Steve Jobs Impact on Pixar and Animation

 
Steve Jobs resigned from Apple at the time while he was focusing on the launch of the NeXT computer and he heard the establishment that George Lucas had on a group of creative people that were trying to acquire making a computer generated animation movie. This was in 1986 and there wasn't the technology established yet to create animation, Jobs had his group focus on saleable products. The first product was the Pixar Image Computer, it produced high resolution at the price of $135,000. Only about 100 of them were sold to intelligence and hospitals agencies. It took 10 years for Pixar to raise money to kickstart the company, John Lasseter would make short animations to make money for the company. It wasn't until the release of Toy Story in '96 that was the first success that saved the company from bankruptcy. Jobs and Lasseter teamed up on the idea to make computer generated animation from the inspiration of using technology to tell stories. Since they had children they wanted to be an entertainment industry to tell stories to inspire the next generation of young people to have movies that would withstand the test of time.

Pixar became a very successful company after Toy Story, and the launch of several other movies such as Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life, the Incredibles, Cars...etc. 

Steve Jobs then sold the rights of Pixar to Bob Iger in 2005. He sold Pixar for $7 billion. Jobs saw Pixar as a side project. Jobs was basically the turning point in Pixar to help make the company a success. Many of his peers would say that he had an obsessive compulsive behavior, that he would get obsessed with a project or idea and wouldn't stop thinking about it until he solved the issue or idea. He even designed the building in Silico Valley in northern California, he put a bathroom in the center of the building so people wouldn't be refined to their desks all day. There's even a gym, pool, cereal and pizza bar where the animators can go to release stress and keep their creativity going for films.

The actual process of animation is interesting as well, everything they animate the whole movie through the computer. You have to come up with the concept for the movie, the storyboard process of the whole storyline from scene to scene. The character design for the characters is developed all through traditional pencil and paper then to the computer where there is coding for the character's facial expression. There's a whole process for the lighting, color palette that enhances the scene and emotion, this can all be seen through the angles inside the computer that's how you can capture an entire scene since the camera is in the computer.

Computer animation didn't replace traditional paper and pencil animation but enhancing the process of making a film so the movie can be edited before the movie was put together. Walt Disney had a similar problem there wasn't the technology to see the scenes put together until the end, the time and places to film a movie would then have to be reshoot and rescheduled and make the budget smaller on a cut.

Now Pixar is bigger than ever with even more films and was the first company to beat Disney at the best animated feature film.