Edwin Catmull - Life and Career

Life and Career

Edwin Earl Catmull was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Early in life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies such as Peter Pan and Pinocchio and dreamed of becoming a feature film animator. He even made primitive animation using so-called flip-books. However, he assessed his chances realistically and decided that his talents lay elsewhere. Instead of pursuing a career in the movie industry, he used his talent in math and studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah. After graduating, he worked as a computer programmer at The Boeing Company in Seattle for a short period of time and also at the New York Institute of Technology, before returning to Utah to go to graduate school in fall of 1970.

Back at the university he became one of Ivan Sutherland's students and part of the university's ARPA program, sharing classes with Fred Parke, James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay. Catmull saw Sutherland's computer drawing program Sketchpad and the new field of computer graphics in general as a major fundament in the future of animation, which combined his love for both technology and animation, and decided to be a part of the revolution from the beginning. From that point, his main goal and ambition was to make a computer animated movie. During his time there he made two new fundamental computer graphics discoveries: texture mapping, and bicubic patches, and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. He also independently discovered Z-buffering, even though it had already been described 8 months before, by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis. In 1972 Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry, an animated version of his left hand which was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 movie Futureworld, the science fiction sequel to the film Westworld and the first film to use 3D computer graphics. The sequence, known simply as A Computer Animated Hand, was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2011.

In 1974, Catmull graduated again and was hired by a company called Applicon. However, by November the same year he had been contacted by the founder of New York Institute of Technology, Alexander Schure, who offered him the position as the director of the new Computer Graphics Lab at NYIT, an offer Catmull couldn't refuse.

Schure also had a great interest in animation, and was working on a project with an animated feature called Tubby the Tuba. Frustrated with the slow progress, he had been looking for tools that could help speed up the process, which turned out to be the computer graphic facilities at the University of Utah. There he also heard about the man he felt was the right man for the job, Ed Catmull. In his new position, Catmull formed a talented research group working with 2D animation, mostly focusing on tools who could assist the animators in their work. Among the inventions was a paint program simply called Paint which could be seen as an early version of Disney's CAPS, the commercial animation program Tween (used in the video called 3Measure for Measure2), inspired by an experimental computer animation system created by Nestor Burtnyk and Marcelli Wein, that automated the process of producing in-between frames, the animation program SoftCel and other software.

Catmull and his team eventually left 2D animation and started to concentrate on 3D computer graphics, moving into the field of motion picture production. By the end of the 70's, the Computer Graphics Lab was starting to struggle for several reasons and felt there was a lack of actual progress despite the technological development, but their efforts had attracted the attention of some big names in Hollywood. These were George Lucas at Lucasfilm and Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to head up a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio into the entertainment field. Lucas has already made a deal with a computer company called Triple-I, and asked them to create a digital model of an X-Wing fighter from Star Wars, which they did. Even if Lucas decided not to use it, it showed him the potential of CGI. Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith felt Lucas was the right man to work for, and they knew that what Triple-I had done could be done better. Smith went to California for a meeting, that turned out to be a success, and the computer research team at NYIT now had the opportunity to work with computer animation in the movie industry. Catmull was the first to leave, and in 1979 he became the Vice President at the computer graphics division at Lucasfilm.

At Lucasfilm he helped develop digital image compositing technology used to combine multiple images in a convincing way. Later, in 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded Pixar, where Catmull became the Chief Technical Officer. At Pixar, he was a key developer of the RenderMan rendering system used in films such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

After Disney acquired Pixar in January 2006, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger put Catmull and John Lasseter in charge of reinvigorating the Disney animation studios in Burbank. According to a Los Angeles Times article, part of this effort was to allow directors more creative control as collaborators on their projects and to give them the creative freedom to use traditional animation techniques — a reversal of former CEO Michael Eisner's decision that Disney would do only digital animation, which Catmull thought was the wrong idea of how Pixar's films did well.