Pixar Animation Studios is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Since 2006, Pixar has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, a segment of the Walt Disney Company.
Edwin Earl Catmull is an American computer scientist and animator who served as the co-founder of Pixar and the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began production on the original Star Wars, now the fourth episode of the Skywalker Saga.
The Adventures of André & Wally B. is a 1984 American animated short film produced by the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project, a division of Lucasfilm and the predecessor of Pixar. The short was groundbreaking by the standards of the time and helped spark the film industry's interest in computer animation.
Alvy Ray Smith III is an American computer scientist who co-founded Lucasfilm's Computer Division and Pixar, participating in the 1980s and 1990s expansion of computer animation into feature film.
Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.
Glenn John McQueen was a Canadian supervisor of digital animation and supervising character animator at Pixar and Pacific Data Images.
Eben Fiske Ostby is a pioneer computer graphics software developer, animator, and technical director for motion pictures.
Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.
James Morris is an American film producer, production executive and visual effects producer. He is currently general manager and president of Pixar. Previously, he held key positions at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for 17 years.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Dan Lemmon is a New Zealand visual effects supervisor. In 2012, he was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This was in the category of Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, his nomination was shared with Daniel Barrett, Joe Letteri and R. Christopher White.
Stephen Rosenbaum is an American visual effects artist and supervisor, and has worked on numerous movie, tv and music productions, including six that have won Academy Awards. He has been nominated three times for an Academy Award and two times for a BAFTA Award. He has won both awards twice for his contributions on Forrest Gump and Avatar, and has played artist and supervisor roles on such pioneering films as Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, X2: X-Men United, Death Becomes Her, Contact and The Perfect Storm.
Paul J. Franklin is an English visual effects supervisor who has worked with visual effects since the 1990s. Franklin won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and the BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects for Inception (2010), and won a second Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for Interstellar (2014). He shared the wins with Andrew Lockley, Peter Bebb, and Chris Corbould. Franklin has also been nominated for an Academy Award for The Dark Knight (2008). He was nominated for BAFTA Awards for Batman Begins, The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
Jerome Chen is a Chinese American visual effects supervisor and director. He is a founding member of Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Gini Cruz Santos is a Filipina animator at Pixar studios based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She worked on numerous Pixar animation films including Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, Up, Lifted and Brave. She was nominated in 2004 for an Annie award for her detailed lifelike animation on Finding Nemo, and was nominated by the Visual Effects Society for an award for this project as well.
Made with Code is an initiative launched by Google on 19 July 2014. Google aimed to empower young women in middle and high schools with computer programming skills. Made with Code was created after Google's own research found out that encouragement and exposure are the critical factors that would influence young females to pursue computer science. It was reported that Google is funding $50 million to Made with Code, on top of the initial $40 million invested since 2010 in organizations like Code.org, Black Girls Code, and Girls Who Code. The Made with Code initiative involves both online activities as well as real life events, collaborating with notable firms like Shapeways and App Inventor.
CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap is a 2015 documentary by Robin Hauser Reynolds. It focuses on the lack of women and minorities in the field of software engineering. It premiered on April 19, 2015 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The film focuses on inspiring young girls to pursue careers in computer science by profiling successful women in computer programming, such as, Danielle Feinberg of Pixar, Aliya Rahman of Code for Progress, and Julie Ann Horvath. By profiling and displaying the careers of these women, the film makers hope to show that computer science can be creative, lucrative, and rewarding.
Sharon Calahan is an American cinematographer who was director of photography on the Pixar films A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), and Finding Nemo (2003), and was lighting director for Ratatouille (2007), Cars 2 (2011), and The Good Dinosaur (2015). She took part in the early rise of computer animated feature film making and the acceptance of that medium as cinematography. Calahan is the first member of the American Society of Cinematographers who was invited to join on the basis of a career entirely in animated film. She was nominated, with Bill Reeves, Eben Ostby, and Rick Sayre, for a 2000 BAFTA Award for Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects for A Bug's Life.
Ayellet Tal is an Israeli researcher in computational geometry and computer graphics who holds the Alfred and Marion Bar Chair in Engineering at the Technion.
