Our Story

We’ve been in this field for a while…  

…since way back before CGI took over Hollywood¹

…since way back when you had to be a programmer in order to do any CGI production at all.   

Graham’s early background was in software development but his first job title at Pacific Data Images in the 1980s was “animator” — because back then doing animation required writing code.  Graham and Ronen met at Pixar in the early 90's, both working as TDs (“Technical Directors”) on Toy Story.   By then at Pixar, animation was done by trained animators… but everything else was done by TDs.   Ronen and Graham did modeling, shading, lighting, etc. — because you still had to be a programmer to do those.  That situation gradually improved, and Pixar started hiring people with actual artistic skills in areas like modeling and cinematography.  Ronen and Graham liked to say that their job as TDs was to continually put themselves out of a job:  Once we’ve figured out how to do something technically, we write a tool so that a real artist can do it instead of us; then we go on to the next technical challenge.

Although Ronen can point at various things he did that are visible on the Toy Story screen (most notably building the Slinky Dog model), arguably his biggest contribution was behind the scenes.  At the time Toy Story started, Pixar had tools and expertise for a handful of people to make short animations… but nobody had ever done a feature-length CGI project.  In those early days, Ronen took it on himself to do various things to help scale up the process — “boring” things like file management, versioning, naming conventions, standardized libraries for lighting and cameras, ability to share settings across shots, etc….  the things that these days are now referred to as the “Pipeline”.   (Later on, Ronen would joke that back then he was the world’s expert in feature-film CGI pipelines — because back then there was only one.)

In the meantime, Graham focused his attention on the big picture of actually getting CGI production done.  On A Bug’s Life he stepped up to manage the entire technical crew.   When Toy Story 2 had an existential crisis and needed to be remade nearly from scratch in 9 months (that’s another story!) Pixar's management brought in Graham to figure out how to pull it off, both creatively and technically.  Afterwards, as producer of Finding Nemo, Graham faced an unprecedented creative and technical challenge, and working closely with the director, delivered a film that was in its day the highest-grossing animation in history.

Among the challenges in making Finding Nemo was the amount of water in the film (back then, water was very hard to do), and the many scenes that take place entirely underwater.   To address this, Graham and Ronen reconfigured the process and workflows to be more agile, creating the notion of “sequence teams”, each empowered to adjust their workflow to the needs of their part of the film (e.g., without going into too much detail, the order of doing animation vs lighting gets jumbled when you’re entirely underwater and light doesn’t travel very far).   The result was a film that achieved the artists’ creative vision, with unprecedented crew efficiency despite the technical difficulties.

Joe and Ronen met in the early 2000s, when both were part of organizing the SIGGRAPH 2004 conference (as “papers chair” and “sketches chair” respectively).  Joe hadn’t been involved in CGI production at that point, but he was already a recognized leader in computer graphics, heading up the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab which had been responsible for a flurry of research innovations and publications.  Joe later joined the production world as a VP at Disney, where he created Disney Research with its labs around the world — again helping launch a flurry of research innovations and publications.

Joe and Ronen continued to work together over a period of years at SIGGRAPH (Joe as Conference Chair in 2007 and Ronen in 2009) and on various other projects since then.  In 2020 Joe joined Wētā Digital as their CTO (and brought Ronen along with him), overseeing the technical group as it created Avatar 2 and other projects.

Joe’s expertise spills over beyond CGI, including being director of the Machine Learning and Health at Carnegie Mellon University, and an entrepreneur with several startups under his belt.  And in that context a few years ago he met Gerard, both of them on the board of a company developing AI for medicine.   Gerard is our newcomer to CGI production, with a wealth of experience in successfully running startups (two to IPO) that serves us well in this venture.

Anyway, some takeaways from all this:

…We want to continue our cycle of “putting ourselves out of a job”: we want to make it possible for individuals & studios to focus on their art without needing us in the loop.

…We believe that the producer’s role is to figure out how to say “yes” so that an artist can achieve their creative vision (contrary to the common cynical view that a producer’s job is to say “no” to keep the artists in line), and we want to give them tools to help them do so.

…We are proud of what we’ve done so far, but we’re even more excited about what we can do to help the next generation of artists unleash their creativity.

¹ FYA  “The Reality of Computer Graphics in the Motion Picture Industry,” 1988.   Ronen was in the audience :)