keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Ed Catmull, currently the president of the Walt Disney and Pixar animation studios, was one of the key people in the development of computer animation. Catmull was and is a software engineer, somebody who developed the nuts and bolts of making animation work with computers. A couple of his early pieces have surfaced. The first, reported on Cartoon Brew , is a film from the University of Utah in 1972. After the University of Utah, Catmull went to the New York Institute of Technology, located on Long Island, where he was involved with trying to find ways of joining the computer with drawn animation. John Celestri has reprinted a paper Catmull wrote called "The Problems of Computer-Assisted Animation." Computer animation has reached a high level of sophistication but it wasn't that long ago that it was struggling to establish itself as a practical medium. These pieces show how far it has come in less than 40 years, all within the working lifetime of Ed Catmull.

Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, has written an article for the Harvard Business Review that can be read here. There is also a podcast you can find here . Both focus on organizational structure and the steps that Pixar has taken to prevent the mistakes that are all too common in business. Here are some excerpts from the article: "To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to re...

David A. Price's book, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company , is a readable history of today's leading animation studio. It's also clearly shows that the company, especially in its early days, was far more than John Lasseter. Within animation circles, discussions of Pixar naturally revolve around Lasseter, but Price establishes the importance of Ed Catmull to the existence of the company. It was Catmull's vision to create movies with computers and it was Catmull who assembled the team of software engineers at the New York Institute of Technology that started to make them a reality. Once Catmull understood the limitations of Alexander Schure, the head of NYIT, he migrated his team to George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. Catmull's contributions came in several areas. As a software engineer himself, he not only wrote code but had an intimate understanding of the problems that needed to be solved. In addition, he was a natural at management. He not o...