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| Industry | Visual effects |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1979 |
| Defunct | 2001 |
| Headquarters |
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Key people | Hoyt Yeatman, Fred Iguchi, Tom Hollister |
Dream Quest Images, later known as The Secret Lab, was an American visual effects company, co-founded in 1979 by Hoyt Yeatman, Scott Squires, Ohio native Rocco Gioffre, Fred Iguchi, Tom Hollister and Bob Hollister. [1]
After early piecemeal work on Escape from New York , E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , and One From the Heart , [1] Dream Quest expanded operations and earned back-to-back visual effects Oscars for work on The Abyss and Total Recall . [2] [3]
In 1996, Dream Quest was purchased by The Walt Disney Company. [4] [5] While Disney began development on Dinosaur , they decided to fold Dream Quest into Walt Disney Feature Animation and subsequently renamed it "The Secret Lab" in 1999. [2] [6]
After The Secret Lab did the visuals of the 2000 animated film Dinosaur , a shuttering process begun, started by cancelling the animated film the studio was doing with Walt Disney Feature Animation, Wildlife. [7] The Secret Lab closed its doors in 2001, [2] but it only shut down once its artists finished their work on Reign of Fire and Kangaroo Jack . [8] [9]
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Autodesk Maya, commonly shortened to just Maya, is a 3D computer graphics application that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, originally developed by Alias and currently owned and developed by Autodesk. It is used to create assets for interactive 3D applications, animated films, TV series, and visual effects.
Modern animation in the United States from the late 1980s to 2004 is frequently referred to as the renaissance age of American animation. During this period, many large American entertainment companies reformed and reinvigorated their animation departments, following the dark age, and the United States had an influence on global and worldwide animation.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects, computer animation and stereo conversion digital studio 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.
Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by Toronto-based SideFX, who adapted it from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools.
Dinosaur is a 2000 American live-action/animated adventure film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation in association with The Secret Lab, and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton and produced by Pam Marsden, from a screenplay written by John Harrison, Robert Nelson Jacobs, and Walon Green, and a story by the trio alongside Zondag and Thom Enriquez. It features the voices of D. B. Sweeney, Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis, Max Casella, Hayden Panettiere, Samuel E. Wright, Julianna Margulies, Peter Siragusa, Joan Plowright, and Della Reese. The story follows a young Iguanodon who was adopted and raised by a family of lemurs on a tropical island. They are forced to the mainland by a catastrophic meteor impact; setting out to find a new home, they join a herd of dinosaurs heading for the "Nesting Grounds", but must contend with the group's harsh leader, as well as external dangers such as predatory Carnotaurus.
Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene from its first synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney after the closure of Laugh-O-Gram Studio, it is the longest-running animation studio in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. Since its foundation, the studio has produced 63 feature films, with its first release being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which is also the first hand drawn animated feature film, and its most recent release was Moana 2 (2024). The studio has also produced hundreds of short films.
Floyd E. Norman is an American animator, writer, and cartoonist. Over the course of his career, he has worked for various animation companies, among them Walt Disney Animation Studios, Hanna-Barbera Productions, Ruby-Spears, Film Roman and Pixar.
Phil Tippett is an American film director and visual effects supervisor and producer, who specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerized character animation. Over his career, he has assisted ILM and DreamWorks, and in 1984 formed his own company, Tippett Studio.
Donald Paul Hahn is an American film producer. He served as a producer for the Disney films Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The Disney Renaissance was a period from 1989 to 1999 during which Walt Disney Feature Animation returned to producing commercially and/or critically successful animated films. The ten feature films associated with this period are The Little Mermaid (1989), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), and Tarzan (1999).
Hoyt Yeatman is an American visual effects artist and supervisor. He has worked with Jerry Bruckheimer on a number of films, including Armageddon, Con Air, and The Rock. He made his directorial debut with the film G-Force.
Craig Barron is an American visual effects artist and creative director at Magnopus, a media company that produces visual development and virtual production services for motion pictures, television, museums and multimedia platforms.
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.
The 39th Annual Annie Awards honoring the best in animation of 2011 were held on February 4, 2012, at Royce Hall in Los Angeles, California.
Muqeem Khan is a Pakistani who started working in the Hollywood visual effects industry in 1996.
Steven "Spaz" Williams is a Canadian special effects artist, animator, and film and commercials director.
Harley Jessup is an American production designer and visual effects art director who has been nominated for two visual effects Academy Awards, and won once. Currently working at Pixar Animation Studios, Jessup has served as production designer for Monsters, Inc., Ratatouille, Cars 2, Presto, The Good Dinosaur and Pixar's animated feature, Coco. Before coming to Pixar, Jessup was production designer on Walt Disney Pictures' James and the Giant Peach.
Dan DeLeeuw is a visual effects supervisor and second unit director best known for his works on Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
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.
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