Pixar’s Pete Docter on how the first computer animated movie was made

We all love animation films. Unless you’re a nerd, most people don’t really care to about the underlying technology that goes into making these movies. On this day today, November 22, 1995, Pixar released its first film, Toy Story. Toy Story is a 1995 American computer-animated buddy comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures.

The screenplay was written by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, and Alec Sokolow from a story by Lasseter, Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft. Peter Hans Docter is an animator, film director, screenwriter, producer, voice actor and chief creative officer of Pixar.

Toy Story 1 technical facts:

• Each one of the movie’s 1,560 shots was created on Silicon Graphics and Sun workstations.
• The artists used 400 computer-generated mathematical models and backgrounds.
• The shots were edited using Avid editing systems and painstakingly rendered by powerful Pixar-developed RenderMan software.
• The software consumed 300 Mbytes per frame, provided by 117 Sun SPARC 20s.
• The movie took four years to make and 77-minute film required 800,000 machine-hours just to produce a final cut.

In the video clip below posted on twitter by @JonErlichman, Peter explains how the first computer animated feature was made. Peter is best known for directing the animated feature films Monsters, Inc., Up, Inside Out and the upcoming Soul, and as a key figure and collaborator at Pixar. Enjoy!

On this day in 1995: Pixar released its first film, Toy Story.

Pixar’s Pete Docter on how the first computer animated feature was made:pic.twitter.com/1BCRCeXmOl

— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) November 22, 2019