MALCOLM RADKE
News Writer

Technology Week featured everything from Pixar to passwords.

Running from Nov. 1 to 5 this year, Technology Week is an annual campus event that exposes instructors, researchers, staff and students to major issues and future trends in information and communications technology.

Throughout the week, Information Technology Services facilitated various events. Among them was a tech show at Louis’, numerous laptop security clinics, student project presentations and a political panel debate on copyright in the academic environment.

The week’s highlight was Darwyn Peachey’s keynote presentation, “Movie Making In The Digital Age.” The chief technology officer of Pixar Canada, Peachey graduated from the U of S with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1978 and a master’s degree in 1983. He is a member of the Innovators Hall of Fame at the Wilson Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence.

Peachey serves as a perfect role model for Saskatchewan students aspiring to make it into prestigious international industries like film or technology.

He began the talk describing how he was able make it big in Hollywood. While working as a researcher at the U of S, Peachey published articles in scholarly computer science journals. These articles garnered the attention of then small computer generated imaging studio in L.A. known as Pixar Animation.

Upon joining Pixar in 1988, Peachey was part of the team that created Toy Story. While Toy Story turned out to be extremely successful, at the time of production the movie was viewed as a gamble — similar projects had barely been attempted. But as positive pre-screening feedback poured in, the excited team gained more and more confidence about the winner they had created.

“I don’t think I’ll ever really feel anything quite as exhilarating as the completion of Toy Story because it was such a balance between going against the odds and yet at the same time having it succeed far beyond your wildest dreams.”

To the joy of children everywhere (myself and most other university students included), the film was released in 1995 and soon became the biggest box office hit of the year.

After the Toy Story project, Pixar and the rest of the animation industry went through a revolution that was marked by vast improvements in character design and detail enhancement. Among the Pixar box office hits that followed Toy Story, Peachey was involved in the creation of A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Ratatouille and Up (the first-ever feature animated film in 3D).

Animated movies generally take more than a year to make, so there are usually multiple teams working on different projects at the same time. Furthermore, the teams have very little down time between assignments, since there is a steady flow of overlapping projects.

Because of the complexity and necessary precision of computer animation, most artists that currently work in the industry are particularly specialized at one specific task, Peachey explained.

Since he led the team that created Up, Peachey gave some insight into the history of 3D movies and their place in the animation world.

While the technology has existed since the ’50s and ’60s, people found that their eyes hurt if they watched a 3D movie for too long. High performance digital projectors have now fixed this problem.

To create a 3D feeling, the projectors alternate between the left side and the right side of the image at a speed so fast that the human eye believes it has some form of depth perception. This is a very sensitive process and if done incorrectly can cause the viewer’s eyes quite a deal of pain.

Because cameramen are filming using two different angles of the same image, it is difficult to go back and fix errors without having to re-shoot the entire scene. As a result, filming a 3D movie with real actors is harder than filming with cartoon characters. With cartoons, creators simply re-adjust the character positions.

Peachey discussed how the digital evolution has affected the art of movie making. As a result of digital effects and digital characters, filmmakers can tell stories in a way that never could have been done before.

“Directors will come to us with some crazy thing that they want us to do and that’s the challenge and we will try to come up with a technical way to do it. But then once that technology exists, that will inspire an artistic response.”

Another important result of the digital evolution is what Peachey refers to as “the democratization of movie-making.” Digital cameras, state-of-the-art computers and Internet distribution are now all easily accessible to anyone with the desire to create movies. While the process of creating content is now much easier, quality in the recent surge of independent media creation is still hard to come by.

“The Guggenheim Museum in New York sent out a call for good, artistic films to YouTube and got 23,000 applications. They only selected 25 of them. So I think there’s still a bar that’s set by what people want to watch.”

Peachey’s artwork from his time working at the university can be found on display in the computer science college.