The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [39]
It was hard enough for a Rembrandt or a Vermeer to paint one picture with that level of realism—and a movie required twenty-four pictures (or “frames”) per second multiplied by sixty seconds in a minute and then multiplied by around ninety minutes in a feature film. That was nearly 130,000 pictures, an effort far beyond the most Herculean efforts of even the best team of hundreds of masterful artists.
So that was where automation could come in. The computer, by making a mathematical calculation, could figure out how light careened off the angles and folds in every object in the scene. The computer could, essentially, pretend that it was shining a sliver of light onto a tiny region on the surface of the object (which the animators called a polygon). The more times you repeated this process, the greater the number of polygons, then the more finely detailed the picture. If the object had simple geometries and flat surfaces—a cube, for instance—you might need only a few dozen polygons to portray it. But if the figure was highly variegated and complex—a human face, say—it could take light rays reflecting off gazillions of polygons to look real.
While the basic idea behind computer animation was relatively easy to grasp, the execution was notoriously hard. You could write a software program to figure out the minute effects of lighting, but when you actually ran the program, it required an awesome number of mathematical calculations. It consumed computer power and time with a staggering appetite. You would have to buy roomfuls of hugely expensive state-of-the-art hardware to constantly crunch all the data. It took what computer scientists like to call “brute force.”
In the late 1970s Alvy and Ed did a crude “back-of-the-envelope” calculation and determined that it would cost more than $1 billion to make a feature film with computers. At the time, most movies were shot for under $20 million. So their dream was still about fifty times too expensive.
Before long, that would change. The cost of computer hardware was falling dramatically, fulfilling the astonishing prediction made by Intel’s cofounder Gordon Moore. His famous prophecy, known as Moore’s Law, said that because of the rapid and relentless improvements in silicon chip technology, computer power became half as expensive every eighteen to twenty-four months. So Ed and Alvy could easily do the math: $1 billion worth of computers today would cost only $500 million when the next models came on the market. And a couple of years later, they would cost $250 million, then $120 million, then $60 million, then $30 million, and then $15 million, which was much more like it. And that meant that once the price had been slashed in half a total of six times—which could take nine years, maybe twelve years—then a Hollywood studio could afford to make the first full-length and fully computer-animated feature. That would take them into the middle or the end of the 1980s. The vision was still years from realization, but it was clearly within sight.
Alvy and Ed furtively believed that Disney would be the company to pay for their breakthrough computer-animated film. Every year, they would make a secret trip to Los Angeles, pretending they were visiting relatives so that Alex Schure wouldn’t get suspicious. They would show up at Disney headquarters and say: “Are you guys ready?”
Disney’s technologists were enthusiastic, but top management wasn’t interested. Walt Disney himself had died a decade earlier. The company was being run by his son-in-law, a former football star, with depressing results. “We knew that if Walt were there, he’d have the vision,” Alvy recalls. But Walt was gone, and his successors were struggling.
Alex Schure wanted fervently to become the new Walt Disney. In one mansion he had Ed and Alvy working on the far-off future of animation, but in another mansion in the compound he had a hundred people trying to make a Disneyesque film in the old proven way, with artists working meticulously with pencils and paper