Profile
e live in a time where entire industries get turned upside-down, reshaped, born and destroyed practically overnight, catalysed by technology which is getting exponentially more powerful every few years. It is a time where innovation and creativity are the tools for survival, where curious minds and dogged determination will thrive and shape the world to come. Alvy Ray Smith was at the forefront of that innovative era, a pioneer who dreamed in pixels and came up with the notion of an entirely computer-generated animation movie long before the technology existed. It was 20 years after he first hatched the idea that Toy Story, the first computer-generated film, was launched on the world. A former director of computer graphics research at Lucasfilm, where he worked with Star Wars director George Lucas, Smith went on become co-founder of Pixar with Ed Catmull but says the notion of film is about to become obsolete. “The word film seems so quaint. There is, or is about to be, no more film,” he says. “There is no more tape either. I am writing a book - a long way from completion, sadly - on the biography of the pixel. I talk there about the great digital convergence that happened around the millennium. All old media types coalesced at that time into one, namely bits.” Smith sees himself as part artist, scientist and technologist: “I learned to paint from my artist uncle. His only rule was that I had to be absolutely silent. So I watched and learned how to stretch canvas, prepare, mix colours, care for brushes, lay out a painting and build it up.” In school Smith excelled in maths and physics and when computers came along he “fell in love”.
Computer graphics group at Lucasfilm. Smith (centre) controlling the remote shutter. Ed Catmull to his right, new hire, John Lasseter, on his left.
“I was also an animation aficionado. I taught myself animation, as have many, from the great Preston Blair’s $1.50 how-to book.” In 1973, while laid up for three months with a broken femur following a ski-ing accident - a time he has described as “one of the most wonderful of my life” - Smith, now aged 73, had time to reflect and concluded he was failing to do anything about his artistic skills. When the cast came off, he went to California in the hope “something good would happen” and in 1974, aged 31, he hit the jackpot. “I stumbled into Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre, the place where computation as we now practice it was being crafted—the personal computer, window-based user interface, the mouse, laser printer, ethernet and colour graphics, the last one being my bit.” He was hired to experiment with the first paint programme in the world, called SuperPaint, and “went nuts”. With his colleague Dick Shoup’s tools, and his knowledge of painting and animation, he set about writing code and inventing computer animation as we now know it. “It was pursuing all this that eventually led to Pixar. My animation love was what bonded me with John Lasseter, Pixar’s star animator, and the best hire of my life.” Lasseter is now chief creative officer at Pixar and Disney. After a productive year, and imbued with new ideas, Smith left Xerox PARC and headed east to join the pioneering New York Institute of Technology’s computer graphics research team where, in 1975, he met Catmull and began a partnership that would last 20 years and revolutionise the motion picture industry. “There was a cel animation team of about 100 people there when we arrived. We learned how animation production works
Smith and his team at Pixar created Toy Story - the first computer-generated film
2014 Jan / Feb 33