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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Well there is also a VHS tape called Tiny Toy Stories that has all the classic Pixar Shorts from Luxo Jr. to Tin Toy. It's a bit hard to find but worth. Also from time to time Pixar have given tapes of their shorts (well at least Geri's Game, a months before it was attached to A Bugs Life) at SIGGRAPH. They are not the only ones, Blue Sky Studios also distributed Bunny on DVD at SIGGRAPH, very cool.
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
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.