Alvy Ray Smith helped invent computer animation as we know it—then got royally shafted by Steve Jobs. Now he’s got a vision for where the pixel will take us next.
screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival. It covered the wild antics of the studio’s founders as they crafted a new kind of movie—a fully computer-animated picture bursting with riotous colors and textures, ultra-vivid characters, and plotlines subversively seeded with mind-expanding wisdom. During a panel discussion afterward, the interviewer asked a provocative question.
The breakthrough in Pixar’s films was that the emotions they unleashed were as vivid as those from a human performance.But the 77-year-old’s mark is not limited to the past, and the world still has to do some catching up to him. This summer he finally stepped out, publishingPixelGödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Oh, and the subject of this biography, the pixel, is not what we generally think it is. Forget your misguided belief that a pixel is one of those tiny squares on your screen. Smith explains that the pixel is the product of a two-part process in which an element of some consciously created content is presented on some sort of display. Friends, you are not looking at pixels on your screen but theof those pixels. What you see is Digital Light. The pixel itself? That’s just an idea.
It would take him a while. He wound up studying cellular automata, self-reproducing digital organisms generated by rule-based systems. After his doctorate, Smith headed east, to New York City, for a teaching job. He designed a cellular automaton exercise that became the cover of the February 1971 issue ofIn December 1972, Smith was racing down a New Hampshire ski slope when his knit cap shifted and covered his face.
Soon, a video artist named David DiFrancesco started hanging out at the lab. Smith built a slick interface for Shoup’s system, essentially creating the first draft of the personal graphics programs that millions of people now take for granted. He used the software to make animations, and DiFrancesco filmed the images. It was a wonderful chaos.