John Lasseter: Director, VP of Pixar Animation Studios

Director John Lasseter is a pioneer of the computer animation industry,co-director of Disney's new CG film, A Bug's Life, and VP of PixarAnimation Studios. He is a two-time Oscar winner for his creative use ofCG imagery.

John Lasseter sometimes sounds like a proud father who beams over hischild's accomplishments and speculates about his bright future. WhileLasseter is hardly a single father when it comes to the rise of the all-CGfeature film, one could easily call him the genre's godfather.

The genre he helped invent, however, is no longer the exclusive province ofPixar and its partners; major studios around the world are now developingand releasing sophisticated all-CG features. Computer animation's evolutionfrom novelty act to what Lasseter calls "a legitimate art form" has lefthim positive about what might lie ahead for his industry. On the otherhand, it also has him concerned about "the various unglamorous issuessurrounding digital filmmaking."

Among those issues are questions about archival procedures, the lack ofstandardized formats, and the fact that these problems have created theneed for more frame-by-frame crafting of CG animated films. "In the next 25to 50 years as studios grow, technology improves, and CG filmmaking becomesmore popular, our industry will be faced with major issues about how topreserve digital data and keep it fresh and compatible with upcomingformats," he says. "For example, even as software evolves, we face thequestion of when do we, and when don't we, make the software backwardcompatible. We know how to do it, but there are limits to it because ofcost, time, and memory issues. So you sometimes decide not to do it, onlyto be faced with creating a translation method later on in order to bringdata from an old system to a new system. Companies that don't address theseissues will eventually bid farewell to old data."

Lasseter is familiar with this issue because Pixar, in just the three yearssince Toy Story's release, has had to digitally update all its old models,characters, and environments from that project while also creating anupcoming sequel. "We changed our whole system and had to re-work lots ofthose elements," he says. "Sometimes, the complexity of that process makesit more cost-effective to start from scratch and re-model the characterswith newer tools. But if you do that, are you really 'preserving' thosedigital assets?"Lasseter agrees with pundits who claim that, for many years to come, filmwill remain the archival medium of choice. "Disney still archives featureson black-and-white film," he points out. "They shoot films in a processthat allows them to put it on black-and-white film to archive, sinceblack-and-white does not fade like color does, and then put it through acolor wheel to put it back together in the lab in color. Since they haven'tsolved all digital archival problems, they are continuing to do this forright now to protect the images."

The irony of all this, says Lasseter, is that digital technology is movingrapidly toward solving many other problems filmmakers face, even as newones develop. Therefore, he hopes for a method of making feature filmrelease prints identical to master prints with no fluctuation of details.

"I do believe a day will come when high-resolution video projection mightreplace certain aspects of film, in the same way that digital sound hasreplaced magnetic sound in movie theaters," he says. "That would solve theproblem that, even now, we have only rudimentary control over color when wecolor-time film. And color film itself is fickle. By that, I mean, thedifference between a half-stop and a full-stop in color can be dramaticwhen the lab is making release prints. That, in turn, can change the wholelook of your film because, with 2,000 prints of a major motion picturerelease, the variation on those prints can be dramatic.

"For filmmakers, this is very frustrating, because we tend to sweat overevery pixel of a 90-minute movie. To then go to a theater and see that filmscratched, faded, or yellow is frustrating. So, theoretically, greathigh-resolution video projection would permit the creation of a digitalsystem that makes each print identical, screening after screening."

Lasseter concedes that the elimination of film would also lead to theelimination of what he calls "the richness of film grain" or a constantrequirement to digitally replicate it for all movies. "But there are alwaystradeoffs," he says. "We get new technology to solve one problem, but thenwe face an entirely different problem."

He points to A Bug's Life as the best current solution to these competingproblems. Filmmakers, obviously, made that project in a computer and thenplaced it on film. "But we are saving digital video copies of every shot wedo," Lasseter says. "Therefore, my hope is that this will eventually be thefirst digitally created, mastered, and viewed motion picture in history,since the digital saves we are making now will eventually be used forfuture, high-resolution broadcasts. This, right now, is the only way toprepare a current project for future formats. Eventually, I hope technologywill give us simpler alternatives."

Until that time, says Lasseter, digital filmmaking will remain a formatthat requires "painstaking hand-crafting of every single frame," just asfilm has for decades. That is why he prefers the term "PGI"(people-generated imagery) to CG.

"New technology has improved computer animation to the point where you canexpect many different styles to appear in CG animation in the comingyears," says Lasseter. "That is a result of the industry creating moreintuitive tools to make these films. When I started working with thismedium, only the same people making the tools could use them. There was nooff-the-shelf software. Imagine if all paintings were done by the peoplewho mix up the paint. That is what it was like. Now, however, the tools arebecoming more user-friendly, and, therefore, we can include people who aretraditionally trained in art. That is the real advance of the last 10years-getting this medium into the hands of artists.