David DiFrancesco | |
|---|---|
 |
David DiFrancesco, (born Nutley, New Jersey, 1949), is a photoscientist, inventor, cinematographer, and photographer. He is a founding member of three organizations which pioneered computer graphics for digital special effects and film [1] with Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, including; New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, Lucasfilm Computer Division, and Pixar, financed by Steve Jobs. [2] [3]
Raised in Nutley, New Jersey, DiFrancesco graduated from Nutley High School in 1967. [4]
As director of the Pixar Photoscience Team at Pixar, DiFrancesco and his team were responsible for the task of accurately transferring high resolution digital images to film. In this role, he developed the world's first laser scanning and recording devices for 35mm motion picture film [5] and established reliable, commercially successful methods for this process, called PixarVision. [6] [7] This pioneering work earned him two Scientific and Engineering Technical Academy Awards and 16 patents. [8] [9] In 1996 the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers adopted his recommended practices for governing output of digital images to film.
Before that DiFrancesco worked at Computer Image Corp., working on Scanimate with Lee Harrison, and also at Xerox PARC with Dick Shoup working on the first 8-bit shift register framebuffer technology, and at JPL with Jim Blinn working on Carl Sagan's Cosmos Series. His prototype film recorder resides in the permanent apparatus collection of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. His recent research included the development of a prototype interchangeable light field [10] lens for motion picture cameras that enables post-production re-focusing of motion picture images and the capturing of 3D motion pictures with a single lens and camera. [11]
In 2004, DiFrancesco designed a custom LED-based stroboscopic lighting system to sync the animation of physical Pixar Toy Story characters in the Pixar Zoetrope, first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with [Pixar's 20th Anniversary exhibit]. [12] The original Pixar Zoetrope has travelled the world to various museums and several other zoetropes are on display at Disneyland's California Adventure theme park in Southern California and other Disney theme parks.
DiFrancesco's technical knowledge with zoetropes was put into use on a two-minute film entitled “Forza/Filmspeed,” directed by Jeff Zwart. The film revealed the world's fastest Zoetrope in the form of a high resolution still images taken from the Xbox game Forza Motorsport 5. Stills from the game were printed onto panels and staged at key intervals around a Barber Motorsports Park race track to recreate the illusion of movement known as the persistence of vision. [13] On November 19, 2017, he was inducted into the Nutley Hall of Fame. [14]
As a photographer, DiFrancesco's work has been displayed at the MoMa in New York City, the Yale University Library collection, V&A CG collection London, England and in a number of private collections. He holds a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Superior, attended the Danish Film Institute and the MFA program at the University of Colorado.[ citation needed ] In 2000, he was awarded an honorary PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Superior. [15]
DiFrancesco's early career in motorsports included road rallies, Ice Racing and Gymkhana's driving Porsches during the 1960s. In addition, DiFrancesco is a collector and restorer of vintage race cars and motorcycles including a 1953 Siata 208s, shown at the Concorso Italiano in 2007, [16] a 1938 Brough Superior raced in CSRG vintage in the 1980s, an SCCA NW regional winning DP 1956 AC Bristol, [17] and a brace of Yamaha factory road racers. He has contributed to the creation of the Pixar Motorama, [18] in what started as an employee-owned event that eventually inspired the creation of the film “Cars” and grew to an internationally recognized private car show at the Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, California.
A zoetrope is one of several pre-film animation devices that produce the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion. It is a cylindrical variation of the phénakisticope, suggested almost immediately after the stroboscopic discs were introduced in 1833. The definitive version, with easily replaceable picture strips, was introduced as a toy by Milton Bradley in 1866 and became very successful.
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 the Disney Entertainment division 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.
Tin Toy is a 1988 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short film, which runs for five minutes, stars Tinny, a tin one-man band toy, trying to escape from Billy, a human baby. The third short film produced by the company's small animation division, it was a risky investment: due to the low revenue produced by Pixar's main product, the Pixar Image Computer, the company was under financial constraints.
Knick Knack is a 1989 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar that was written and directed by John Lasseter. The short is about a snow globe snowman who wants to join the other travel souvenirs in a summer-themed party. However, the glass dome that surrounds him prevents him from doing so, thus leading to his many tries to break out of his snow globe. Knick Knack is Pixar's fourth short and the final short produced during the company's tenure as a hardware company.
Luxo Jr. is a 1986 American computer-animated short film produced and released by Pixar. Written and directed by John Lasseter, the two-minute short film revolves around one larger and one smaller desk lamp. The larger lamp, named Luxo Sr., looks on while the smaller, "younger" Luxo Jr. plays exuberantly with a ball to the extent that it accidentally deflates. Luxo Jr. was Pixar's first animation after Ed Catmull and John Lasseter left Industrial Light & Magic's computer division of Cinetron Computer Systems. The film is the source of Luxo Jr., the mascot of Pixar.
John Alan Lasseter is an American film director, producer, and animator. He has served as the Head of Animation at Skydance Animation since 2019. Previously, he acted as the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios, as well as the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering.
Lance J. Williams was a prominent graphics researcher who made major contributions to texture map prefiltering, shadow rendering algorithms, facial animation, and antialiasing techniques. Williams was one of the first people to recognize the potential of computer graphics to transform film and video making.
The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) was a proprietary collection of software, scanning camera systems, servers, networked computer workstations, and custom desks developed by The Walt Disney Company and Pixar in the late 1980s. Although outmoded by the mid-2000s, it succeeded in reducing labor costs for ink and paint and post-production processes of traditionally animated feature films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. It also provided an entirely new palette of digital tools to the filmmakers.
Red's Dream is a 1987 American animated short film written and directed by John Lasseter and produced by Pixar. The short film, which runs four minutes, stars Red, a unicycle. Propped up in the corner of a bicycle store on a rainy night, Red dreams of a fantasy where it becomes the star of a circus. Red's Dream was Pixar's second computer-animated short following Luxo Jr. in 1986, also directed by Lasseter.
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.
Loren C. Carpenter is a computer graphics researcher and developer.
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.
Digital puppetry is the manipulation and performance of digitally animated 2D or 3D figures and objects in a virtual environment that are rendered in real-time by computers. It is most commonly used in filmmaking and television production but has also been used in interactive theme park attractions and live theatre.
SuperPaint was a pioneering graphics program and framebuffer computer system developed by Richard Shoup at Xerox PARC. The system was first conceptualized in late 1972 and produced its first stable image in April 1973. SuperPaint was among the earliest uses of computer technology for creative artworks, video editing, and computer animation, all of which would become major areas within the entertainment industry and major components of industrial design.
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.
DreamWorks Pictures is an American film studio and distribution label of Amblin Partners. It was originally founded on October 12, 1994, as a live-action film studio by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, of which they owned 72%. The studio formerly distributed its own and third-party films. It has produced or distributed more than ten films with box-office grosses of more than $100 million each.
The Pixar Photoscience Division, a division of Pixar Animation Studios, was founded in 1979 at Lucasfilm for the express purpose of designing and building a laser recorder/scanner system to input and output film to a computer for compositing and color correction of special effects. In the early years of Pixar's history, the team was responsible for the design of color monitoring instrumentation to control the color gamut and gamma of the digital images onto 35mm film using a more advance laser recorder system called PixarVision. In later years at Pixar, the team was responsible for transforming the artists computer-animated images onto film master negatives. Today the team manages all digital content to a variety of delivery media, film, DVD, and digital cinema projection. The team has won Engineering and Technical Academy Awards and patents for their work in Motion Picture Sciences.
Thomas K. Porter is the senior vice president of production strategy at Pixar and one of the studio's founding employees.
Michael Kass is an American computer scientist best known for his work in computer graphics and computer vision. He has won an Academy Award and the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award and is an ACM Fellow.