INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Toy Story was the first feature length film released by Pixar and has gone on
to become a billion dollar franchise
In the opening scene of Toy Story, released in 1995, a cluster of boxes is scattered
The sun streams into the room as a Mr Potato Head doll demands money from a seemingly stricken cast of plastic and plush toys outside a
Into the picture arrives the hero - a cowboy sheriff made of plastic and fabric with a pull-string to make him speak
The sheriff casts a shadow over the villainous potato who flees from the law
It's a scene plucked from a child's imagination
It was also the culmination of decades of development in computer animation
This year two of the men behind those advancements, Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, are the recipients of the Turing Award
The award recognizes "lasting and major" contributions to the field of computing and is considered to be the "Nobel Prize" of computer
The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery and comes with a $1m cash prize split between the winners
Computer animation Dr Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar, the studio behind Toy Story, and Dr Hanrahan, one of Pixar's early employees,
were notified of their win in early March
It gave the two old friends and former colleagues just enough time to meet for a celebratory meal before coronavirus lockdown measures were
put in place in California, where they both live.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Pixar Studio was "a magic
place" to work according to Pat Hanrahan who helped the studio develop the software that makes 3D images
"The digital
revolution we have seen in all kinds of movies, television, games - probably no one made more of the difference to that then Ed and Pat,"
says David Price, author of the book The Pixar Touch
To make Toy Story and other computer-animated films possible, Dr Catmull, Dr Hanrahan and their teams had to develop ways to get computers
to visualize three-dimensional objects
During his postdoctoral studies, Dr Catmull created a way to make a computer to recognize a curved surface
Once developers had a mathematically defined curve surface they could begin to add more features to it - like texture and depth
"Step by step you figure out what kind of lighting should be applied
Then you begin to put in the physics of it because plastic reflects light one way and metal reflects it in a very different way," Dr Catmull
Dr Catmull had always had an interest in animation and film
After earning, his doctorate and working in a graphics lab in New York, he eventually became the head of computer division of Lucasfilms,
The creator of Star Wars and Jurassic Park saw the potential of computer animation in movies
But Dr Catmull's says his dream to make a feature-length computer animated film was still seen as "wildly impractical"."Most people
dismissed the idea as an irrelevant pipe dream." Pixar is bornIn 1986 the Apple founder Steve Jobs came along
He bought Lucasfilms' computer division and turned it into a standalone company, Pixar
At first, the firm tried to sell computer hardware
When that failed to take off, Pixar refocused on computer imagery.Image copyrightEd CatmullImage caption
Pat Hanrahan
(left) left Pixar in 1989 but contributions helped Ed Catmull and the remaining Pixar team develop their feature films
Dr
Hanrahan was one of the company's earliest employees
He was put in charge of creating a minimum standard for the way computer code is used to describe images
"Pixar was a magic place," says Dr Hanrahan who now teaches at Stanford University
He oversaw the creation of RenderMan - the software Pixar uses to create its 3D animation - working with teams from across the industry
Shading and lightCrucially Dr Hanrahan worked out how to visualize how light reflects off of different surface
On surfaces like human skin some of the light passes through or is absorbed
Getting this level of light and shade right gave the images a computer could create a realistic look
RenderMan has been used to create animated films like Toy Story and Pixar's A Bug's Life
It was also essential for visual effects of live-action films including Terminator 2, Titanic and Jurassic Park
Developments in computer animation drove the video gaming industry as well as advancements in virtual and augmented reality
And its progress has been tied closely to advancements in machine learning
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Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 and Ed Catmull became the president of Pixar and
Disney animation
"Waiting for computers to catch upAccording to Dr Catmull, sharing work across the industry and with other
sectors allowed for the bigger breakthroughs, particularly processing power Computers of the 1980s and 1990s had only a fraction of the
processing power laptops and smartphones have today
"[A lack of processing power] definitely was a limiting factor," Dr Catmull explains
"You had to almost bide your time working on the algorithms for the compute power to catch up with the ideas that we had."But even today
computer animated films rely on small armies of animators
"It's a very labour-intensive process, we still have to do a lot of things manually," says Dr Hanrahan
"If you just want to have a character walk around a world and have a human-like motion that makes you think it's natural, that's a huge
crucial it still is to share learning across fields.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Steve Jobs was mostly
hands-off but offered an honest outside voice to Pixar's developers
Though Steve Jobs, was known as a very secretive leader
at Apple, Dr Catmull says at Pixar he was far more open and understood the need to share innovations."Publishing was one of the things that
helped us attract the best people
Getting the best people was far more important than any single idea and Steve understood that," says Dr Catmull.Creations that last Mr Job's
was also an essential outside voice for Pixar's films; he didn't work on them, but would drop in to give his opinion
One of the memorable things he told the Pixar team was that while computers would be thrown away every few years, the films they were
creating would last for generations.This is only the second time the award has been given for advancement in computer graphics
The official ceremony to present the Turing Award is scheduled for June 2020
The outbreak of coronavirus may have meant few people noticed when the announcement of Dr Catmull and Dr Hanrahan's achievement was made
But with millions of people across the globe locked down in their homes, it is certain many have been watching the films these men made
