Edwin Catmull

Edwin Catmull, Ph.D. (born 1945 in Parkersburg, West Virginia) is an Academy Award winning computer scientist and current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics. Catmull is a recipient of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, the highest technical honor bestowed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Biography
Early in life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies such as Peter Pan and Pinocchio and dreamt of becoming a feature film animator. He even made primitive animation using so-called flip-books. However, he assessed his chances realistically and decided that his talents lay elsewhere. Instead of pursuing a career in the movie industry, he used his talent in mathematics and studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah. After graduating, he worked as a computer programmer at The Boeing Company in Seattle for a short period of time, before returning to Utah to go to graduate school in fall of 1970.

Back at the university he became one of Ivan Sutherland's students, sharing classes with Fred Parke, James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay. Catmull saw Sutherland's computer drawing program Sketchpad and the new field of computer graphics in general as a major element in the future of animation, which combined his love for both technology and animation, and decided to be a part of the revolution from the beginning. During his time there he made three fundamental computer graphics discoveries: Z-buffering (independently from Wolfgang Straßer who described it 8 months before Catmull in his PhD thesis ), texture mapping, and B-spline|bicubic patches, and invented algorithms for anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces.

In 1973 Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry, an animated version of his left hand. This animation was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 movie Futureworld, the science fiction sequel to the film Westworld and as a result, the first film to use 3D computer graphics.

In 1974, Catmull graduated again and was hired by a company called Applicon. However in November the same year he was contacted by the founder of New York Institute of Technology, Alexander Schure, who offered him the position as the director of the new Computer Graphics Lab at NYIT. Schure had a great interest in animation, and was working on a project with an animated feature called Tubby the Tuba. Frustrated with the slow progress, he had been looking for tools that could help speed up the process, which led him to Catmull's work in the computer graphic facilities at the University of Utah.

In his new position at NYIT, Catmull formed a research group working with 2D animation, mostly focusing on tools who could assist the animators in their work. Among the inventions was a paint program (simply called Paint) which resembled an early version of Disney's CAPS, the commercial animation program Tween (used in the video called Measure for Measure) that automated the process of producing in-between frames, the animation program SoftCel and other software.

Catmull and his team eventually left 2D animation and started to concentrate on 3D computer graphics, moving into the field of motion picture production. By the end of the 70's, the Computer Graphics Lab had attracted the attention of George Lucas at Lucasfilm, who wanted to create his own computer group with Industrial Light and Magic. Lucas contacted Catmull in 1979 and offered him the role of Vice President at the computer graphics division at ILM.

At ILM Catmull helped develop digital image compositing technology used to combine multiple images in a convincing way. Later, in 1986, Steve Jobs bought ILM's digital division and founded Pixar, where Catmull became the Chief Technical Officer. At Pixar, he was a key developer of the RenderMan rendering system used in films such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

After Disney acquired Pixar in January 2006, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger put Catmull and John Lasseter in charge of reinvigorating the Disney animation studios in Burbank. According to a Los Angeles Times article, part of this effort was to allow directors more creative control as collaborators on their projects and to give them the creative freedom to use traditional animation techniques — a reversal of former CEO Michael Eisner's decision that Disney would do only digital animation.

Awards
In 1993, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Catmull with his first Academy Award "for the development of PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance." In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Again in 1996, he received an Academy Award "for pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing". In 2001, he received an Oscar "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan." In the 81st Academy Awards (2008) Catmull was awarded with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which honors "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry."

Interviews

 * Networker magazine interviews Ed Catmull
 * Fantastic Voyage: Guardian Unlimited interviews Ed Catmull, president of Pixar
 * SIGGRAPH Interviews Edwin Catmull
 * Stanford business school students of the iinnovate blog interview Ed Catmull
 * The Spline Doctors interview Ed Catmull
 * Innovation, Inc.
 * Pixar's Collective Genius