audio puppeteering n.— «To that end Mr. Stanton enlisted the man who created the grammar of the “Star Wars” robot R2D2, the veteran sound designer Ben Burtt. Mr. Stanton wrote a conventional script—“Hi, I’m Wall-E”—and Mr. Burtt...
avar n.— «Designing cars for computer animation is not designing for the real world, but it has similarities. To orchestrate the motion, Pixar used a shared platform, a system not unlike a real carmaker’s. The film’s cars have a common...
renderwall n.— «Remember the movie Toy Story? Well, when Pixar did the rendering on that, they created their own supercomputer to do it. The supercomputer in question was dozens of rack-mounted Sun workstations sans monitors and with...
Z-buffer n.— «Catmull invented texture mapping (the way to make digital surfaces “pour” over objects), the Z-buffer (an algorithm that tracks the virtual distance between pixels and a viewer, now standard in most personal...
scratch adj.— «With the story reel complete, next comes the soundtrack. Disney animators use “scratch” voices rather than professional actors for preliminary dialog.» —“Welcome to Planet Pixar” by Austin...
sweatbox n.— «Pixar’s story development process as well as its internal lexicon—including sweatbox, when the director critiques individual animations, and plus-ing, heaping more and more good ideas on a structure that’s already...