Kimball wrote software to produce the halo effect that surrounded images of the live-action characters in Disney's CGI breakthrough Tron. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

For Tron, it was Kimball's job to write the software that produced the halo effects that surrounded images of the live action characters. "They had been photographed in black-and -white and transferred to Kodalith images," he explains. "We had to figure out how to make that come into color underneath the animation cameras. That was where the exposure control system was used. To get what were -- at that point -- small desktop computers to run all the elements on the Disney camera was kind of a breakthrough. I always felt pretty honored to be allowed to mess with equipment that had such a legacy." Kimball didn't have the opportunity to work extensively with one of Disney's most famous alumni, John Lasseter, but he does recall seeing the digital test Lasseter created for Where the Wild Things Are with animator Glen Keane. "The two of them showed it to me and I was flabbergasted," he recalls. When Lasseter left Disney to join Ed Catmull in George Lucas' computer department, Kimball observes, "You could see the forces aligning."

Disney's Bolt is a 3-D accomplishment Kimball is proud to see in the industry. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

While Kimball had left the studio himself to become an independent consultant before the return of Lasseter and Catmull to Disney, he was thrilled to see what the studio accomplished with the 3-D stereoscopic release, Bolt. "I remember back in 2003 or 2004 seeing the original story for what was then called American Dog. Movies continually go through refinement processes and this took large leaps. I think the collaboration between Disney and Pixar is good, and the companies are relatively close. I see a restructuring of the engineering efforts there to take advantage of what the different groups can do."

The stereoscopic advances at Disney are of particular interest to Kimball, who first got involved in 3-D decades ago. "I worked on a motion control system called ACES -- which stands for Automatic Camera Effects System -- back in the 1980s. We needed to create a shot for one of the pavilions at EPCOT. It was a shot where the camera had to fly towards a spacecraft, and we had to have left eye and right eye takes of that. That was my first introduction. I'm hopeful for stereoscopic films, especially in live action. Within the Digital Cinema Initiative it was a push of mine, among other people, to make sure that we had the ability within digital cinema to be able to foster this. I believe that the mechanism within the equipment is there. But we'd have to set up the specifications that the equipment would need to support being able to put out that many frames."

Kimball isn't surprised that digitally animated films are leading the way in 3-D stereo, however. "From what I have seen, we have such good storytellers in animation and they are really extending the art. Any animated film is planned to such a degree that you could set your environment and the staging and the props to be able to extend the 3-D notion. The ability to have soft boundaries gives you additional flexibility and avoids the problems that we used to have with 3-D. There's been great progress made, but there are still challenges, like with subtitling, for example. That's still very difficult."

There's a certain collective impetus that moves forward ideas whose time has come, and Kimball has seen several breakthroughs driven by technology. "Someone will come up a really good idea for changing their rendering pipeline, for example, and you then see that work its way into the rest of the industry. I thought all seven films shown at the visual effects bakeoff this year were really good examples. I was pleased that the three that were nominated were fine representations of what you can do today. The digital head replacement done with Benjamin Button is really a wonderful process. The push to move digital further into emulating humans is both scary and challenging. It will be interesting to see where we go next."