10:30 at night
until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.
This evening I am animating a scene
from the dream sequence.
This is a rough level of detail.
How come your car
has the best parking spot?
'Cause it hasn't moved
in about three days.
I've been sleeping here.
He'd leave me a note on my desk.
"D.W., wake me up when you come in,"
and I would go to his common.
Of course, the door would be closed.
I'd have to bang on the door,
and John'd be asleep.
He used to bring in a mattress
or a futon or something
and sleep under his desk.
And then he would get up
and start animating again.
And he did that for weeks.
Their next short,
Red's Dream,
was the story of a lonely unicycle
longing to perform in the circus.
We could show him
what was easy for us to do
and what was hard for us to do,
and he'd also push us.
We'd say, "Well, you know, John,
it's kind of hard for us to do a human. "
Then first thing you'd know,
he'd be thinking about
human stuff he'd wanna do
and he'd encourage us to try to do it.
Tin Tot, about a wind-up
toy tormented by a baby,
brought children's toys to life
through the computer.
And in 1989,
Bill Reeves and John Lasseter
took home their first Oscars
for Best Animated Short Subject,
and the first ever awarded
to a computer-animated film.
With each subsequent short film,
John got more ambitious
and the team got more experience
and the software got better.
In 1990, Pixar applied
their knowledge of animated shorts
to make commercials.
The new venture soon required
bringing in new animators.
John hired
two recent CalArts graduates.
It was literally the day
after I graduated I showed up.
John sat down and showed me
the way the animation software worked.
It was pretty slow.
There was a lot of kind of
noodling and futzing around,
but I loved that stuff.
I didn't care what it was.
I said, "Commercials? Fine.
"I'll do, you know, soap bars,
soda cans, whatever. I don't care. "
Introducing
new Freshmint Gum!
The freshest mints.
The coolest cool.
For as simple as it was,
it was probably the hardest
learning experience I ever had,
because it was archaic.
I knew nothing about the computer.
I had never touched one,
never word-processed,
never even really looked at one
before I came up there.
So I'm a testament
that anybody can learn the computer.
At the same time,
Pixar began a collaboration
with the new leadership
at the Walt Disney Studios
headed by Michael Eisner,
Frank Wells,
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy Disney.
In a renewed effert to bridge
hand-drawn animation with computers,
Pixar invented CAPS,
a digital ink-and-paint system
which brought new technical advances
to 2-D animation.
The techniques gained critical notice
in Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
Roy Disney was
a great champion of this.
He spent a lot of money
building the CAPS system,
and it was just the basis
of what was to come
in terms of the 3-D animation process.
It was the engine
that drove everything else forward.
Pixar's software,
Renderman,
was also getting industry acclaim
for the creation
of photo-realistic special effects
that allowed Hollywood filmmakers
to tell stories
that could not be told any other way.
Renderman had become
the new standard in special effects,
and in 2000,
the technical team
garnered the first Oscar
ever awarded
for computer-animated software.
But the research and development
of all their technology
was costing more money
than the company was bringing in.
Steve Jobs had been losing over
a million dollars a year for five years.
It was all great stuff to do,
but none of it was a home run.
None of it really... It was a struggle.
Every step of the way,
it was a struggle.
We were trying to pay the bills
and just buy time.
And that strategy
really turned out not to work.
Steve was a very forgiving investor
at that time
and had a much longer term view
than your average venture capitalist
would've had
about