Pixar, as a company has always inspired me. The way they began as a small computer graphics division in Lucasfilm, pioneering a lot of today's CGI technology and working on milestone effects in movies like Star Trek II and Young Sherlock Holmes, at the time when CGI was just being conceived.
In 1986, Steve jobs bought over the Computer Graphics Division from LucasFilm, due some financial difficulties LucasFilm was facing and Steve Jobs had just left Apple Computer and he needed to invest his money in some company.
Pixar, with Jobs as CEO, Ed Catmull as President, started selling high-end CGI hardware. In the meantime John Lasseter's tiny animation dept. started creating animations to showcase at SIGGRAPH and started to gather a lot of buzz. Soon they started doing animation campaigns for TV commercials and grew stronger ties with Disney, to finally make Toy Story, just when the poor hardware sales threatened to close the company. The rest as we know is history.
Jan 2006, Disney bought over Pixar, making Steve Jobs one of the board of Directors in Disney with the largest share. This did not mean that the two studios were merging, in fact, additional conditions were laid out as part of the deal to ensure that Pixar remained a separate entity. Some of those conditions were that Pixar policies would remain intact, including the lack of employment contracts etc. Also, the "Pixar" name was guaranteed to continue.
Looking from where they have come from and the ride they have had, Pixar always impressed everyone with the way they handled themselves and the work they did, what makes the company tick?
Ed Catmull answers them in this amazing 50 min talk at the Stanford Business School on how Pixar "keeps their crises small".
To know more about Pixar's history I strongly recommend the book "The Pixar Touch" by David.A.Price
For those who cant see embedded videos - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc
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