American Cinematographer - November 1989 - 103

the model while the shutter

was

open

and

got a little streak in it. Since we were part of
Lucasfilm when we started, we knew to put
into

our

rendering algorithms the artifacts of

motion control. That's the way people are
used to seeing things. We used it first for
Andre and Wally and when I saw it, it was

kind of scary. The picture really came alive."
Once Lasseter has designed the
movement for his various wire frame cre¬
ations and placed them properly in their

backgrounds, the next step is to bring those
models truly to life. This is rendering - inking
and painting with a computer. It is terribly
time consuming - even for a computer. Or in
this case 10 or 12 computers. Each pixel is
given a color. Shadows, reflections, textures
and the motion blur are part of the rendering
step.
Pixar uses a variety of tech¬
niques in the rendering process. For exam¬
ple, many of the textures imposed on
objects are digitized into the computer. The
wood pattern of the floor in Jin Toy was
taken from the conference table in a room
down the hall. Once the texture was in the

computer, it was manipulated and laid down
to look like a hardwood floor.

Rendering a
can take many, many hours.
Even Pixar's director of animation production

single frame

Ralph Guggenheim admits it is the most
daunting part of the process. Pixar's re¬
sponse has been to develop HenderMan, a
3-D scene description interface designed to
transfer scene descriptions from modeling
programs to rendering programs, saving a
considerable amount of time and money.
Once a scene or an element is

rendered, of course, it must be put on film.
As Guggenheim told it, "It's easy to forget
with all the neat things going on out there the modeling, the animating, the rendering that everything has to come together at

point. On Tin Toy things began piling
up waiting to be put together on this
machine a 35mm transport that is pointing

some

^dedolight
A

Surpasses Fresnel Technology

Innovative optical system design (pat. pend.) and precision manufac¬
turing define a new level of performance. A light output comparable
to conventional fixtures of much higher wattage. Economical 100, 50
and 20 watt 12 volt lamps are available - rugged and long-lasting.
Power by battery - camera or car (cigarette lighter). Or
use the AC contol unit, which can power up to four
lights, with accurate setting of the color temper¬
ature to 3000°, 3200° or 3400° Kelvin.

Small size. Lots of
Lots of

at a flat face CRT black-and-white screen.

We shoot our pictures off that screen. There
is a color wheel between the lens and the
screen that effectively gives us 3-strip Tech¬
nicolor on one frame. It is the same basic
idea.

Revolutionary Optical System

light.

tough.

extraordinary focus range.
Really wide. 25 to 1 wide.

A flat field. From
A dream has

edge to edge.

come

true.

information). Each frame was about 1 mega¬

France

byte (1 million pieces of information) by the
time Don Conway, our film output techni¬
cian, got it. But we got each frame in
elements. We would get, for instance, the
baby, Tinny, and the background and we

Great Britain

Soprofilm, 6 Av. G. Rodenbach, B-1030 Bruxelles
Cinequip, 10 Banigan Drive, Toronto Ont. M4H 1E9
Lome Lapham, 206-1099 West 8th Ave., Vancouver B.C. V6H 1C3
Macphon No. 2-2616 16th St. N.E., Calgary Abta. T2E 7J8
Poul Zimmermann, Borgergade 16, DK-1300 Copenhagen
Dimaphot, 16 Rue Clement-Marot, F-75008 Paris
Telefex, 58 Kew Road, Richmond Surrey TW9 2PQ

Italy

De Sisti, via di Torrenova 257, 1-00133 Roma

tel.

Netherlands

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Spain

Compact Light, Wenckebachweg 81, NL-1096 AL Amsterdam
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Switzerland

Bolex, 15 Route de Lausanne, CH-1401 Yverdon

tel.

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FILM GMBH

with 4

"On Jin Toy we were dealing
gigabytes of data (4 billion pieces of

would do the final

compositing here to get

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Tel.:

West

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Germany
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FAX

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American Cinematographer - November 1989

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - November 1989