Pixar's Problem Solver: Dr. Michael Johnson Uses Mac OS X to Help on Animated Films (online at http://developer.apple.com/wwdc2002/pixar.html)
"What are you doing here?" Avie Tevanian asked with a smile. After all, Tevanian, senior vice-president of software engineering at Apple, was talking to Pixar technologist Dr. Michael Johnson at the WWDC two years ago Johnson was not an expected attendee that year, but he came to see what was going on with Mac OS X. And it sounds like he's glad he did. Two years later, Pixar Animation Studios, makers of Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc. and other top-selling animated films, has been finding more and more ways to replace their existing Linux, Sun and Windows-based computer systems with Macintosh computers running Mac OS X. The studio's entire team uses Mac OS X not only for creative work, but for workflow and custom application development. The animators, writers, editors, production staff and administrators cite the benefits offered by the UNIX platform, Cocoa, QuickTime, and the powerful graphics technologies that come with Mac OS X.
"We are looking to OS X for the future," Johnson told a full house in a fascinating lunchtime talk on Wednesday at the WWDC.
In order to explain how and why Pixar is using Mac OS X, Johnson guided the audience through an insider's look at the creative and production processes that Pixar Animation Studios uses to create its award-winning films. After setting the stage by explaining many of the time-intensive, often hand-generated work that goes into creating an animation, Johnson then shared a Cocoa "success story." He explained how he built a powerful storyboarding tool in just a few evenings at home using the Cocoa development environment.
Storyboarding is an essential, time-consuming part of the creative process for any film, and for an animated film project, it can consume months or even years. The storyboarding process "goes back to the old days at Disney," Johnson explained. Animated film creation may take four or five years, but more than half of that time is often spent on the story, the editorial and art components.
The storyboarding process starts simply and slowly, as the team begins with "pieces of paper and pencils, and you just try to make each other laugh," Johnson said. It's an endless cycle of drawing, putting storyboards up on a wall, adding some text or dialog, moving things around, trying things out, throwing most of it away, and starting over, again and again.
Recently, a Pixar producer came to Johnson and asked if him if he could create a software tool to animate the storyboarding process. Despite a packed schedule, and not having much time, Johnson got to work-mostly in the evenings after putting his 2-year-old daughter to bed.
Johnson decided to use the Cocoa environment to see how quickly he could assemble a usable tool for the storyboarding process. Johnson recalled, "The first evening, I basically made it work." Remarkably, within a few hours, he had working application, even though it was incomplete and had no interface to speak of.
"The second evening, I added toolbars, icons and printing," he explained. Over the next two nights, he added input from a camera, exporting to QuickTime, printing, even online help! A week after starting the project, Johnson was able to show it to his delighted producer, who was then immediately able to begin saving enormous amounts of time on his new animated film project.
Johnson gives the credit to Mac OS X, saying, "I could not have done this in Linux, not to mention Windows. This is the kind of thing that gets us excited."
Quickly building a storyboarding tool is just one of the potential benefits Pixar may yield by switching to Mac OS X. "What we do is agonizing, it's hard and not interesting. What it ends up with is interesting, but the process is not," Johnson told the audience.
And what happens when you automate the workflow, saving time and effort?
"You can focus on the creative process," Johnson said.
And after Johnson was finished with his remarks, he proclaimed, "And that's all I have to say." And then, like a character in an animated film might do, he silently walked off the stage.
