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Big Blue to take on Pixar?
spareacct1 writes "USAToday is reporting that IBM is set to announce a strategic partnership with Threshold Digital Research Labs of Santa Monica, CA. TDRL now hopes it has the deep pockets and computing power to take on Pixar as the undisputed leader in CG animated films. TDRL's spartan website is showing off digital stills. Interesting sidebar at the end of the story, both Pixar and TDRL recently dumped Sun and MS, respectively, in favor of Linux."
Pixar's movies are good because of their people, not their computers. They've got good artists, good directors, and amazing writers. Without those, you end up with movies like Final Fantasy: technically adept, but ultimately empty and pointless.
You don't just need big computing power, you need design & drawing skills, besides lots of creativity and imagination.
I could have all the computing power and still not be able to do something worth watching.
It doesn't matter if IBM is providing your Linux tech support, and it doesn't matter how pretty the pixels are.. What's important is that the movie is good, and I've never even heard of this company before.
After looking at the article and TDRL's website, the more interesting side of the story seems to come from the USA Today article, specifically IBM's new goal to make computing power a utility such that on demand computing can be purchased just like the power/water/gas utilities of today. The animation stills from TDRL are ok, but nothing spectacular. I've seen more realistic stills come out of a skilled single artist with Maya (see here). The incredible results that Pixar has been able to achieve through their research into rendering technology (ie. RenderMan) combined with artistic prowess have brought them success, and I fail to see how the Terminator 2 producer merely acquiring processor power brings TDRL into a position to challenge the best in the field.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
well, believe it or not, but PIXARs success isn't really because of their rendering power -- true enough, the realism and rendering techniques used in their latest productions has contributed to making images better, but they've always had the edge when it comes down to the thing that matters: storytelling and keeping the audience interested. Look at their older shorts and their more recent feature films, the story is the main driving force.
While Final Fantasy looked quite amazing, the story and the movie just didn't fit in like most of the PIXAR movies. PIXAR makes movies for the whole family which people enjoy on different levels (best example, toy story 2) -- Shrek was a very welcome break from the PIXAR dominance, but not because it wasn't made by pixar, more because of a great story supported by a nice screenplay and good animation (it's more about how you use the tools, not that the end result has been raytraced with molecular precision)..
If they're able to produce films that would be entertaining even if they were hand drawn by a five year old, then the rendering power comes to good use; not the other way around.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
So IBM's supplying hardware as a showcase of their new initiative. It's hardly 'taking on Pixar'. I bet IBM would love to do business with Pixar, too. Do people say that IBM's "taking on the XBox" by supplying the processor in the Gamecube?
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Hire some talented writers and storytellers. Contrary to popular opinion, Pixar's success had much less to do with the CGI than with traditional old storytelling skill. Pumping money into the technology side at the expense of people will result in a big financial loss.
Just ask Sony.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Steve Jobs is the Chairman of the company he co-founded which just entered an alliance with IBM for microprocessors.
Steve Jobs is the Chairman of the company he bought from ILM which just entered a battle with IBM for computer procduced films.
Reality is stranger than fiction.
Yes, they did the effects for MK as well as Scary Movie, Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob, The Afterlife, The Faculty and soon Foodfight.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Hewlett-Packard has announced that they will be writing children's novels in attempt to compete with JK Rowling- "With our experience in building and designing excellent printers, as well as photo-grade papers and color inks, we see no reason we shouldn't be able to write great books." Currently HP is working on it's first book, "Harry Plotter and the Unholy Army of Third-party Ink-cartridge Refurbishers". USB cable not included.
Sure, processing power is a crucial part of it, but it's only necessary for advancing the state-of-the-art in computer graphics.
In each movie that Pixar takes, it takes about 8 hours to render each frame (or so I've read in numerous locations) and you can see that with the increasingly "less-computery" look of their movies as processing power has increased for each one.
This brings me to the point that I'm intending on making: the realism of the graphics is not what makes a great movie, it's the quality of the story and all that. I saw Toy Story again the other week and it looks so dated now compared to say Monsters Inc. It was still a thoroughly entertaining movie though because it was a good story.
I love CG films, but I admit that the main reason I love seeing them is to see what new effects and advancements have been made, which is why Pixar films are so great to me.. they're always advancing the state-of-the-art.
Damnit, now I've just contradicted the original point I was trying to make! Hrmm... BRING ON THE CG FILMS!
"After running our RenderMan benchmarks, we can now say that the G5 is the fastest desktop in the world"
This according to Pixar president Ed Catmull, who is an early booster of the Power Mac G5. An introduction video for the Power Mac G5 posted to Apple's own Web site features Catmull explaining that the G5 allows Pixar animators to show frames at full resolution.
This comes amid speculation of a Rendezvous-enabled (G5) Xserve rendering cluster, which would allow 3D shops to set up a plug-and-play rendering cluster which works in conjunction with RenderMan. Couple this with the availability of other 3D applications like Maya, and of course the sheer number of other production and DV applications like Photoshop, AfterEffects, Final Cut Pro, and Shake and the Mac seems to become an ideal platform for 3D production.
Seriously, their technology is two generations away from a Best Picture Oscar.
How many reading this cried during Finding Nemo?
Me, too.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Unless you're going to replicate the entire Pixar team, company X (Dreamworks, TDRL, anyone...) is never going to be Pixar.
As if the bleedingly obvious has to be stated here, but Pixar have a long history of digital animation, and their films have never been about the technology, it's always about telling a great story.
The technology simply provides a platform from which to elevate their incredibly rich narratives and ideas to another level. Should Pixar ever reach the boundaries of their current technolgies (software and/or hardware) I'm guessin' they will find something else, or some other alliance that will provide them with a powerful platform which will support their creativity.
There is no doubt that they do this already. RenderMan, provides them with the flexibility to (re)develop their own software when requirements upon it change.
I wouldn't bind my creativity to anything - would you?
It's a myth that Pixar are uncontested when it comes to digital features (as it states in the article). For example:
(1) Blue Sky Studios made a little movie called Ice Age.
(2) Pacific Data Images made a little movie called Shrek, and also released the 2nd ever computer generated feature, Antz (the official site, Antz.com seems dead).
Here's another myth:
While Pixar's rendering techniques are *good*, they aren't necessarily cutting edge when it comes to technology. Blue Sky uses raytracing for their images. This gives them features like caustics, global illumination and efficient curved surfaces. Curves in particular had a huge advantage through memory efficiency for their render farm - meanwhile Pixar's render nodes were crashing because of scene complexity simulating curves through polygons. Sure, Pixar's movies are impressive, but I can't help but think they'd do better without clinging to some legacy baggage that comes with Renderman.
Anyway - the technology is overhyped. It's just a better pencil. Story, story, story is what counts. Disney can probably afford to take longer developing scripts. This is why you can have something as gorgeous as the Final Fantasy movie and have it completely suck at the box office; and Disney flicks don't look so great, but sell well.
Yeah, well you might live in a fantasy land where talent and creativity are the prime components of a good film...
But IBM is better placed to synergize the business potential of the graphics medium. Personally, I can't wait to see what will happen with the structural dynamics of Rational Rose hits the big screen in an animated short.
Like many of the Slashdot crowd, I absolutely love Pixar's movies (and shorts). Not only for the visuals (which are always stunning) but also the great stories.
I recall seeing somewhere, many many months ago, a comment from someone at Pixar saying that part of the key to their success is that they take artists and teach them how to use computers, instead of taking computer people and teaching them how to be artists. Many of Pixar's best people are alums or the California Institute of Arts (including John Lasseter). [There are many in-jokes through Pixar's movies that are refernces to Cal Arts).
Can't wait for "Cars" or "The Incredibles" to hit theaters.
CyberDave
Will you people stop saying "It's the story, not the graphics"? Yes, we know. We knew before you told us. Even if we hadn't known, reading it 3 million times on the posts here would have clued us in. Your 3 million and 1st wasn't necessary.
That said, if IBM hires good writers then they can make good movies too. Pixar's stories are good. They're very good. They're not, however, the greatest stories ever written, and people don't collapse to their knees at the end of the film, weeping copiously in gratitude for being permitted to see such movies.
May show some 'rendering skills' but it shows zero artistic merit. The page seriously has the esthetic merit of some Geocities page who's proprietor just learned about the 'lenses flair' function in Photoshop...
Just about everyone in every industry says stuff like "We are going to be the next [industry leader". It hardly ever happens. If these guys actually want to take on Pixar, they are going to need some real artists.
Btw, has anyone noticed how much poorly done cg is out there in the movies now? I mean, when CG was all new and novel it was always so well done, Jurassic park looked real to me, but the CG in League of Exceptional Gentlemen (not a movie that I had really planned on seeing) was horrible. Even the CG in spider-man was pretty hokey (but there the movie was rescued by a good plot)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Pixar is migrating to OS X, primarily because of the G5. Pixar's OS/machine of choice seems to vary with the wind, whatever is the most powerful at the time. It seems that they believe the G5 is where it's at in the near future.
They're posting jobs for techs to assist in a migration to OS X.
My heart be still.
I am shocked. What is this world coming too?
http://saveie6.com/
Its funny, they talk about how they want to be the leader in CG animated films, but most of the stills that they show on their website are taken from movies with CG/film composites. I think there are only three frames from animated movies. As far as I am concerned, ILM seems to be the leader in this field. Just look at Star Wars Ep. II or even more recent is the Pirates of the Caribbean. I would imagine that if ILM was to ever make a totally CGI movie, it would blow most others out of the water as far as effects are concerned. Also, they have years and years of experience in making movies, which is often more important than who has the fastest servers and the best pixel shaders.
SIGFAULT
"The Faculty", a rather insipid and forgetable sci-fi film from the mid-to-late 90s for the teeny bopper set. It was about alien pod people and that sort of thing, I suppose that it was supposed to be a message about conformity or whatever, like the "in crowd", or whatever that equally forgetable film was.
Don't you just find mass market media, preaching to teens about conformity to be wonderfully ironic?
I suppose that I should talk about Pixar though. Some of their movies have been all right, people have been saying that they have great writers and all of that. The animation I can respect, but the writing isn't anything out of the world. Really, if it wasn't for the fact that the films were fully computer animated they would just be standard fare, but as of right now we have this love affair with all things tech.
Of course the writing is far better than a great number of a lot of the schlock they throw at us in order to keep us pacified.
Of course, visually Pixar films aren't much without all of the fun gloss of the computer animation, it all seems to be pretty standard format kinds of things, but I guess they really aren't the kinds of films to delve into the artistic side of things. I like them, I don't love them, not tha tanyone cares.
They simply don't have the talent to take on Pixar. It's a "B" movie house. The place is run by a guy named Larry Kassanoff (sp?) who made his fortune with movies such as Mortal Kombat. He has no love for cartoons or animation like the Pixar staff does.
I saw what the projects Threshold had in the development pipeline last year. While I can't give specifics, nothing they had was worth making into an animated feature.
In my opinion, the only two studios that can even attempt to take on Pixar are Dreamworks and Sony.
Heat dissipation is a MAJOR, HUGE factor is clustering. The G5's extremely low power output is undoubtedly a big selling point for G5 clusters. You think climate control for a cluster of AMD chips is cheap? It's hard enough to keep ONE Athlon XP cool, let alone a few hundred.
PIXAR has what really counts: audience mindshare.
They also have something else that really counts with the paying public, which is a terrific track record. If a PIXAR movie and a TDRL movie were released on the same weekend, which one would you choose? 99% would go with the sure bet, and that's PIXAR.
TDRL/IBM would be better served going after the Dreamworks market. Other than Shrek, Dreamworks last couple of animated films were box-office disappointments. Sinbad, in particular, has been a collossal bomb for them. But that just proves my point, Sinbad was released so close to Finding Nemo that the audience for animated features choose the one they knew would not disappoint.
The dynamics of what makes PIXAR the undisputed king of computer animated movies has very little to do with technology and everything to do with satisfying audience expectations.
I will try to be original. Everyone here repeats the same argument that story is important, talent is important, technology will get you nowhere. I respectfully disagree.
.Bakshi's film). BTW, regarding Bakshi. Notice how everyone critisized the rotoscopy, which didn't work too well. The story there was on par with PJ's lame effort, but the technology wasn't there and Bakshi lost. Point proven - technology is the king.
Look at the story of Two Johns. Romero tried the "Design is King" technology and look where it got him. And look what we got - a terrible mess called Daikatana. His friend Carmack, on the other hand, is probably unable to comprehend that there might be things more important than the rendering pipeline or pixel shaders, but all id games still sell like crazy.
Why do you think the animated movies should be different? Good technology is essential, it empowers the artists, it enables the directors. The story is the cheapest and easiest thing in the whole business. For 1 million you can have the script written by the greatest scriptwriter (whoever he is). And still 1 million is just a small fraction of total costs. Even easier, everyone can use any public domain story like Disney always does. It is even possible to clone other successful films, like the Hollywood industry is often doing.
Yet, to render the underwater world beautifully you need the technology. To do it cheaply you need extensive technological expertise, you need programmers, you need hardware specialists, network engineers, etc. Consider The Two Towers. Where would that movie be without Gollum (we survived because of ME!), glorified CGI fest called Helm's Deep battle, storming of Isengard and other digital goodies? It would be just another crappy flick (no, it won't be good just because it is based on LOTR, look how they butchered the story and, anyway, remember
P.S. And don't say anything about Final Fantasy. It was a first attempt, some argue it was too complex for unsofisticated American public and, anyway, it failed to a large extent because the technology failed (as everyone agrees, animation was stiff and unnatural blah-blah-blah).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
According to Pixar, Toy Story 2 does not count as one of the five, being a sequel. So we will get another film: 'The Incredibles' The trailer is here
to use a cliche, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. an accurate rendition of something done by something other than a photograph is an impressive feat. the way they accurately (re)produced scenery, vehicles, and people the way they did was amazing to me. i find things that amaze me beautiful.
You're still not right. Disney and Pixar renegotiated their contract in the early days, following the success of Toy Story. I can't remember at what point, though. There are at least 2 more films coming out. The Incredibles, as you mentioned. I belive the other is tentatively titled Cars.
And all of a sudden, they're a "filmmaker"
Pixar president Dr Ed Catmull has said on record that the dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac is the fastest desktop computer for RenderMan to be released for Mac OS X very soon.
Look at the IMDB top 50 animation features. Pixar and Studio Ghibli combined share most of the top ten popular user votes. Disney is further down the ladder, their new stuff fails to captivate the audiences the way the other two studios mentioned do. This is no coincidence -- these studios wins out against their competition because of creative talents and skillful directors, the technology employed is not the answer.
Studio Ghibli and Pixar are masters at production design and storytelling, and their works have appeal to children and adults alike. You could argue that Pixar has put out a few 'buddy' pictures following a very safe and mainstream formula, but generally both Ghibli and Pixar pursues original works that aren't derivative.
Disney on the other hand, is content with stealing from other sources and perpetually rehashing their own tired 'success' formulas, often compromising style, pace and adult interest with jarring diversions and noisy, needless extra characters crammed in by accountants and suits in order to sell a few more McDonald's toy tie-ins.
Ghibli and Pixar's stuff is immensely marketable, but that seems like an emergent property, something coincidental rather than the very reason for the production to exist. Compared to Disney, Ghibli and Pixar's studio structures seem to have much thinner strata of lawyers, accountants and other suits for ideas to percolate through, which means more direct creative control from directors and production designers.
This produces richer and much more satisfying features than the bland and safe works that always result from too many suits in a creative design process.
The secret weapon of Studio Ghibli is Hayao Miyazaki. The secret weapon of Pixar is John Lasseter. Tech doesn't have anything to do with it.