10 Questions with Edwin Catmull, Super Genius
(continued from page 1)
AWN: If you could change or improve anything about the industry,
what would it be?
EC: I thought that the concerted raiding of the L.A. studios
against each other a couple of years ago caused considerable damage
to the economics and culture of our industry.
AWN: There is an expression that, "Any sufficiently
advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic."
Do you know any magicians?
EC: There is another saying: "Talent isn't fair."
And when you get talented people to work together something happens
that any one of them alone couldn't produce. That is magic.
AWN: Why do you love animation?
EC: When done well, the voices, story and animation come
together in a pure act of creation.
AWN: The debate rages: with so many individual frames manipulated
in some way, shape or form, is Titanic an animated or live-action
film?
EC: Even in live-action films, the lighting, sound and stage
are not realistic. Are the CG props in Titanic really any
different than fake store fronts that we see in Westerns? Feature
films are not meant to be realistic, they are at heart artistic
creations.
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Ed Cutmull's favorite little
German caterpillar from A Bug's Life. © Disney
Enterprises, Inc./Pixar Animation Studios. All Rights Reserved.
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AWN: Who is your favorite digital character?
EC: For some reason, I really liked Heimlich the caterpillar
[from A Bug's Life].
AWN: You are creating an amazing career at the forefront
of computer animation. So far what have you accomplished, or were
involved with, that you are most proud of?
EC: Early on I developed texture mapping, Z-buffers and subdivision
surfaces. I was fortunate enough to be associated with four institutions
that were willing to take a gamble on computer graphics and animation:
University of Utah, New York Institute of Technology, Lucasfilm
and Pixar. Along the way I was joined by many of the most talented
people in our industry. I think it would have been easy to be so
caught up in the technology that we could have forgotten what our
real goals were. I am most proud that we have made the transition
from researchers to story tellers.
Gregory Singer is working towards an M.F.A. in Producing at Chapman
University, in Orange, California. He is also the assistant editor
of the Animation Journal, a peer-reviewed scholarly publication
devoted to animation history and theory.
Heather Kenyon is editor in chief of Animation World Magazine.
