The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [42]
Their honeymoon at Lucasfilm was brief. At first Alvy and Ed felt exhilarated. The glamour of the movie business made it remarkably easy for them to hire the most talented people in their field. They quickly added to their own estimable brain trust and assembled the best team of computer graphics people in the world. The problem was that George Lucas showed almost no interest in computer-generated special effects beyond the original impetus of the light sabers and the spaceships. He didn’t yet understand the full potential.
The turning point came when Paramount hired ILM to create the effects for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and asked for one particular shot using computer graphics. They wanted a genesis scene, a creative and visually spectacular portrayal of death transformed into life. The ILM people had no experience with computers, so they went to Alvy Ray Smith, who by then was working in an office literally next door in San Rafael.
Alvy realized that this was even more than his first big chance to design a scene in a motion picture. It was an opportunity to make what would also serve as a sixty-second advertisement to George Lucas about how computers could revolutionize film.
Alvy thought about what they already knew how to do with graphics. Alvy had a freakish passion for genealogy and embryology, so he was good at making pictures of eggs, zygotes, sperm. One of his colleagues excelled at craters. Another could do mountains, and one even knew how to realistically simulate the appearance of fire.
These early experiments in computer graphics, inspired by the personal quirks of each researcher, all came together in Alvy’s storyboard for the scene: A spaceship flies by a barren moon covered by craters. A sperm-shaped projectile shoots out. Then: chaos. Fire covers the planet and melts its surface. Mountains rise. Oceans form. Life reemerges.
The Paramount people loved the idea.
Alvy knew that he needed one more trick. The scene had emotional power, but when George watched movies he wasn’t sucked in by the emotions. George focused on the technique, especially the camera work. Alvy knew that if he wanted to impress his boss, he had to conceive of an incredibly acrobatic camera move that would be absolutely impossible to film with a real camera, something that could only be done through the otherworldly magic of a computer simulation. In Alvy’s big scene, the camera’s vantage point would twist and swirl around the spacecraft, then sweep ahead of the wall of flames on the planet.
The day after the premiere of Star Trek II, George put one foot inside Alvy’s office.
“Great camera move,” he said quickly.
Then he was gone.
From that point forward, George’s movies relied heavily on computer graphics.
• • •
NOT LONG AFTER George Lucas became a convert, Disney’s executives followed.
In the autumn of 1984, Disney’s board recruited two bosses from Paramount, Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, to take control and attempt to save the company. They needed to do something about animation. Disney’s films had been faring so poorly at the box office that its managers had seriously considered abandoning animation entirely. But Walt Disney’s brother, Roy, argued passionately for preserving the soul of the company. The new honchos, Eisner and Wells, wanted to save animation but knew they needed to greatly reduce the costs. Soon after they took over, they called Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull at Lucasfilm to talk about going digital.
It was still prohibitively expensive to use computers for the new vision of 3-D animation, but the machines could actually save money if they took on some of the drudge work in the traditional process of 2-D animation. The idea was that Disney’s artists would still sketch the characters by hand, but then they’d scan