Bill Griffith Quotes

Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.

It's been about 15 years, and I've never really worked seriously in CGI and I thought that here was an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I was not able to do on Ghostbusters.

I quickly realized that this medium had a lot to offer someone like me. To do Disney-quality hand-drawn cartoons, you have to be a master of two art forms. Seriously, you have to be able to draw like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. But also you have to know movement and timing and control that through 24 frames a second.

When I started work with LucasArts Computer Division back in 1984, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts and saw the Festival of Animation for the first time. I loved the diverse collection of animated films the festival held.

Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.

Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.

I enjoy doing digital work. I enjoy sculpting digitally. I've had my digital sculptures on covers of the top digital magazines.

There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.

I'm impressed by the way some illustrators develop their images on computers, but it's too late for me to start, and I'm still in love with paper and paint and pencils.

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.

If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.

It's amazing what they can do with animation nowadays. It's really beautiful. The 3D stuff is out of hand.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.

I've always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like 'Waking Life,' which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation.

I just recently did a film with Disney, and they put the drawings straight on the computer. And it's all painted on the computer now and not by hand anymore.

I've always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early '80s.

Drawing on a computer doesn't make any sense to me. It's not intuitive.

A lot of people have helped me along the way. But you know the biggest thing for me was when computer animation came along.

The great thing about computer animation is that all of those environments exist as three-dimensional worlds, so these VR worlds already exist.

I don't have anything against CGI.

I do all my coloring on PhotoShop - it's good and bad: It helped refine my color, but I do miss the texture and organic quality of the traditional.

As I look back on my career, I had a goal, which was to build the first feature computer-animated film.

In the early 1970s, I headed to graduate school at the University of Utah and joined the pioneering program in computer graphics because I realized that's where I could combine my interests in art and computer science.