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Pixar Finally Offers Animated Shorts on Pixar.com
NicerGuy writes "Today I was bored and decided to check out pixar.com. I hadn't been there in a long time, but was pleasantly surprised to find that they have finally made all(?) of their animated shorts available for download. The films, which are in QuickTime format, include my favorites: Geri's Game and Luxo Jr."
Pixar ==> Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs ==> Apple/NeXT
Apple/NeXT ==> MacOS
MacOS ==> QuickTime
Really nice. Thank you Pixar :)
Why is everybody saying Pixar=Steve Jobs ?
Pixar is John Lasseter, that's all.
He's an artist, and I love all that he has done,
from the very beginning.
I think one of the first 3D computer rendered image that Pixar made and got used in a movie was in "Young Sherlock Holmes", but I am not sure about this...
By the way, if you like short animation movies you can also
go to Aardman, and enjoy some movies from the makers of Chicken Run !
McCartney fans pay bus tickets. [...] Lennon fans too, with discretion.
Whilst this is undoubtedly cool to see the ultimate way to wath the shorts is of course on dvd. Where do I get them you ask? Well we all know Geri's game is on a bugs life but over here in Britain at least there are quite a few shorts on the toy story 1 and 2 box set. Not sure if this was a collectors edition or what but it comes with a third disc with all sorts of lovely goodies on it. Can't remember eactly which shorts are there but Tin Toy certainly is and I think Luxo is too
Codeweavers Crossover allows you to view Apple Quicktime. Shockwave, Ipix, and other Win32 based browser plugins under Linux.
:D ).
:D
it uses Wine, buts in a much more limited and controllable environment, meaning its a lot more stable. It supports any browser which support the Netscape plugin API (Galeon, Mozilla, etc) but bugs in Konq nspluginapi implementation means that Konq and Quicktime is a no goer (currently anyway).
Its twenty US bucks and the cash goes towards the salaries of the fellows who work on the free, main Wine project. it can be clunky at times 9when running Quicktime as a standalone app) but generally its OK. Galeon, OTOH, works with it a treat. I've viewed every single trailer at apple.com with it (to the point of being kicked off my ISP for bandwidth overuse
Version 1.01 is coming out this week, BTW, which apprently fixes a lot of the bugs of earlier versions.
its a good product and worth the small price. The money also goes to a good cause that contributes to the community.
No, I don't work for them
In case you don't know, the director of Luxo Jr. is John Lasseter - the guy who directed the Toy Stories.
Anyway, Luxo Jr. is a classic in computer animation. The most amazing part, is that it is made in 1986. This little movie really pushed the mental limit for people as to what computers could produce. Sure, Lasseter wasn't the only one experimenting at the time, but IMO this particular animation made computer animation respectable as it even got nominated for an Oscar under the category Animated Short Film in 87. Well, it's fun no matter what - check it out.
-Kraft
Live and let live
Unfortunately they haven't relased For the Birds on the net yet. I saw it for the first time back in SIGGRAPH2000 in New Orleans, and everybody loved it. It's just incredibly funny, and so well done.
If I'm not mistaking, the reason it's not up for download yet is because Pixar want to have it nominated for an academy award, for the best animated short. And the academy's rules state a nominee is not allowed to be broadcast on the net or on television, except during animation festivals like SIGGRAPH etc. (Or something to that effect). It was shown at Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Animation Festival however.
It should be submitted to the academy this year. Last year however, a fairly reliable source said a paperwork error made the short miss the submission deadline. If that hadn't been the case I'm sure it'd be up for download aswell.
Renderman is an open API. Photorealistic Renderman is Pixar's implementation. Anyone can make a Renderman compliant render engine. E.g. BMRT is an alternative implementation, free as in beer. It would make little sense for Pixar to GPL it since is what they make money from, it's their main product.
Pixar is a company that has many, many important people working for it. John Lasseter is a very skilled writer/director, but he'd just be another great writer if it weren't for the amazing scientists at Pixar.
People like Ed Catmull, Pat Hanrahan, Tom Duff, Loren Carpenter, Bill Reeves, Andy Witkin, Micheal Kass, David Baraff, Larry Gritz (and the rest) are what truly enable Pixar to make such visually compelling stories. Without Pixar providing a conducive atmosphere for their contributions to computer graphics from an academic pov, we'd be worse off.
There are amazing computer scientists at Pixar, and amazing people holding down the infrastructure. Can anyone imagine the throughput in their LAN during crunchtime?
All said and done, all these fancy algorithms and implementations would be useless without compelling stories and art. Pixar has amazing artists, nobody should overlook that.
Pixar and PDI are stalwarts of the commercial (read entertainment) computer graphics industry, and deservingly so, their contributions (in all forms) cannot be overlooked.
Kawaldeep
replace 'berserkeley' with 'berkeley' to respond via email.
XMMS does have Quicktime support, but none of the Linux Quicktime players can play most Internet movies, because they use the proprietary Sorenson codec, of which there is no Linux port (except for the CodeWeavers plugin that uses Wine).
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I have them on WinMX. I wasn't able to get For the Birds, sorry, search for SLASHDOT_02-11-01 to find them. If someone eles wants to help out see my comment yesterday.
Well Pixar got started first as the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group back in 1979. Back in those days Triple I, one of the pioneer companies in commercial CG, did a test for Lucas that had several CG X-Wings flying around. This was for the FX work in Empire Strikes Back. Art Durinski and Gary Demos were among those involved. Unfortunately they couln't come to financial terms and Lucas opted to continue the traditional way but move ILM to Northern California. But Lucas was so impressed that he decided to start his own CG division. The first guy they hired was Ed Catmull but many others soon followed and the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group was born. They worked on maby things, from the Pixar Image Computer, film scanning, the beginnings of RenderMan and shading languages and digital compositing, among many things. They produced the Death Star hologram for Return of the Jedi. One of the last few things they did was the Andre and Wally B. short, that's why you'll see Lucasfilm credits in there.
But Catmull was always interested in doing animated movies while Lucas was interested in photorealistic effects. So he let Catmull look around and later in 1986 Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs (of course way before he went back to Apple). While Jobs might be the owner, if you want to equate Pixar with someone that would be Catmull (though there are many talented folks there). They also had an agreement that ILM would get first access to any new technology Pixar developed. And the rest as they say is history.
Actually, lovable Steve is the CEO, but not the founder of Pixar. After he left Apple to form Next (1985 I think), he purchased several divisions that Lucasfilm was selling off (presumably to help with NeXT). These were SoundDroid, EditDroid, and Pixar.
Apple == iPod == lame?
Remember that iPod retails for *exactly* the same cost as Toshiba sells the hard drive it contains. That is not lame. The only bad thing is no digital still camera I know of has a firewire output, or you could use it as a 5 gig storage thingie for a digicam, with it easily fitting in your pocket.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.