00:08My name is Rick Sayer. I started here in 1987.
00:12My name is Anna Lacoste Jordan, and I started in June of 1997.
00:18For me, technology was a means to creating magic,
00:22and anything that felt like that was something that I was interested in.
00:25I basically grew up in Uruguay, and we used to have like a half-an-hour special
00:29that was cartoons, and I watched it all the time.
00:32Then I kind of grew up, and I thought I have to get a real job.
00:36I had a lot of different interests, making short films, blowing things up.
00:40I set my bedroom carpet on fire a number of times.
00:43I tried a bunch of little things. Chemical engineering, I tried chemistry,
00:48I tried nuclear physics for a little while, and then I heard about computer graphics,
00:53and it was, that's great.
00:56I'm Guido Cuaroni. I started at Pixar in January of 1997.
00:59I was hired as a generalist at TD, did modeling, rigging, shading.
01:03I was born and grew up in Italy.
01:05Pretty much I was like any other teenager guy.
01:08Actually, I was big in breakdancing.
01:11And I didn't even know what a computer really was,
01:13and I didn't really know writing a program, software, what that meant.
01:16You know, I had no idea.
01:17My name is Mike Krumhoffner, and I got hired at Pixar in 1996,
01:23and I started working on Toy Story 2 as a digital sculptor.
01:27I remember the exact moment when I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
01:32That was opening night of Jurassic Park, and the first time you see the T-Rex break out of its
01:38pen,
01:38and you see it plant its foot in full frame, and I knew that's what I wanted to do.
01:43I quit my job two weeks later, and I sold everything that I owned
01:48so that I could buy the computer and the software.
01:51And back then, the computer and software was just ridiculous. It was expensive.
01:55And the only way that I could really afford it was I had to move back home with my parents.
02:00There was a computer introduced called Next with graphic capability beyond anything seen before.
02:05And it was an expensive computer, and I had to decide between a car and a computer,
02:09I choose this, and I'm so happy I did.
02:14My name is Bill Reeves.
02:16My name is Lisa Forsell.
02:17I started at Pixar, well, I started with the group who formed Pixar in September of 1980.
02:23I started at Pixar in January of 1995.
02:26I brought my standard mathematical tables book. It's filled with sines and cosines, log tables, numerical tables like square roots
02:36and cube roots,
02:38four-year transforms, Laplace differential equations, all sorts of calculus, all sorts of stuff.
02:43Honestly, my advice to a young person is high school math. You know, college was great and all, and I
02:49learned a lot, but what I used day-to-day in the first several years of my career was high
02:53school algebra, high school geometry.
02:55I always go back to this every once in a while.
02:58This equation, A dot B equals the absolute value of A times the absolute value of B times cosine theta,
03:04is incredibly valuable if you're trying to figure out how light, in a mathematical way, if you're trying to figure
03:09out how light bounces around in a scene.
03:11Stuff like this you learn when you're in ninth, tenth, eleventh grade, and it's incredibly useful.
03:15In Toy Story 2, I worked on the Roundup props. Actually, that was the first time I started doing shading.
03:21Now I'm a shading technical director.
03:23So this is my little tool. I didn't bring any high-tech computer or anything like that. It's just a
03:29magnifying glass, and it's the basis of what shading is all about.
03:32And shading is the response of a surface to light. So that's black, and so is that, and so is
03:39that. They're all the same color, but they all look different.
03:41The specular highlight that you get here in this very elaborate way that the light falls over here on this
03:46velvet because of the little fibers sticking up, that's shading.
03:52I don't know if there's a correct English word for it. It's perseverance. It's the idea that, despite, you know,
03:59whatever happened in life, stay on target, continue to follow the passion.
04:03You don't want to get out of school and have a job. You want to get out and have a
04:07career. You have to find something that you love to do in life.
04:11Look around you and see what really makes you excited. Explore that.
