Skip to main content

A CAPS Pioneer

 


What was it like working on CAPS on The Rescuers Down Under? What do you remember about that system in its early days?


Prince and the Pauper was Disney's final use of the traditional ink-and-paint and camera process,[1] before the CAPS digital-ink-and-paint process rendered the traditional techniques and equipment obsolete.[2]

The film was released in November 1990 before The Rescuers Down Under.


The year before Beauty’s release, Disney used The Rescuers Down Under, a belated sequel to Disney’s 1977 animated feature, as a proving ground for a new digital animation process being developed by a small computer graphics company called Pixar. The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) promised to bring radical change to the company’s familiar workflow by allowing character and background illustrations to be scanned into a digital environment, where they could be painted and layered in ways that would enhance the richness and depth of the final image.


Check the interview about Disney that Will did, I think I talk about it there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Whatever you can do or dream you can do begin it. Boldness has Genius Power and Magic in It. Goethe

  Whatever you can do or dream you can do begin it. Boldness has Genius Power and Magic in it. Goethe How’s about starting with the successes?  I’ll begin by telling you about the small breaks. The pinholes of opportunity that allowed me to progress (proceed) (dash forward) (advance) There are the big ones like being hired at Disney Feature Animation as a computer cleanup person. My dad thought I as cleaning the machines. Working my way up from Animator to Lead animator at Industrial Light and Magic on shows like Dragonheart and Mars Attacks, “Ack Ack” and lots of non obvious, smaller ones.  I’d like to point to the smaller ones especially. These are the ones that meant the world to me when they happened, even though they didn’t necessarily dash me forwards in my career. Or at least I didn’t think so at the time.  California Here I Come Anasta Anahou instead of Richard Williams (that’s what was written in my calendar) Disney Film Screenings We we...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ballroom in Beauty and the Beast

The CG ballroom in Beauty and the Beast was a good use of CG, as there were sweeping camera movements that added impact to that moment in the story.  What were my early impressions of Disney beginning to adopt computer graphics and modeling into its animation pipeline? Honestly, I was worried that we were going to ruin the movie. CG has a tendency to look to clean, too perfect. We did the best we could to make it less perfect, more hand made.  We positioned the columns around the perimeter of the ballroom by hand, we added a little bit of ‘dirt’’ to the curves in the camera motions.  Between first getting the task to work on the ballroom scene for B+B, but long before the Oscar nominations I didn't  have any idea that the project was going to have such an impact.  And I certainly didn't  know that the ballroom scene in particular was going to be such an iconic moment in the film. None of us had any idea the film was going to be so successfu that I know of, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Flintstones and University of Guelph

Part of this memoir is about my time at the  larger studios.  Eventually trying my hand at creating stories with my own characters. But then there’s the part about the struggle of life. To believe in myself. To choose a path. To find work, the inner doubts of whether or not I could succeed always haunting me.  Growing up we lived on the corner house right next to the primary, middle and high schools I attended. All through high school I would run across the street at lunch time. My mother would make me a grilled cheese sandwich and for 30 minutes I got lost in the voices and Hoyt Curtain rifts of music of the Flintstones. I knew the dialogue by heart.   I knew the stories by heart.  The Hot Piano with '88 Fingers Louis'  Dripper about a seal that follows Fred home from an aquarium, and 'the New Neighbors' starring the Gruesomes . Oh and another favorite 'Giggles Flintstones' with Fred and Barney spending the night in a haunted mansion, only to find out it w...
Post a Comment
Read more