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Edwin Catmull

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Edwin Catmull
Born (1945-03-31) March 31, 1945 (age 79)
Parkersburg, West Virginia
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Utah
Known forTexture mapping
Catmull–Rom spline
Catmull–Clark subdivision surface[2]
SpouseSusan Anderson Catmull
AwardsAcademy Award (1993)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsPixar
Lucasfilm
DisneyToon Studios
Walt Disney Animation Studios
ThesisA Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces (1974)
Doctoral advisorRobert E. Stephenson[1]

Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is a computer scientist and current president of Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, DisneyToon Studios.[3][4][5] As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics.[6][7]

Life and career

Edwin Catmull was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia.[8] Early in life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies such as Peter Pan and Pinocchio and dreamed of becoming a feature film animator. He even made primitive animation using so-called flip-books. However, he assessed his chances realistically and decided that his talents lay elsewhere. Instead of pursuing a career in the movie industry, he used his talent in math and studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah.[1] After graduating, he worked as a computer programmer at The Boeing Company in Seattle for a short period of time and also at the New York Institute of Technology, before returning to Utah to go to graduate school in fall of 1970.

Back at the university he became one of Ivan Sutherland's students and part of the university's ARPA program,[9] sharing classes with Fred Parke, James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay. Catmull saw Sutherland's computer drawing program Sketchpad and the new field of computer graphics in general as a major fundament in the future of animation, which combined his love for both technology and animation, and decided to be a part of the revolution from the beginning. From that point, his main goal and ambition was to make a computer animated movie.[10] During his time there he made two new fundamental computer graphics discoveries: texture mapping, and bicubic patches, and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. He also independently discovered Z-buffering, even though it had already been described 8 months before, by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis.[11] In 1972 Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry, an animated version of his left hand which was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 movie Futureworld, the science fiction sequel to the film Westworld and the first film to use 3D computer graphics. The sequence, known simply as A Computer Animated Hand,[12] was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2011.[13]

In 1974, Catmull graduated again and was hired by a company called Applicon. However, by November the same year he had been contacted by the founder of New York Institute of Technology, Alexander Schure, who offered him the position as the director of the new Computer Graphics Lab at NYIT.

In his new position, Catmull formed a talented research group working with 2D animation, mostly focusing on tools that could assist the animators in their work. Among the inventions was a paint program simply called Paint which could be seen as an early version of Disney's CAPS, the commercial animation program Tween (used in the video called 3Measure for Measure2), inspired by an experimental computer animation system created by Nestor Burtnyk and Marcelli Wein, that automated the process of producing in-between frames, the animation program SoftCel and other software.

Catmull and his team eventually left 2D animation and started to concentrate on 3D computer graphics, moving into the field of motion picture production. By the end of the 70's, the Computer Graphics Lab was starting to struggle for several reasons and felt there was a lack of actual progress despite the technological development, but their efforts had attracted the attention of some big names in Hollywood. These were George Lucas at Lucasfilm and Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to head up a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio into the entertainment field. Lucas had already made a deal with a computer company called Triple-I, and asked them to create a digital model of an X-Wing fighter from Star Wars, which they did. In 1979 Catmull became the Vice President at the computer graphics division at Lucasfilm.[14]

At Lucasfilm he helped develop digital image compositing technology used to combine multiple images in a convincing way. Later, in 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded Pixar, where Catmull became the Chief Technical Officer. At Pixar, he was a key developer of the RenderMan rendering system used in films such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

After Disney acquired Pixar in January 2006, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger put Catmull and John Lasseter in charge of reinvigorating the Disney animation studios. According to a Los Angeles Times article,[15] part of this effort was to allow directors more creative control as collaborators on their projects and to give them the creative freedom to use traditional animation techniques — a reversal of former CEO Michael Eisner's decision that Disney would do only digital animation, which Catmull thought was the wrong idea of how Pixar's films did well.

In June 2007, Catmull and Lasseter were given control of DisneyToon Studios, a division of Disney Animation housed in a separate facility in Glendale. Since then, as president and chief creative officer, respectively, they have supervised three separate studios for Disney, each with its own production pipeline: Pixar, Disney Animation, and DisneyToon. While Disney Animation and DisneyToon are located in the Los Angeles area, Pixar is located over 350 miles (563 kilometers) northwest in the Bay Area, where Catmull and Lasseter both live.

Awards

In 1993, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Catmull with his first Academy Scientific and Technical Award "for the development of PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance". In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Again in 1996, he received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award "for pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing". In 2001, he received an Oscar "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan". In 2006, he was awarded with the IEEE John von Neumann Medal for pioneering contributions to the field of computer graphics in modeling, animation and rendering. In the 81st Academy Awards (2008, presented in February 2009), Catmull was awarded with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which honors "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry".

Wage Fixing Lawsuit

In May 2014, as part of a class action lawsuit alleging Pixar's involvement in a wage fixing cartel, emails written by Catmull confirmed his central role in the agreements between Silcon Valley technology firms aimed at preventing the poaching of employees of other firms in the agreement, in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust law.[16]

In 2013, the Computer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow "for his pioneering work in computer graphics, animation and filmmaking".

Bibliography

  • Catmull, Ed; Amy Wallace (2014). Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. New York: Random House. ISBN 9780812993011. OCLC 851419994.

References

  1. ^ a b Catmull, Edwin Earl (1974). A subdivision algorithm for computer display of curved surfaces (PhD thesis). University of Utah.
  2. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1016/0010-4485(78)90110-0, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1016/0010-4485(78)90110-0 instead.
  3. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1145/37402.37414, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1145/37402.37414 instead.
  4. ^ Price, David P. T. (2009). The Pixar Touch (Vintage). London: Vintage. ISBN 0-307-27829-8.
  5. ^ Michael Rubin, "Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution" (2005), ISBN 0-937404-67-5
  6. ^ Edwin Catmull at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  7. ^ Edwin Catmull publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
  8. ^ "Parkersburg, West Virginia". City-Data.com. Retrieved June 7, 2014.
  9. ^ A conversation with Ed Catmull
  10. ^ Innerview - Edwin Catmull
  11. ^ Straßer, Wolfgang. Schnelle Kurven- und Flächendarstellung auf graphischen Sichtgeräten, Dissertation, TU Berlin, submitted 26.4.1974
  12. ^ "2011 National Film Registry More Than a Box of Chocolates". Library of Congress. December 28, 2011. Retrieved December 28, 2011.
  13. ^ "'Silence of the Lambs', 'Bambi' and 'Forrest Gump' added to National Film Registry". New York Times: Artsbeat. 2011-12-27. Retrieved 2011-12-28.
  14. ^ "The Pixar Story: Dick Shoup, Alex Schure, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Disney".
  15. ^ Eller, Claudia (2006-06-12). "Ed Catmull: Pixar 's Superhero, Shakes Up Disney (offline)". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2006-06-13. [dead link]
  16. ^ "REVEALED: Court docs show role of Pixar and Dreamworks Animation in Silicon Valley wage-fixing cartel".
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