Jennifer Yuh Nelson Quotes

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

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.

Are we blasphemous in saying that 2-D is largely a thing of the past, and computer-generated animation is the present and future? It's all about creating a better experience for the viewer - and that includes 3-D.

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

I've been working in computer animation for 25 years. I'm obviously a devotee of the technology. I just think it's the one aspect of the medium that's going to continue to revolutionize the filmmaking. It's constantly changing and it's constantly opening up new possibilities. The technology is evolving where 2-D animation was ultimately limited by how long you could pay how many people to make a movie. I mean computers, not that it's in anyway a labor saving device, but it promises to open up exciting new technical possibilites.

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.

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

It's quite amazing what 3D is doing to movies. Just simple things like a paper plane flying at you or flower petals fluttering about are wonderful.

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

Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive.

If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.

Certainly the animation technology is growing like crazy. All media technology is.

We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

You look at CG sometimes and its terrible. You look at CG sometimes and its great.

When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.

I learned a lot about 3D animation from and with my dear friend Michael Hemschoot of Workerstudio. Taught me that I want to play more with animation and image manipulation. Fun stuff!

I believe in 3D for certain kinds of films. I certainly believe in using 3D for all things in animation because animation has such clarity and so much depth of focus. It worked great with 'Avatar' because 70 percent of that film is animated.

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

I don't have anything against CGI.

ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.

In computing, everything happens inside this rectangular screen. I want to get the pixels out, paint the world, and allow us to interact with it.

Doing 3D on 'Hugo' was a big learning curve for me, but fun!

Actually I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do.

Animation has always been about technology. You can't have animation without technology.