Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull,born in March 31, 1945.He is a computer scientist and current president of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios (including the latter's DisneyToon Studios division).As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics.
Catmull formed a talented research group working with 2D animation, mostly focusing on tools that could assist the animators in their work. Among the inventions was a paint program simply called Paint which could be seen as an early version of Disney's CAPS, the commercial animation program Tween, inspired by an experimental computer animation system created by Nestor Burtnyk and Marcelli Wein, 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 was starting to struggle for several reasons and felt there was a lack of actual progress despite the technological development, but their efforts had attracted the attention of some big names in Hollywood. These were George Lucas at Lucasfilm and Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to head up a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio 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 the seminal Industrial Light & Magic computer graphics division at Lucasfilm.
At Lucasfilm he helped develop digital image compositing technology used to combine multiple images in a convincing way. Later, in 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm'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. 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, which Catmull thought was the wrong idea of how Pixar's films did well.
In June 2007, Catmull and Lasseter were given control of DisneyToon Studios, a division of Disney Animation housed in a separate facility in Glendale. Since then, 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.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 Animation Studios.
Academy Award (1993)
IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2006)
Computer History Museum Fellow (2013)
