History
Pixar is an American computer animation company based in Emeryville , California. The company was founded in 1979 as one third of the the Lucasfilm group by invented by George Lucas and Ed Catmull, and then being bought and joined in 1986 by the co-founder of Apple Steve Jobs who invested a large amounts of money to make the company successful and named the company Pixar which at the time employed 44 people in the same year the debut film Luxo.Jr is made and becomes the first three dimensional film to get nominated for the Best Animated Short Film Oscar .Even though with such success early on the company was loosing money and Steve Jobs thought to sell it out however he gave it another chance as Pixar produced Toy story which went out and grossed $361 million with having spent only $30 million to make it . As the film was such a big success the crew of Pixar went on to make a CD-Rom video game .The company also worked on animated commercials for brands such as Coca-Cola which expanded the portfolio of the company. From the success of Toy Story Pixar went on too make many other great films which won big awards and grossed a lot of money which kept the company alive. Later on in 2006 the Walt Disney company bought Pixar for $7.4 billion and named Ed Catmull the president of the company that year also Pixar celebrated it's 20th anniversary . The studio overtime has earned 27 Academy awards , 7 Golden Globe awards and 11 Grammy awards with many other awards which is an impressive record as they only released 14 feature films all together with few short films. In 2010 Pixar opened up studio and offices in Vancouver , Canada which was named Pixar Canada which worked with some of the animated characters that they made. At this moment there are three films that will be released in 2015 and 2016 one of them is Inside Out which is directed by Pete Docter the director of Up. The Good Dinosaur which is directed by Bob Peterson and Finding Dory which is directed by Andrew Stanton who previously directed the film John Carter .There is also rumours that there will be three new films released in the years 2017 and 2018 however none of them been named yet.
Being home to such animated films as Up , Finding Nemo and Wall-E the animation studios grew and became a one of the leaders in the industry of animation grossing on average $607 million per film . They have currently released and made 14 films which mostly where a success .On average for every film a budget of $200 million is spend to make and release a single film .According to Ed Catmull Pixar are trying to release one original film a year and sequels every other year as a strategy to try and release "One and a half movies a year". Before joining up with Disney the film Cars was released which was the last film which was made before joining up with Walt Disney which was released in 2006. After joining up with Walt Disney the company made films such as Up , Ratatouille , Wall-E , Toy story 3 , Cars 2 , Brave and Monsters university as of this day. Over the years the company has been very successful with there films as most of them either won Academy awards or another important award which what mostly keeps the company alive and makes it stand where it is today.
Pixar hasn't been releasing feature films just for cinema but also TV shows . Some of the shows that they released are Toy Story Treats , Buzz Lightyear of Star Command , Cars Toons and Toy story Toons .
Another thing that Pixar is known for is shorts film . Starting in 1986 they made there first short film named Luxo.Jr which led a new way in film making as it used three dimensional computer to tell a story to the audience . Later on Pixar started including short films before hand a feature film to create a a great experience for big film fans.
The Dream and the software
At the start of the company George Lucas had a wish list that he wanted to the company to complete which was to have a film editing system , a digital sound editing system , a digital film printer and a deeper exploration of computer graphics in film. Throughout the current history of the company they made there own software and there own system which is not on available to anyone. However Pixar did create there own software in 1988 named RenderMan which became the industry standard. The software is available to be bought by anyone who owns a computer and is interested in animation. Main point of the software is to render objects and animations in high quality normally used in films that require high quality and standard of animation. There is also another software made by Pixar named Marionette which is another software made by Pixar it is not available for sale and is not accessible by anyone outside Pixar and because of this there isn't much information on the software however Pixar claim that the software helps animators who have a traditional cel animation experience.
In 2001 the academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honoured Ed Catmull the president of Pixar , Loren Carpenter the senior scientist and Rob Cook the vice president of software enginnering with an Oscar (Academy Award).
- "From the beginning, I kept saying it's not the technology that's going to entertain audiences, it's the story. When you go and see a really great live-action film, you don't walk out and say 'that new Panavision camera was staggering, it made the film so good'. The computer is a tool, and it's in the service of the story."
- —John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar
Pixar format
From all of the films that Pixar has made there is a certain format they follow which is that everything that is non-living in real life has a life or a voice in the film for example cars in the films cars or toys in toy story which makes the company more unique and shows that animation can make anything believable and lively.
