Steve Jobs & The Birth of Pixar
Visual booknotes for Creativity inc. bestseller - Part 2
We continue in our visual summary for the book “Creativity Inc” by Ed Catmull.
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And now, the summary:
Chapter 2 - Pixar is Born
Ed, still driven by the dream of animated films and now with a PhD in his pocket, found his place leading a research lab at the New York Institute of Technology.
This meant he had to build a team and learn an important lesson:
Even if it is scary, hire people smarter than you.
Ed Catmull was afraid of being outshined by computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith, but he hired him anyway. Alvy later turned out to be crucial to the development of the “Picture Maker,” aka the Pixar Computer!
They now had an A-team of researchers, but without a good story, their animation prowess stayed still kind of flat, their dream of creating computer-animated films needed one more element: Storytellers!
Convincing a creative agency to join them was a complicated endeavor; at the time, Hollywood didn’t care at all about integrating technology... Until...
George Lucas single-handedly changed the industry with Star Wars… Visual effects and computer became cool!
Ed Catmull and his team managed to join Lucasfilm, and with the new prestige of that company and their cutting edge animation tech (the Pixar mentioned above was developed there), they finally managed to woe a star storyteller: John Lasseter.
A year later, at the SICCGRAPH conference 1984, they presented an unfinished short film directed by Lasseter, “The adventures of André and Wally B” showcasing the power of storytelling:
Even if part of the film was in wireframe, nobody really noticed!
They enjoyed their time at Lucasfilm or a while, but after George Lucas’ divorce, financial pressures started to force them to find an investor…
Some potential buyers wanted to keep Ed Catmull but get rid of the team; Ed always refused:
“Without the talents, we were nothing.”
They finally meet a young Steve Jobs, forceful, intense, reminding Ed of the famous “blown away” Maxwell commercial.
After some back and forth (- and Steve Jobs being fired from the Apple board in between -), they come to an agreement:
Pixar is born!
Hope you enjoyed this little visual Journey!
I’m still figuring out the best way to share this book summary, so if you have some suggestion / feedback, I will be grateful 🙂.
The next chapter is live find it here:
