Luxo Jr.

Who would've thought that the little lamp that is the mascot which hops onto the screen with the Pixar logo when Pixar shorts and films are showed has a name?!  I always thought it was cute, but I found out during the lecture on animation that the lamp has a name, and it is Luxo Jr.

Here Luxo and Luxo Jr. are contemplating the distractions and possible fun of this ball.  Professor Winkel told the class that this short had pioneered the art of light, having it brighten up certain parts of the scene and be even brighter when both lights were shining on the same spot using depth-map based lights.  Around the time that this short, titled "Luxo Jr." came around, Steve Jobs decided to take on Pixar and the animation studio broke away from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). 

John Lasseter who was once let go from Disney after pitching ideas for a new film and wanting to enhance the animation industry back in the early 80's.  He is now the Chief Executive Officer of Pixar and Disney Studios and is also the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering.  John Lasseter is able to help design theme parks as well as give the go-head for films.  It goes to show no matter how hard people may shut you down for your ideas and desires, you might just nip them back in the bud years down the road, ending up in a position higher than you could have imagined at the beginning.

Why Pixar?

During one lecture, our professor brought in Professor Lance Winkel as a guest lecturer.  The man had been inspired and motivated into the field of animation through the older film of the movie Transformers.  He is now a kind of human version of a textbook about animation.  What really prompted me to write this log about Pixar films was the fact that the man who was contracted by Disney and who was pioneering 3D animation was "fired" when his contract was up and is now leading the animation team over at Disney.  I would say that is quite a turn around and a good reason to start a blog about the fruits of labor after having a door sort of shut in your face.

One of the first exposures I had with Pixar had to have been Toy Story.  If there was something previous I was exposed to that came prior to that, I might not have realized it was a Pixar film... or my sense of chronological history of films is a bit off.  I have since been a huge fan of the Toy Story series, once playing a Super Nintendo game as a child and following on the sequels up until the last, Toy Story 3, which made me cry.  Click for a little trailer of the original Toy Story to get a sense of how amazing Pixar films are if you haven't for some reason seen any!  The trailer which Professor Winkel showed of an archaic baby modeled after his own child and what came to be the idea for the storyline was pretty unreal compared to the 3D animation and special effects we see in movies today.