What would old Walt Disney have made of his company’s latest box office smash, Toy Story, a full-length feature film in which every frame was produced entirely by computer using animation techniques developed by Pixar Animation Studios Inc? No more pains-taking drawing and redrawing cartoons every time the director wants to make a minute change such as slowing down an arm movement. One keystroke on the computer sorts out the change. However, animation artists apparently need not fear. It would seem that as computer animation software has come of age, the role of the artist is coming back into its own. In the early days of computer animation, companies were writing software as they went along, and animators also had to be highly computer-literate.

Heightened reality

With the latest techniques in three-dimensional animation, artists can once again be creative, and simply be taught how to translate their design onto the computer. Toy Story has been made in collaboration with Point Richmond, California-based Pixar, the company bought in its infancy a few years ago by Apple Computer Inc co-founder Steve Jobs. Walt Disney Co, traditionally committed to making all animated films in-house, was persuaded by Pixar’s John Lassiter to collaborate with Pixar on a full-length feature film using the company’s computer animation techniques. Pixar used its own modelling environment software, Menv, which it took some nine years to develop, writing it for Silicon Graphics Inc workstations, to create three-dimensional computer models of characters, with built-in articulation controls for isolating very specific movements such as the hinging of an elbow, or co-ordinating lip movements with dialogue. The company also used its RenderMan software, running on 117 Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstations to generate the images, complete with lighting, texture and shading, for each of the 144,000 frames in the 77-minute movie, with each frame taking up 300Mb of disk space. It took 800,000 machine hours to produce the final cut, and Pixar’s animation team grew to 110 people from 24 in the four years it took to make the movie. Obviously, the processes and the hardware involved are expensive, but Pixar believes that it has achieved a look of heightened reality never seen before on the big screen. Lasseter, who first experimented with computer animation as long ago as 1981, said he realised that computer-animated backgrounds could be so much more dimensional that you could paint by hand, and realised how this could totally liberate the camera. He explained that with painted backgrounds, the camera could go only sideways or pull up or back. With three-dimensional backgrounds you could go in for a shot wherever you wanted and move the camera around in all directions. It was just another world! As director of Toy Story, Lasseter seems to have achieved the effect he was looking for with the camera. Daily Variety said of the film, the camera loops and zooms in a dizzying fashion that fairly takes one’s breath away. The film’s story is simple enough – and is typically Disney. It concerns a group of toys owned by a boy named Andy which come to life when they are alone. The arrival of a new resident, toy spaceman Buzz Lightyear, triggers jealousies, an adventure and a whole host of human emotions. Pixar says the nature of toys made them ideally suited for the computer animation technique.

By Emma Woollacott and Joanne Wallen

The company admitted that these new techniques enabled it to make a film that traditionally would require 400 animators with about 150, but said that the animator’s time is now spent on achieving more realism, and on creating believable storylines, rather than on time-consuming redrawing of frames. The goal everyone is now striving for is true photo-realism. This has been managed to a limited extent in films such as Jurassic Park and Jumanji, for which photo-realistic monkeys, bats, rhinos and elephants were created. Lasseter says In computer animation, it’s so easy to make things move, but it’s the minute detail work at the end that makes it look so real. To create Toy Story, Pixar took early sketches and drew up a story board. The pencil images were then transferred onto video using an Avid Technology Inc Media Composer. Then the modellers created sculptures and three-dimensional models of all the characters and sets, some of which started as computer-drawn diagrams using Menv, and others were first sculpted out of clay and then digitised with a wand called the Polhemus 3 Space Digitiser, which the artist touches on key points of the model to create a three-dimensional surface description in the computer. Then Menv articulation controls were added, and the animation process began. Dialogue came next: it takes about a week to fit facial expressions to soundtrack for an eight-second shot, and then rendering and shading are added. Many of the major studios are now looking at three-dimensional computer animation. Twentieth Century Fox plans to include the capability at its animation facility in Arizona, and Sony Imageworks is increasing its digital staff. Metrolight is modelling three-dimensional satellites that can be blown up again and again, while at Kleiser-Walcsak, artists are creating computer-animated stunt doubles. The obvious question mark over the technique is whether it is cost-effective enough yet to come in to the mainstream. Pixar says that it is.

Feature-length

The company says one of the main costs in making traditional animations is the cost of the team of animators, and it has demonstrated its ability to cut this cost significantly. Of course, all eyes have been on whether the film would be a box office success, and therefore whether the companies would see a good return on their money. Well, Toy Story is not yet playing at a cinema near you in the UK, but in the US, the film went to the top of the box office charts. It pulled in $13.88m in box office sales in one weekend alone – December 7 to 10, making it one of the season’s most successful films. Toy Story is part of Pixar’s three-movie deal with Disney, and the next film is now in production for release in 1998. The company has also been producing television commercials using its computer animation techniques, and it is releasing an interactive version of Toy Story on CD-ROM. It said its future strategy is to produce more feature-length films, either on its own, or in partnership, but it would not name those with which it is talking. Those that have seen Toy Story say it is more than just a brilliant technical achievement, having a good storyline and well-rounded characters as well. Pixar claims that computer animation enables film makers to devote more time to the story and character development. And for Steve Jobs, Toy Story is a real fairy tale come true. Pixar’s flotation (CI No 2,807), has turned him into a paper billionaire, and Hollywood beckons.