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John Lasseter: Director, VP of Pixar Animation Studios

Nov 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman

Director John Lasseter is a pioneer of the computer animation industry, co-director of Disney's new CG film, A Bug's Life, and VP of Pixar Animation Studios. He is a two-time Oscar winner for his creative use of CG imagery.

John Lasseter sometimes sounds like a proud father who beams over his child's accomplishments and speculates about his bright future. While Lasseter is hardly a single father when it comes to the rise of the all-CG feature film, one could easily call him the genre's godfather.

The genre he helped invent, however, is no longer the exclusive province of Pixar and its partners; major studios around the world are now developing and releasing sophisticated all-CG features. Computer animation's evolution from novelty act to what Lasseter calls "a legitimate art form" has left him positive about what might lie ahead for his industry. On the other hand, it also has him concerned about "the various unglamorous issues surrounding digital filmmaking."

Among those issues are questions about archival procedures, the lack of standardized formats, and the fact that these problems have created the need for more frame-by-frame crafting of CG animated films. "In the next 25 to 50 years as studios grow, technology improves, and CG filmmaking becomes more popular, our industry will be faced with major issues about how to preserve digital data and keep it fresh and compatible with upcoming formats," he says. "For example, even as software evolves, we face the question of when do we, and when don't we, make the software backward compatible. We know how to do it, but there are limits to it because of cost, time, and memory issues. So you sometimes decide not to do it, only to be faced with creating a translation method later on in order to bring data from an old system to a new system. Companies that don't address these issues will eventually bid farewell to old data."

Lasseter is familiar with this issue because Pixar, in just the three years since Toy Story's release, has had to digitally update all its old models, characters, and environments from that project while also creating an upcoming sequel. "We changed our whole system and had to re-work lots of those elements," he says. "Sometimes, the complexity of that process makes it more cost-effective to start from scratch and re-model the characters with newer tools. But if you do that, are you really 'preserving' those digital assets?" Lasseter agrees with pundits who claim that, for many years to come, film will remain the archival medium of choice. "Disney still archives features on black-and-white film," he points out. "They shoot films in a process that allows them to put it on black-and-white film to archive, since black-and-white does not fade like color does, and then put it through a color wheel to put it back together in the lab in color. Since they haven't solved all digital archival problems, they are continuing to do this for right now to protect the images."

The irony of all this, says Lasseter, is that digital technology is moving rapidly toward solving many other problems filmmakers face, even as new ones develop. Therefore, he hopes for a method of making feature film release prints identical to master prints with no fluctuation of details.

"I do believe a day will come when high-resolution video projection might replace certain aspects of film, in the same way that digital sound has replaced magnetic sound in movie theaters," he says. "That would solve the problem that, even now, we have only rudimentary control over color when we color-time film. And color film itself is fickle. By that, I mean, the difference between a half-stop and a full-stop in color can be dramatic when the lab is making release prints. That, in turn, can change the whole look of your film because, with 2,000 prints of a major motion picture release, the variation on those prints can be dramatic.

"For filmmakers, this is very frustrating, because we tend to sweat over every pixel of a 90-minute movie. To then go to a theater and see that film scratched, faded, or yellow is frustrating. So, theoretically, great high-resolution video projection would permit the creation of a digital system that makes each print identical, screening after screening."

Lasseter concedes that the elimination of film would also lead to the elimination of what he calls "the richness of film grain" or a constant requirement to digitally replicate it for all movies. "But there are always tradeoffs," he says. "We get new technology to solve one problem, but then we face an entirely different problem."

He points to A Bug's Life as the best current solution to these competing problems. Filmmakers, obviously, made that project in a computer and then placed it on film. "But we are saving digital video copies of every shot we do," Lasseter says. "Therefore, my hope is that this will eventually be the first digitally created, mastered, and viewed motion picture in history, since the digital saves we are making now will eventually be used for future, high-resolution broadcasts. This, right now, is the only way to prepare a current project for future formats. Eventually, I hope technology will give us simpler alternatives."

Until that time, says Lasseter, digital filmmaking will remain a format that requires "painstaking hand-crafting of every single frame," just as film has for decades. That is why he prefers the term "PGI" (people-generated imagery) to CG.

"New technology has improved computer animation to the point where you can expect many different styles to appear in CG animation in the coming years," says Lasseter. "That is a result of the industry creating more intuitive tools to make these films. When I started working with this medium, only the same people making the tools could use them. There was no off-the-shelf software. Imagine if all paintings were done by the people who mix up the paint. That is what it was like. Now, however, the tools are becoming more user-friendly, and, therefore, we can include people who are traditionally trained in art. That is the real advance of the last 10 years-getting this medium into the hands of artists.

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
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