“Toy Story”: How Pixar Made the First Fully Computer-Animated Feature Film

"Toy Story" became the first feature-length film created entirely on a computer. Pixar Animation Studios made the film together with Disney, the director was John Lasseter, and production began in 1991 and took about four years. More than 100 people worked on the film.

Everything in the film was virtual. The artists created each of the 1,560 frames on Silicon Graphics and Sun workstations, relying on roughly 400 computer models and backgrounds. The finished frames were edited in Avid systems, and rendering was handled by RenderMan, a program developed at Pixar. One frame contained about 300 megabytes of data, and a farm of 117 Sun SPARC 20 machines carried out these computations.

Producing the final version of the 77-minute film took 800,000 machine hours. The farm itself had about 300 Sun processors, and rendering a single frame could take anywhere from two to fifteen hours.

Steve Jobs, the founder of Pixar, said that rendering a single frame took about three hours on average, even on the fastest computer you could buy.

"Toy Story" opened Pixar's agreement with Disney for three feature films. Before that, the studio had become known for the short film "Tin Toy," which won an Oscar in 1988 for Best Animated Short Film and later inspired the idea for "Toy Story."

Translation editor: Ловушкин А.