Communications - December 2010

of a place where they did do that, and I always looked at ARPA at that time as being a spectacularly successful example of governmental policy moving things in the right direction. It had very low bureaucracy and trusted that if you give funding to smart people, some interesting things will happen. I came up out of that environment, and to this day I believe it’s a great thing to do. That doesn’t mean you won’t have some failures or some abuses along the way, but that model of funding universities was spectacularly successful.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the way it worked at the rest of the schools I was applying to, so I originally got a job doing CAD work at Applicon. Then Alex Schure [founder of the New York Institute of Technology] came along, and he wanted to invest in animation and make me head of the computer graphics department.

He didn’t have all of the pieces necessary to do it, but he was the only person willing to invest in it. We had this remarkable group of software people coming to New York Tech, and Alex was essentially supporting them, but the technical people there knew that an element was missing: they didn’t have the artists or the other components of filmmaking. Alex didn’t understand that. He thought we were the filmmakers, and that rather than being part of a larger thing, that we were the solution. Unfortunately, he never got full credit for what he did because of that little bit of a blind spot on his part. He certainly made a lot happen for which he hasn’t gotten a lot of credit.

Eventually, I moved on to Lucasfilm, where a very interesting thing happened, which I don’t think people quite understand. At the time Lucasfilm was making the second Star Wars film, and the people at ILM [Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm’s special effects divi-sion] were the best guys in the world at special effects. So George [Lucas] took me to them and said, “OK, we’re going to do some computer graphics.” These guys were very friendly and very open, but it was extremely clear that what I was doing was absolutely irrelevant to what they were doing.

hanRahan: They didn’t get it?

Ca TmuLL: They didn’t think it was relevant. In their minds, we were working on computer-generated images—and

on ThE EaRLY Da YS:
We believed that
achieving the
appearance of
reality was a great
technical goal—not
because we were
trying to emulate
reality, but because
doing it is so hard
it would help drive
us forward. That
is, in fact, what
happened. We
finally reached the
point where we can
create convincingly
realistic images.
Reality was a great
goal for a while.

for them, what was a computer-generated image? What was an image they saw on a CRT? It was television.

Even if you made good television, it looked crappy by their standards. However, from their point of view, it was George’s decision and he could do with his money what he wanted. It wasn’t as though he was taking anything away from them—it’s just that computer graphics was not relevant to what they were doing on that film.

I look back at this and see that what we had—and this is very important—was protection. When you’re doing something new, it’s actually fairly fragile. People don’t quite get what it is. Sometimes even we don’t necessarily get what it is. When people don’t get it, and they’ve got their immediate concerns, it’s hard for them to see the relevance. In ILM’s case, the immediate concern was to make a movie, and we truly weren’t relevant to the job at hand.

Because of that, what we needed was protection at that early stage. That’s what we’d had at the University of Utah. ARPA was essentially coming in and protecting “the new,” even though we didn’t know what “the new” was. It’s kind of a hard concept because when most people talk about “the new,” they’re actually talking about it after the fact. They look back and say how brilliant you were at seeing all this, and so forth. Well, it’s all nonsense. When it is new, you don’t know it. You’re creating something for the future, and you don’t know exactly what it is. It’s hard to protect that. What we got from George was that protection.

The reason I was thinking of that model was that we had a software project here at Pixar to come up with the next generation of tools and assigned that task to a development group. But we had a different problem. The people responsible for our films didn’t look at that development group as this sort of odd thing that somebody else was paying for; they looked at the group as a source of smart people that they could use for the film. We had given the development group a charter to come up with new software, and a year later I found out the whole group had been subverted into providing tools for the existing production.