Edwin Catmull

Name	Edwin Catmull
Image
Caption	Catmull in 2015
Birth Name	Edwin Earl Catmull
Birth Date	1945-3-31
Birth Place	Parkersburg, West Virginia, U.S.
Spouse	Susan Anderson
Children	3
Field	Computer science
Work Institution	New York Institute of Technology Pixar Animation Studios Walt Disney Animation Studios
Education	University of Utah (BS, MS, PhD)
Thesis Title	A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces
Thesis Year	1974
Thesis Url	http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=907242
Doctoral Advisor	Robert E. Stephenson
Known For	Texture mapping Catmull–Rom spline Catmull–Clark subdivision surface
Prizes	Academy Award (1993, 1996, 2001, 2008) IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2006) Computer History Museum Fellow (2013) ACM Turing Award (2019)

Early life

Edwin Catmull was born on March 31, 1945, in Parkersburg, West Virginia. His family later moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where his father first served as principal of Granite High School and then of Taylorsville High School.

Early in his life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies, including Peter Pan and Pinocchio, and wanted to be an animator; however, after finishing high school, he had no idea how to get there as there were no animation schools around that time. Because he also liked math and physics, he chose a scientific career instead. He also made animation using flip-books. Catmull graduated in 1969, with a B.S. in physics and computer science from the University of Utah. Initially interested in designing programming languages, Catmull encountered Ivan Sutherland, who had designed the computer drawing program Sketchpad, and changed his interest to digital imaging. As a student of Sutherland, he was part of the university's DARPA program, sharing classes with James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay.

From that point, his main goal was to make feature films using advanced computer graphics, an unheard-of concept at the time. During his time at the university, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries: texture mapping and bicubic patches; and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. Catmull says the idea for subdivision surfaces came from mathematical structures in his mind when he applied B-splines to non-four sided objects. He also independently discovered Z-buffering, which had been described eight months before by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis.

In 1972, Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry: a one-minute animated version of his left hand, titled A Computer Animated Hand, created with Fred Parke at the University of Utah. This short sequence was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 film Futureworld, which was the first film to use 3D computer graphics and a science-fiction sequel to the 1973 film Westworld, itself being the first to use a pixelated image generated by a computer. A Computer Animated Hand was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2011.

Career

Early career

In 1974, Catmull earned his doctorate in computer science, and was hired by a company called Applicon. By November of that year, he had been contacted by Alexander Schure, the founder of the New York Institute of Technology, who offered him the position as the director of the institute's new Computer Graphics Lab. In that position, in 1977, he invented Tween, software for 2D animation that automatically produced frames of motion in between two frames.

However, Catmull's team lacked the ability to tell a story effectively via film, harming the effort to produce a motion picture via a computer. Catmull and his partner, Alvy Ray Smith, attempted to reach out to studios to alleviate this issue, but were generally unsuccessful until they attracted the attention of George Lucas at Lucasfilm.

Lucasfilm

Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to lead a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital sound into the entertainment field.

Lucas had already made a deal with a computer company called Triple-I, and asked them to create a digital model of an X-wing fighter from Star Wars, which they did. In 1979, Catmull became the Vice President at Lucasfilm, set up to launch a "computer division" inside the company. By 1980 he had established three projects and recruited experts to lead them: the graphics group led by Alvy Ray Smith; the audio project led by Andy Moorer; the nonlinear editing project, led by Ralph Guggenheim.

Pixar

In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded Pixar, where Catmull works. Pixar would be acquired by Disney in 2006.



In June 2007, Catmull and long-time Pixar digital animator and director John Lasseter were given control of Disneytoon Studios, a division of Walt Disney Animation housed in a separate facility in Glendale. As president and chief creative officer, respectively, they have supervised three separate studios for Disney, each with its own production pipeline: Pixar, Disney Animation, and Disneytoon. While Disney Animation and Disneytoon are located in the Los Angeles area, Pixar is located over 350 miles (563 kilometers) northwest in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Catmull and Lasseter both live. Accordingly, they appointed a general manager for each studio to handle day-to-day affairs on their behalf, then began regularly commuting each week to both Pixar and Disney Animation and spending at least two days per week (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays) at Disney Animation.

While at Pixar, Catmull was implicated in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust scandal, in which Bay Area technology companies allegedly agreed, among other things, not to cold-call recruit from one another. Catmull defended his actions in a deposition, saying: "While I have responsibility for the payroll, I have responsibility for the long term also." Disney and its subsidiaries, including Pixar, ultimately paid $100 million in settlement compensation.

In November 2014, the general managers of Disney Animation and Pixar were both promoted to president, but both continued to report to Catmull, who retained the title of president of Walt Disney and Pixar. On October 23, 2018, Catmull announced his plans to retire from Pixar and Disney Animation, staying on as an adviser through July 2019.

Thatgamecompany

In March 2022, Thatgamecompany announced the addition of Catmull as principal adviser on creative culture and strategic growth.

Personal life

As of 2006, Catmull lives in Marin County, California, with his wife, Susan Anderson, and their three children.

Catmull has an inability to form mental imagery within his head, a condition known as aphantasia.

Awards and honors

In 1993, Catmull received his first Academy Scientific and Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences "for the development of PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance". He shared this award with Thomas K. Porter. In 1995, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Again in 1996, he received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award "for pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing".

In 2000, Catmull was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the creation of digital imagery, leading to the introduction of fully synthetic visual effects and motion pictures.

In 2001, he received an Academy Award "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan". In 2006, he was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann All-Medal Crown Of Trophies for pioneering contributions to the field of computer graphics in modeling, animation, and rendering. At the 81st Academy Awards (2008, presented in February 2009), Catmull was awarded the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which honors "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry".

In 2013, the Computer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow "for his pioneering work in computer graphics, animation and filmmaking".

His book Creativity, Inc. was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2014), and was a selection for Mark Zuckerberg book club in March 2015.

Catmull shared the 2019 Turing Award with Pat Hanrahan for their pioneering work on computer-generated imagery.

Filmography

Films

See also

• List of pioneers in computer science

Publications

• Catmull, Ed (2016). "Part 2: Wealthy § Ed Catmull." Pp. 309–13 in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers, edited by Tim Ferriss. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. isbn 9781328683786.

References

• Catmull, E., Edwin Catmull, Clark, J., James H. Clark, 10.1016/0010-4485(78)90110-0, Recursively generated B-spline surfaces on arbitrary topological meshes, Computer-Aided Design, 10, 6, 350, 1978, 121149868
• Cook, R. L., Robert L. Cook, Carpenter, L., Loren Carpenter, Catmull, E., Edwin Catmull, 10.1145/37402.37414, The Reyes image rendering architecture, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 21, 4, 95–102, 1987, August 28, 2015, March 4, 2016, dead
• Price, David P. T., The Pixar Touch (Vintage), Vintage, London, 2009
• Avery, Laura, Newsmakers, 2004, Gale Research, 61, en, 0899-0417, 17977680
• Katie, Harmer, Pixar ties to Utah run deep, dead, January 29, 2022, October 9, 2014, Deseret News, June 20, 2013
• David A. Price, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, 12, –13, 21, registration, January 4, 2016
• A conversation with Ed Catmull - ACM Queue, acm.org
• Edwin Catmull, 2023-04-11, awards.acm.org, en
• 2011 National Film Registry More Than a Box of Chocolates, December 28, 2011, Library of Congress, December 28, 2011
• Westworld's twists were hidden in Futureworld all along, Trenholm, Richard, CNET, en, 2020-03-19
• Itzkoff, Dave, 'Silence of the Lambs', 'Bambi' and 'Forrest Gump' added to National Film Registry, December 27, 2011, New York Times: Artsbeat, December 28, 2011
• PhD, Edwin Earl, Catmull, A subdivision algorithm for computer display of curved surfaces, University of Utah, 1974, live, September 26, 2020
• A Conversation with Ed Catmull, Hanrahan, Pat, November 13, 2010, queue.acm.org, June 27, 2019
• Edwin Catmull, 2008, en-US, June 27, 2019
• Rubin, Michael, Droidmaker : George Lucas and the digital revolution, 2006, Triad Pub. Co, Gainesville, Fla., 60856108
• The Pixar Story: Dick Shoup, Alex Schure, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Disney, August 14, 2013
• Lev-Ram, Michal, A candid conversation with Pixar's philosopher-king, Ed Catmull, January 11, 2015, Fortune, Time Inc., December 31, 2014
• Johnson, Ted, Animation Workers Reach $100 Million Settlement With Disney in Wage-Fixing Suit, Variety, February 2017, 21 March 2020
• Amidi, Amid, Amid Amidi, Pixar's Ed Catmull Emerges As Central Figure In The Wage-Fixing Scandal, Cartoon Brew, July 11, 2014, 21 March 2020
• Ames, Mark, REVEALED: Emails, court docs show how Sony stood up to Steve Jobs' and Pixar's wage-fixing cartel, Pando, 21 March 2020, March 21, 2020, dead
• Rosenblatt, Joel, A conspiracy or a lawsuit all about money?, independent.ie, November 20, 2014, 21 March 2020
• Cano, Georgia, Op-Ed: Why I Filed The Wage-Theft Lawsuit Against Major Animation Studios, February 2019, Cartoon Brew, 21 March 2020
• Graser, Marc, Walt Disney Animation, Pixar Promote Andrew Millstein, Jim Morris to President, November 18, 2014, Variety, Variety Media, LLC, November 18, 2014
• Pixar Co-Founder Ed Catmull to Retire, The Hollywood Reporter, October 23, 2018, en
• 2022-03-03, Sky and Journey maker Thatgamecompany raises $160M, 2023-03-17, VentureBeat, en-US
• Eller, Claudia, Disney's Low-Key Superhero, March 18, 2020, Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2006
• Gallagher, James, Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind', 15 April 2022, BBC News, 9 April 2019
• dead, September 17, 2011, Three Pixar execs get special Oscars, February 1, 1996, San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 2009
• Moody, Annemarie, Academy to Honor Ed Catmull with Gordon E. Sawyer Oscar, Animation World Network, January 6, 2009, March 19, 2020
• Edwin Catmull—CHM Fellow Award Winner, Computerhistory.org, March 30, 2015, March 30, 2015, dead, April 3, 2015
• December 10, 2022, subscription, live, Shortlist unveiled for FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, Financial Times, Andrew Hill, September 24, 2014, November 12, 2014
• Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks everyone can learn something from Pixar, Business Insider, Richard Feloni, March 3, 2015, April 19, 2015
• Pixar Pioneers Win $1 Million Turing Award, Cade, Metz, March 18, 2020, March 18, 2020, The New York Times
• Thomas, Zoe, Pixar animators win 'Nobel Prize' of computing, 2020-04-05, BBC News, 2020-04-06, en-GB
• Catmull, Ed, Amy Wallace, 2014, Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, New York, Random House, 851419994

External links

• Catmull discusses creativity, entrepreneurship, story telling and filmmaking, Stanford University, 2014-04-30 (video with transcript)