have hair on
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him, and everyone's like, yeah, we don't know how to do
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hair. OK, so we're gonna have to R&D a project to figure
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out how to do hair. And then the next one is Finding Nemo
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and it's underwater. How do we do underwater? OK, let's
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figure out underwater. There's these huge hurdles that
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you're getting over because none of those movies were
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possible in the beginning and there's this big R&D project to figure it out.
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Making an animated film is an extremely time and labor
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intensive process that draws upon the talents of hundreds
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of artists and computer engineers. It's on the order of
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20,000 person weeks. We shoot for lower than that but we've
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had much worse actually. Once the story is figured out for
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a film, which can take months, even years itself. Artists
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start by creating all the different digital assets needed.
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Every character, prop and location must be sculpted and
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modeled. From there, the surfacing team adds all the
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relevant textures. Objects that are wood or metal are given
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the appropriate materials to reflect their composition.
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Clothing is given a fabric appearance, skin an organic look
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and so on. Character models have controls attached to their
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limbs so they move in a realistic way. Once all of these
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assets are complete, animators bring the characters and
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world to life, conveying the story through personality and
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action. Completed shots are then passed on to the lighting
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department, which gives the film its cinematic look and
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style.
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This is before lighting and you kind of get a sense of what
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the world looks like a little bit. But then we throw the
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lighting in there and all of a sudden you can see WALL-E,
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where before you can't even really see WALL-E, but you
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start to pull WALL-E out.
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Someone like me, the lighting DP might go on three years
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before it ever comes out in theaters and we create a whole
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three-dimensional world inside the computer. And if we
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don't put lights in it it actually comes out black because
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the computer is trying to mimic real life. And that we have
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little icons of lights we move around. So if it's sunset, I
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put the sun in and I can make it kind of orange and put it
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at the horizon and start sort of building the scene up that way.
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The Coco set at Pixar was I think one of the most
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complicated that we've ever put into a film. And it was
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difficult because the cameras that they chose to fly
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through the world of the dead, or through the giant main
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Grand Central train station, or the big cemetery, each of
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those sets were hugely complex. One scene in Coco there was
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eight million light sources illuminating in this sort of
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interesting glow of candlelight and other light sources. If
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you have more than a dozen lights it's often a problem and
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so to scale that up into thousands and millions was a huge challenge for RenderMan.
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This is the shot where we have eight and a half million
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lights and it's like, I don't know, that's probably eight
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million more lights than we've ever done in a scene before.
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Because the assets being worked with are extremely resource
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intensive from a computing perspective, artists must work
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with lower resolution versions of the film. The actual
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final image and look isn't known until it's processed
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through RenderMan. Taking all the lighting, shading and
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data aggregate into an image and turning it into a finished
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2D frame. Compiling all these digital assets and processing
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them into their final form is an extremely intensive computing task.
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A typical frame takes hours to render, if you were going to
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render them all on your home computer it would take a
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couple hundred years probably to make one of these movies.
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And so we solve that problem by having whole networks full
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of computers that all render simultaneously different
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frames at the same time. The sequences being rendered by
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Pixar are so complex, even with state-of-the-art machinery,
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it can take days. An image is anywhere between 50 hours to
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100 hours, on modern computers.
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That roughly translates to around 1,200 to 2,4000 hours of
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rendering for every second of a movie.
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I always try and remind people that we're not pushing a
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button and a movie comes out the back end. That the huge
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number of people involved, from fine artists through the
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engineers that are writing RenderMan. It's a very human
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intensive task making one of these films.
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The influence of Pixar's work in computer animation had a
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profound impact on the industry, but its applications
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spread far beyond just entertainment. From the beginning,
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when we started building the renderer we were thinking
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about commercializing it. Making it available to anybody
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who wants to use it in doing visual effects, to doing
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animation, to doing scientific exploration. If they want to
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make images, it's basically a way of making images.
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There's a big advertising market. People use it in
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architecture visualization. One of our longest standing
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customers is NASA. There's a group there that is tasked
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with visualizing some of the huge amounts of data they get back from their satellites.
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Over 30 years ago, Pixar started as a hyper technical
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software company pioneering advances in computer graphics and animation.
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We're able to tell the story we want to because the
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technology enables us to. Ultimately what we're doing here
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is really this amazing combination of art and technology
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that, if you pull them apart, they aren't as strong as when
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we combine them here. In the early days, we sort of had to
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hold it back. I had to tell John Lasseter, No, I just can't
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let you try to make it rain in this sequence. We can't get
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it done in time. We don't want to make those restrictions
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anymore, we want to try to make it be whatever you want. It
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shouldn't be the renderer that's holding us back.