Film: The Renderman Pixar

Disney’s stock has outperformed the S&P 500 since 2009 and in 2013 they generated revenues of 45 billion dollars. The company has continues to grow and over the last 5-10 years have aggressively been pursuing a diversification strategy. Disney has acquired the rights to Marvel, Pixar, and Playdom, which they believe will help their brand grow. However, while focusing on developing other aspects of their company I believe that they have lost track of what made Disney so successful to begin with animated movies. My recommendation for Disney is put out more then two animated movies per year, because if these movies are successful it will over them more opportunities to diversify then any other acquisition.

Disney; although they have made some great strides they tend to fall back into their old habits quite easily. Some may say that modern Disney has become progressive however; there are many others who would beg to differ. In today's modern age we cannot talk about Disney without mentioning Frozen. Frozen came out in 2013 and is loosely based off the 1844 tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. The film focuses on sisterly love which is unusual for a Disney films. More often than not Disney films follow a strict outline and have key elements which can be traced in every film. For instance, the prince saves the damsel in distress and there is usually a goofy animal sidekick as well as, comedic music to develop the characters personality and emotions.

The speech “The magic ingredient that brings Pixar movies to life” was presented in November 2015 by Danielle Feinberg, who has been working as a director of photography at Pixar Animation Studios since 1997. Her speech shared her passion for making cartoons, and also revealed “the magic ingredient” behind Pixar’s favorite movies. According to Mrs. Feinberg, “lighting” is a key tool to set up a scene, create the settings and mood, and attract the audiences to the movies. Specially, it is also a process of making animations, in which animators can bend rules of science to make scenes more gorgeous.

Animation began as simple pencil drawings accumulated to create a seamless moving image and later advanced to what we see today on the big screens: highly advanced visual details and effects created in 3D rather than 2D. With every advancement and change there will be changes behind the scenes as well. In the article “Problems within Animation Industry” by Min Young Kim, she argues there are repercussions for the technological advances in the animation field, but does not execute her argument well in means of rhetorical effectiveness.

Additionally, this would make animated movies very time consuming and labor intensive that would spike the cost of production of movies. (movie) Early animated movies had a large animation staff for the movies along with a high budge however the movie Toy Story only required 3/4 of the budge and it only required 1/8 of the animation staff to design and produce. (movie) In addition, to this movie being low cost director John Lasseter created the first team production through Pixar and Disney.

Rendering is the act of translating all of the information in the files that make up the shot, (sets, colours, character movement), into a single frame of film. Pixar's RenderMan is a computer system that interprets the data. Pixar's RenderMan software "draws" the finished image by computing every pixel of the image from the model, animation, shading, and lighting

One thing that has always given me interest is the process through which Disney movies go through in order to wow us like they always do. Both Disney Animation and Pixar movies focus mainly on being number one over Dreamworks movies and any other cartoon producers in the industry. Looking closely though, I realized there is more to it than just drawing and speaking for the characters. There’s a process that can last from months up to years. Let’s take a look firstly at how Disney Animated movies are made.

Disney is always being bashed about how they portray girls as being beautiful and skinny or how the portray ethnic groups in their movies. Disney also is haggled about being a monopoly and taking over other companies to be the only ones. Disney has been around since 1923, which Walt Disney and his brother started making short films about Mickey Mouse. They began to grow rapidly and eventually became the powerhouse they are today. In this quote by Alexandre Bohas professor at University of Paris says, Major Hollywood studios such as Disney wield a power which comes from a material and ideational preponderance in global markets through the transnational scope of product and symbolic universes”(Bohas). Disney’s Portrayal as a monopoly, its marketing to children and its views from the public eye.

Visual development is the process before film where artists put together their ideas visually. This aids the animators with deciding how the film looks. Visual development was not a popular mechanism in animation until the 1940’s where Walt Disney began making feature films. In order to successfully create the beautiful animation we know today, Disney used visual development as a way to show his animators what to include in the film. To prepare for a successful animated feature film or show, one would need character and set designs, film language, the correct color palette, and a sense of lighting.

The most notable film released by Pixar is of course Toy Story. „Toy Story represents a major achievement in the field as being the first full-length computer-generated film“ (Wells, 2008) when it launched in 1995. Until this, all the animated films were mainly hand drawn, which had been the gold-standard in animation for decades. Even though classical animation was thriving, it had its limitations. One of the biggest drawbacks was the limited movement of the scenes. This was because every single frame had to be mainly hand drawn (Max, 2016), which is a very meticulous and time consuming process. The cost of production was another reason to make the switch, digital animation being way cheaper than traditional animation. When the motion picture was released, the concept of an animated feature film made entirely on a computer was unheard of. At the time, it was the most visually impressive film released. Pixar had the advantage of having very talented and focus people, and also proprietary software like RenderMan, which made all of this possible (Nieva, 2015). The film had beautiful photorealistic 3D animation, realistic shadows

Toy Story (Lasseter, 1995) was remarkable for its time by employing animation unlike ever before. Despite previous uses of CGI in other films such as Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991), Toy Story was the first fully computer animated feature-length film. The film’s phenomenal success and critical praise in reviews answered the question of whether or not a computer animated film could garner the attention of an audience and do so in a tasteful manner. Although animated films had been previously produced by Disney via cel animation, the extensive use of computer animation was not executed prior to Disney-Pixar’s release of Toy Story. The technology was simply not available at the time nor were

This year, The Walt Disney Company used its annual shareholders meeting to announce plans for Frozen 2 (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-walt-disney-co-announces-frozen-2-20150312-story.html). They will also release another installation of the Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: The Force Awakens on December 18th, 2015 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/04/02/batman-v-superman-star-wars-and-trailer-debut-musical-chairs/). We believe Disney is poised to enjoy further growth as they produce more franchises like this, which will create significant advancement in every area of the company.

From our research, the percentage of revenue of home videos was almost three times higher than the box office, which shows that the use of animation in the movie industry was not as popular at that time. 2-D animation was the traditional way to produce a movie and was also used for most movies before 3-D animation came out. Therefore, 3-D animation technology still has a lot of room for improvement and development which is one of the opportunities. More information on SWOT analysis is stated in the appendix from Figure 1.

Pixar changed animation forever by introducing new ideas and changing the overall feel for animation forever. One very important trend that Pixar started was the actual slowing down of a movies narrative. Previously, before Pixar, animated movies such as Aladdin or even Beauty and The Beast, both made by Disney, were both very rapidly paced, along with most other animated movie prior to Pixar. Most companies did this because they considered their audiences to be an extremely impatient bunch, specifically children. Pixar however, disproved this theory with Up, Wall-E, and many others. Pixar knew the value of temporarily slowing down a movies narrative. Pixar had faith that it’s audience, including children, would not lose interest during

The entertainment and animations industry has been around for several decades, as early as the cave arts era. Since then, this industry has dramatically changed and has introduced new ways to watch animated films. Disney and Pixar are two huge competitors in the animation development and computer generated imagery (GCI) industry. Computer generated imagery is the process of computer graphics to create realistic images in films, TV and video games. GCI is used to refer to either the two-dimensional or three-dimensional graphics used to create scenes and special effects in films and TV. CGI takes a more realistic approach than traditional ways. The animations trend has changed from traditional, where each frame is drawn by