Penn alum discusses making 'A Bug's Life'

Graham Walter spoke about the making of the film Thursday night. Graham Walter is now a top executive at Pixar Animation, the studio that produced the hit 1995 movie Toy Story and the upcoming A Bug's Life. But Walker, a 1995 graduate of Penn's Engineering School, credits his successful career in animation to his experiences at Penn. While walking through the Moore Building as an undergraduate, Walker caught a glimpse of a professor giving a presentation on movie special effects. After sitting in on the class, Walter approached the professor and told him, "I want to work for George Lucas," referring to the famed director of 1977's Star Wars and founder of the Hollywood special effects company Industrial Light and Magic. "Can you tell me how?" Last Thursday night, Walter returned to his alma mater to pay homage to that professor, Computer Science Professor Norman Badler, and teach University undergraduates how computer animated films are made. During the third lecture in a series sponsored by the newly established Digital Media Design major -- which began this fall as a joint effort between SEAS, the Annenberg School for Communication and the Graduate School of Fine Arts -- Pixar's head technical director addressed a crowd of more than 60 University students in Annenberg. Looking to the Wednesday release of A Bug's Life -- which stars Dave Foley and Kevin Spacey -- Walter showed brief clips and still shots from the new movie to highlight the computer animation process. "After Toy Story, we were feeling pretty proud, and we decided we wanted to make an epic. Epics are pretty hard to make," he explained as he told the audience about the obstacles overcome by the Pixar production team. Led by veteran computer animation director John Lasseter -- who also did 1995's Toy Story -- the team faced numerous challenges including an enlarged wide screen format, the creation of a realistic "living world" of insects and an ensemble cast of thousands of ants. The massive effort it took to make the film required doubling the studio's production staff and a budget "two to three times more expensive than its live-action counterpart" would have been, he said. In addition, creating the realistic, beautiful scenes which define the new film's critically-acclaimed animation involved the installation of more than 1,300 new supercomputing processors. "Sun Microsystems said it was the largest installation they are allowed to tell us about -- whatever that means," Walter said. Engineering freshman and prospective Digital Media Design major Matt Tieff said that he "was impressed with the art of each scene. It wasn't even moving, and it looked great." During his two-hour-long talk, Walter also discussed how new technologies evolved from academic classrooms and industry -- and from small firms to larger studios -- to influence blockbuster films such as 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1995's Casper and 1997's Titanic. Universal Studio's blockbuster Jurassic Park, he said, was a turning point in the use of computer effects, since the 1993 feature film on dinosaurs "effectively blurred" the lines between computer animation and reality. "It was the first time we were able to do whatever we wanted. We were not creatively or technologically limited," he explained. Still Walter claims that Lasseter's belief that "technology inspires art, and art challenges technology" is still at the crux of Pixar's work. According to Walter, although colleges such as Penn, Brown University and the California Institute of Technology traditionally provided many of the top special effects wizards, a renewed emphasis on illustration means that now some of the art schools are providing the best candidates. But Badler said the DMD program "aims to connect students between the technological world of computers, the art world of design and the communication world of storytelling." Walter agreed. With its stress on solid foundations, "the DMD program [at Penn] is right on the money with its interdisciplinary approach," he said.