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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."
Well now theres no excuse for buying it.. :)
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I remeber seeing most of these in the theater before moives. It still reall impresses me that Luxo was made in 1986. Could you imagine how long that must have taken to render? Anyway it's really neat to be able to see these shorts again.
The first time I read this I thought to myself "Why would I wanna see someone's animated undergarments?"
If it hadn't been for the Luxo Jr. mention, I would have not been enlightened for quite some time.
I just dunno. My value system is mightily screwed up here, guys.
Pixar == Disney distribution == Disney == bad.
but
Pixar == nifty films == good!
but
Pixar == Steve Jobs == Apple == bad!
but
Apple == iPod == lame?
(this is where it gets confusing)
Pixar (also) == Linux == geeky == GOOD!
but
Linux == Pixar films == more money to MPAA == BAD!
but
Linux == less money to Bill Gates == GOOD!
but
Pixar == Apple == Sorenson Codec == BAD!
but
Sorenson Codec == Good Quality at Reasonable Size == GOOD!
but
Pixar == Apple != Linux == BAD!
but
Apple == OSX == BSD == GOOD!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaargh!
Thinking in more than one direction is really confusing. Someone post something about MS embracing and extending something, even if it's just an elastic band. Please? I need my world to be set right again.
Maybe a frogurt?
Alex
Pixar ==> Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs ==> Apple/NeXT
Apple/NeXT ==> MacOS
MacOS ==> QuickTime
Because their bandwidth bill is going to sky rocket today.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
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
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/eo/20011101/en/_quot_ shrek_quot_stalks_quot_monsters_inc_quot__1.html
Disney/Pixar most definitely do not like DreamWorks, and vice versa. Ever notice how Farquad (the villain in Shrek) looks amazingly like Micheal Eisner, and that saying "farquad" fast enough sounds a lot like "fuck wad"? These guys dislike each other on a personal level.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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.
We've come a long way since then !
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.
Does anybody know any better?
I didn't say I didn't like it. It's just that no one would buy it.
A Bugs Life is just Yet Another Disney Film (yawn), which, while enjoyable in a mindless sort of way, is a bit jaded even to my seven year old niece.
Geri's Game, however, is cool. All the Pixar shorts are cool, because they aren't just Yet Another Disney Film. Pixar shorts have originality. While I accept that A Bugs Life isn't targeted at my peer group (well maybe it is targeted at 19 year old Comp Sci students...), it's still a little predictable, even for Disney.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
"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."
:)
Uhm, yeah. You found them, decided no one else could have them, so you submit it to Slashdot knowing that it's the best way of ensuring that their servers will die and that they will remove them again?
Hosting a movie clip of any size and having it posted on Slashdot must be like the ultimate punishment.
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.
Luxo, jr and Geri's Game?
Great shorts, especially Geri's Game.
Saw that when I took the kids to A Bug's Life.
Made the bugs bearable.
I may have to break down and shell out for the Crossover Plugin so that I can play these.
Or -- hmmm. Maybe I can steal the spouse's NT Thinkpad...
She doesn't really need it, right?
I'd like to download the quicktime movies with Mozilla. I don't have a quicktime plugin but I do not want to play them with Mozilla. Just download them so I can play them with whatever I want. Is that possible?
Greetings
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
I'm in the middle of pulling down Knick-Knack (Bobby McFerrin rocks), and the quality of the transfer to QuickTime is definitely not what I would expect from Pixar. It appears that they did a very simple and very quick film-to-video transfer. The registration is poor (the frame jumps vertically), and the brightness of the imagery varies.
But most importantly, I think, is that frames have been dropped. In my opinion, this is nearly fatal to Knick-Knack. Knick-Knack has comic timing down to the frame level, nearly as fine as anything done by Tex Avery. By dropping frames -- believe it or not -- part of the joke is lost. Some jokes are three frames long. In particular, I feel the jackhammer scene and cutting torch scene are almost ruined. It's not simply what he's doing that's funny, but how they show him doing it. Every frame is critical to showing that, and I'm surprised and disappointed that they released even a free version in this condition.
If they do the same thing to For the Birds, it will be ruined, too. They're too wonderful to be seen only in this manner. If you get the opportunity, you owe it to yourself to see them at full frame rate.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Actually A Bug's Life is none other than:
Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.
Seven strangers are recruited to save a village.
Which is also remade as:
The Magnificent Seven,
Three Amigos,
and Galaxy Quest
Amongst others.
It's not that it's "predictable..." It's that we like to be retold/repackaged good stories.
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.
The question I have is, are these Quicktime using a codec that non-Mac, non-Windows folks can view?
;)?
Also, the big argument about Quicktime is "Higher quality, lower bitrate". Does this hold true against MPEG4? DiVX
If Pixar is USING Linux internally, why don't they support it more EXTERNALLY?
And the last question: how does Pixar convert from whatever format they use internally to QuickTime? Are any of these conversion tools available for Linux?
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
No, the original Star Wars displays were done by Larry Cuba. The Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group, which eventually became Pixar was not formed until 1979 (between Star Wars and Empire)
They don't make that much money from RenderMan, their main source now is the animated movies. They don't even do commercials now.
Still if you wanted an open source RenderMan compliant renderer there is AQSIS hosted at Sourceforge.
AQSISAnd there are many others (mostly closed).
I have the For The Birds sneak peak mirrored on Morpheus/KaZaa. Search for ftb_sneak_320.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
Very true except that Monsters Inc. was produced by John Lasseter and directed by one of the previous top pixar animators. A minor detail.
I really like the Phantom Menace commentary because it has so many different people talking about how they made the movie, not just George Lucas. That is what a commentary should be I think. The only thing that could have been better would be to have some of the actors on it. How cool would be to have the actor who did the voice of Jar Jar justify himself or Natalie Portman talking about what it was like. Moderators please note that this is actually a contexual use of Natalie Portman.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I think the first movie done by what would become Pixar is Star Wars, they did computer readouts of the Death Star.
As someone else pointed out, Larry Cuba did this. The first movie work done by the Lucasfilm Computer division (later Pixar) was the Genesis demo in Star Trek II. The simulated Death Star display in Return of the Jedi was their second job. (I have first-hand knowledge of both of these.)
-Tom Duff
Its already on the net.
But the quality is much lower than
you get in theatre.
That's the worst haiku I've ever read.
Inform them that their lack of quicktime support for linux is hurting their bottom line.
Because a bunch of geeks can't freeload short movies off their server? This is hurting their bottom line?
Wouldn't it be a lot nicer if they could have posted VCD-ready mpeg files (or better yet, SVCD-ready mpeg2)?
Yes, I'll still download the quicktime files and convert them with TMPENC and then burn them to VCD (so I can watch on my DVD player). I'd imagine many other people will do the same.
I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm glad they released these. I'm just surprised that no one seems to ever release VCD-ready files.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I think you're talking about "Reds Dream".
As with most Pixar work, there's a strong procedural texture look to the thing. All those Pixar people, endlessly writing separate Renderman shader code for each material. I didn't see anything that was clearly a photographed texture in the Monster world. It's not photorealism; it's procedural cartooning.
This looks like a lower-budget job than the previous films. Fewer scene changes and more background reuse. No big technical innovations. More of a kid's film than previous Pixar output. Don't expect "Shrek".
Worth seeing, but don't rush to a theater.
Actually while Red's Dream does involve a clown and a dream he might be referring to Bingo. It was produced internally by Alias/Wavefront under the direction of Chris Landreth, to test the newly created Maya. It premiered at SIGGRAPH 98 in Orlando. You can see it here:
Chris Landreth portofolio at Maya MastersYou can also get it on video and DVD. It's included in the SIGGRAPH 98 video review of the Electronic Theatre, and at least in one of the Odysey 3D DVDs/videos (some others also included many classic animation and shorts by PDI among others):
Issue 125: SIGGRAPH 98 Electronic Theater Program
Computer Animation Marvels
Believe it or not, QuickTime runs alright with recent builds of WINE. Buggy interface, but then, I never found the interface that great to start with. :)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.