From Prof Mark Mayerson (Sheridan College): The founder of the Fox Film Corporation was William, not Charles, Fox.
Author's Note: Whoops! Mixed him up with Charles Fox, the English Whig Parliamentarian of the XVIII Century. My bad.
Mayerson: No ‘e’ at the end of Adolph Zukor’s first name. The four Warner Brothers were Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack. No Abe.

From Prof Mark Mayerson:Felix the Cat was not the first original cartoon character. Bray’s Col. Heeza Liar never appeared in print before becoming an animated character in 1913.

From Mark Mayerson: Marlene Dietrich did not flee the Nazis. She came to the U.S. in 1930 to work for Paramount, before the Nazis took power. In this way, she was more like Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau who came from Germany in the 1920s for the opportunity to work in Hollywood than she was like Fritz Lang, who was fleeing. If you change Dietrich to Billy Wilder, the sentence works.

From Mark Mayerson: Gustav Tennegren was Swedish, not Swiss. Albert Hurter was the Swiss artist who worked for Disney. There is no ‘r’ in Bianca Majolie’s last name./indent]

…basically a CADCAM (computer-assisted design camera)…
[indent]From Jim Blinn: The acronym CAD/CAM (usually written with the slash in the middle) stands for “Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing”

From Vibeke Sorensen: Just a little clarification about my time at Caltech. I wasn't formally a student but as a Visiting Associate in Computer Science for almost 10 years I could take classes. So in that sense, I was indeed a student.

From Jim Blinn: If this refers to the voyager flyby movies, the first one was produced in late 1978 and released to the public in early 1979.

Jim Blinn: Ivan had left Utah just before I got there. I worked under Martin Newell.

Jim Blinn: This was in 1977/78 and published in the Siggraph 78 conference. In 1980 I was at JPL.

Jim Blinn: Minor point, but I would estimate that the Voyagers WAY more than quadrupled our knowledge

Jim Blinn: I really didn’t think of the computer animations as a substitute for the real images

Jim Blinn: Wow, it was never anywhere near that long. Actually quite short (see photo on page 154 of the book, taken about that time).
Author's Note: Any student reading this who needs a cool idea for a research paper……

Jim Blinn: Now there’s a disturbing comparison.

Jim Blinn: The original Voyager 1 film was already complete and in color; no modifications were required. Now that they saw the value of it, they wanted one for Voyager 2 etc.

Jim Blinn: Uranus is the planet with the vertical ring
Author's Note: D’oh!

Jim Blinn: The voyager images took about 90 minutes to return to earth from Jupiter. They were shown live to the news media on monitors at JPL. Some image processing and analysis might have taken weeks.

Jim Blinn: Alvy was not involved in the Voyager movies. (The camera position was actually determined by the flight path of the spacecraft. The aiming of the viewpoint was chosen by Charlie Kohlhase based on his knowledge of what was interesting to look at during the mission.) The quote from me was in reference to Alvy’s later Genesis sequence. I‘m not sure what I might have meant by “he got it [the camera] thinking like the satellite itself”

Alvy Ray Smith: I did not work on the Voyager flyby movies with Jim Blinn. The motions of the camera were all Jim’s design. The freedom of cameras to fly around unconstrained in 3-space was an old idea by this time in computer graphics.

Jim Blinn: I don’t think NAS was involved, but I might be wrong.

Jim Blinn: The TV program was the original. The book came out after the programs were finished, documenting it.

Jim Blinn: I was not involved in this scene at all. I believe it was a miniature filmed with a snorkel camera and Sagan was green-screened onto it; no computer graphics (as we think of it) at all. It was actually beyond the capabilities of computer graphics at the time.

Jim Blinn: The various special effects were divided up between various special effects houses early on in the production. All the effects delegated to JPL were completed successfully, plus one (DNA replication) added on at the end of production. Several other effects contracted to other houses encountered some troubles but they had been given the contract from the start, not brought in later to relieve the JPL crew. There was one scene showing how constellations evolved over time that we at JPL were given and performed successfully; it was actually pretty simple. I don’t know anything about Calico and the last few sentences of page 51.

Jim Blinn: Alvy and David came to JPL directly from NYIT so they didn’t really “return” to ILM (or actually LucasFilm) . They went there next after JPL.

Jim Blinn: I didn’t write any books, just some Siggraph papers and films

From Hank Christiansen: I graduated from Utah State University with a BS in Mathematics in 1957, and graduated from Stanford University with an MS in Engineering Mechanics (a division of Mechanical Engineering) in 1958. In 1962, I received a PhD from Stanford University, also in Engineering Mechanics. After six months as a 2nd Lt in the US Army, and a total of five years working in Aerospace, I accepted a position as an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Brigham Young University in January 1965. I am now in my forty-ninth year of teaching at BYU.

When Dave Evans became Dept. Chair of Computer Science at the University of Utah and generated a large contract with ARPA, he funded several projects. One of those was with the School of Architecture. They needed someone to advise them on how to include structural analysis and design into their plans. So, I was recommended based upon my experience in developing structural analysis programs for NASA. Thus, Dave hired me in 1968 as a consultant. The Architectural School was in the "I wish we could . . ." phase (actually they never got out of that phase) and it was way to early for my input. So, Dave told me to get acquainted with the projects underway. I could see from the early pictures, that continuous tone shaded pictures using computer graphics was the answer to how to display finite element data and I began to work in that area.

One thing led to another and I began to get my own contracts (initially I was funded under the ARPA contract). Since I did not have a faculty position at the University of Utah, Dave always volunteered to be the responsible professor and I was hired as a consultant. This worked out extremely well as Dave never charged any of my contracts and consultants did not generate overhead charges. Anyway, I had a series of contracts sponsored by the Army, Navy, NASA and others which continued until 1978, when I stopped generating contracts at the University of Utah and concentrated on the development and distribution of MOVIE.BYU (which evolved from my computer programs at the University of Utah and distribution of the software had started in 1976) at Brigham Young University. I always thought the title "Consultant" was a bit much for my role at the University of Utah (when they were clearly the worlds best in computer graphics), so when pressed, I have used the term "Research Associate".

Jim Blinn: It was the Merrill Engineering Building. I don’t think the investment company had anything to do with it.

Jim Blinn: Ed is the head of Walt Disney Animation Studios, not the larger organization Walt Disney Studios

Jim Blinn: Gouraud and Phong were long gone from Utah before the teapot was digitized.

Vibeke Sorensen: I had a position as Visiting Associate in Computer Science for 9 years. While there, I was allowed to take classes ("sit in"), do the homework, and get feedback from the professors. That is why I said I took (Richard) Feynman's last class, which I did. But I never graduated Caltech, because I was never enrolled formally as a matriculated student.

I was a student in Feynmann's class in terms of attending, doing the homework, and getting a response. I was allowed to attend the class. The Visiting Associate title is what in other places might be called an "artist in residence". It was difficult to figure out a title because I was doing a lot of things artists typically didn't do, like learn how to design and build circuits. I built the Three Ring Circuit for the Feynmann class. Today you have artists working with Arduino and doing physical computing, but back then it didn't exist and I wanted to do that. So in my position I was able to go to the class and meet with people to learn how to do it as part of my position as Visiting Associate. I had the title for almost 10 years, an office at Caltech, and was a member of the Caltech Computer Graphics Group, attended talks, worked collaboratively with people there, etc.

Alvy Ray Smith: The story is much more complex and involves many other people. I received two technical Academy Awards, but no Oscar, and neither for items in the list. Marc Levoy’s paint program at Cornell was definitely influenced by mine at NYIT, but Marc did his alone, in Don Greenberg’s laboratory at Cornell.

Mark Mayerson: I think that might be wrong about not being able to sell things at Siggraph until 1989. I was there in 1984 and ’85 and there was a trade show where I saw technology like plotters for sale.

Alvy Ray Smith: I appear on this page, just as the index indicates, but the index reference to “hackers” doesn’t make sense, as none are mentioned. Loren sent his resume (pictures only!) to me at JPL but wouldn’t talk to me until the Siggraph showing of his Vol Libre.
Authors Note: In the index the term hackers was meant to refer to the subject of the chapter heading, but I agree it is a weak association.

…..truckloads of unwanted videocassettes…
[indent]Larry Loc: Atari buried video game cartridges in the desert not video cassettes

Alvy Ray Smith: I jokingly called my Ford Torino “a Turin machine.” “Turino machine” misses the joke, which hinges, for half the joke, on the fact that Torino is English for Turin in Italian.
Authors Note: I heard Turino Machine to better get the pun on Computer Pioneer Alan Turing . My bad.

Alvy Ray Smith: I don’t know for a fact that Martin Newell ever described me as a “hippie.” It doesn’t seem in keeping with his English reserve. (Author: anecdote from Ed Catmull). He did, however, pave the way for me to NYIT. Upon returning from his first visit with Ed Catmull there, he called me, per arrangement, and told me that we (David DiFrancesco and I) should get ourselves out there and check it out. The time is a bit compressed in the text as written. David and I went to New Jersey first, where David’s father lived. A blizzard blanketed New York in a foot of snow. We drove David’s father’s car across Manhattan (the next day), buried in snow, to NYIT on Long Island. We visited with Ed Catmull and Malcolm Blanchard who had been there a short while and then were ushered into a limo that took us all to one of Schure’s mansions, for lunch. We called Schure “Uncle Alex” because of the (strange) coincidence that he was an uncle of my housemate in California, no relation to David DiFrancesco.

Alvy Ray Smith: The estate where David Rockefeller’s helicopter landed, and where David and I lived, was not part of the Westbury campus. It was the McGrath estate, not the Wyndam House mansion (which I don’t recognize). The NYIT Computer Graphics Lab was in the former four-car (not six-car) garage of Gerry (not Kerry) House mansion, including the chauffeur’s quarters above it.
Authors note: Several sources incorrectly or not spell it as Kerry House.

Alvy Ray Smith: I’ve never heard of Clyde in the Cockpit. Catmull and Smith never taught any courses at NYIT. The Computer Graphics Lab was independent of the school at NYIT.

Alvy Ray Smith: The scan and paint system at NYIT was created by Garland Stern and was not an outgrowth of Paint and BigPaint. It did incorporate my Tint Fill program however.

Alvy Ray Smith: Kerry House should be Gerry House (everywhere). The first 8-bit frame buffer cost $80,000 (1975 dollars) and the next five that Schure surprised us with cost $60,000 each.

Alvy Ray Smith: Ed Catmull and I developed the alpha channel together.

Alvy Ray Smith: I indeed learned to animate, before I went to Xerox PARC (which was before NYIT), from Preston Blair’s famous thin book, and from a small animation class taught by animator Steve Smith in the San Francisco Bay area.

From Alvy Ray Smith: Jamie Davis certainly helped us but he didn’t teach us that inbetweens were nonlinearly placed. Some of the computer guys already understood (see note above). (Author's Note: Ed Catmull's version to me.) Alvy cont.:Jamie’s main contribution to us was not to be frightened of us. He was the first animator who wasn’t afraid we were going to take away his job. Another contribution he tried to make was to introduce Ed and me to his next boss, Ralph Bakshi. But when we showed up from New York in California for the meeting, Bakshi stood us up!

Alvy Ray Smith: Paul Xander was a background artist, not an animator.

Author's Note: Here I’m using the generic form of traditional animator for clarity, instead of the specific job classification of background painter.

[indent]Page 137
[indent]Alvy Ray Smith: The paragraph about Lucas and Coppola is mangled. Here’s the correct time sequence: Coppola’s representative called me at NYIT the day before Lucas’s representative called Ralph Guggenheim there. The group went to Lucasfilm, never seriously considering Coppola. Then while at Lucasfilm I attended a weekend retreat at Coppola’s San Francisco mansion. Lucas was not there. Francis Coppola tried to seduce me away from Lucas at this event. Coppola was definitely interested, but it was Lucas with whom we teamed up and remained loyal.

Alvy Ray Smith: When Ed Catmull and I wrote the first letter to Lucasfilm, we indeed were afraid to do it on the NYIT computers because of the Jim Clark affair, so we went to an office supply store in Glen Cove and rented one of those old black typewriters with the levers that fly up at each stroke of a key. We composed the letter together off campus, at Ed’s house in Glen Cove, and I typed it since I’m the typist (and had learned on such a beast). So it’s Catmull and Smith’s letter. Ed and I took the first trip to Lucasfilm together. Ed took the second trip there alone. David and I left at the same time as Ed, but laundered ourselves through JPL first, on the way to Lucasfilm, being the arrangement we’d made with Ed. David and I did not help Blinn make the Voyager flyby movies. We worked on the Carl Sagan Cosmos series with Blinn.

…the Bray-Hurd animation patents.
[indent]Mayerson: The Bray-Hurd animation patents ran out in the early 1930s. Patents are only good for 17 years. It doesn’t matter that Bray lived past 100, his life span had no effect on how long the patents lasted.

They started with a Tectronics 4013 computer
[indent]Jim Blinn: It’s spelled “Tektronix” and it was a display terminal not a computer.

Jim Blinn: Stella Star was the character name, played by actress Caroline Munro. She was British.

Jim Blinn: GRASS was a real time system, driving a Vector General display which, as I recall, had 3d hardware transformations. It might have taken a week to set up the scene and film it, but the rendering was not the bottleneck.

Jim Blinn & Alvy Ray Smith: It was called the Computer Division, never Lucas Digital Lab. The Computer Graphics Group was one part of the Computer Division. Ed Catmull was in charge of the whole Computer Division; Alvy Ray Smith was head of the Computer Graphics Group.

Jim Clark was never part of Lucasfilm. He was for a short time a member of the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, before being fired by Alex Schure.

Jim Blinn: I was not involved in the Genesis sequence at all. This is a common misconception that has caused some understandable dismay from some of those who actually did work (really hard) on the sequence.

Jim Blinn: Alvy was “inspired by” rather than “worked on” the voyager films

Jim Blinn: The Voyager Jupiter films were released in 1979, Cosmos was shown on PBS in 1980, both before the Adam Powers film.

Jim Blinn: The PS2 was a general purpose 3D vector display system, used by architects, CAD/CAM, etc. It was not really used in military flight simulators. Incidentally, I gave Abel his first look at a PS2 during a demo I gave him at JPL. He bought his own right afterwards.

Jim Blinn: The correct model number would be VAX 11/780.

Mark Mayerson:Omnibus did not do Captain Power. The L.A. office of Omnibus did a test to try and land the project, but lost it to a Toronto studio named Arcca. I know this because I quit Omnibus very shortly before the bankruptcy to work at Arcca on Captain Power.

recalled later, "After the ceremony, and so many great Bob Abel stories, I was inspired to go back to my office and work. Tell me who else’s funeral would make you want to go do that?”
[indent]The unnamed source of the anecdote was Tracy Fullerton, chair of Interactive Studies at USC.

The most direct ancestor of Motion Capture was the rotoscope technique.
[indent]Larry Loc: Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope in 1916 before they worked for J.R. Bray not 1917.
(Author: He began to develop it in 1915, but the patent reads 1917). And Bray did not let them go, he tried to take Koko in the courts and only ended up with the “Out of the Inkwell” name.
Mayerson: While the Fleischers invented the rotoscope, they did it before they were employed by Bray. See page 170 of the 1982 edition of Donald Crafton’s Before Mickey./indent]

The producer of the Big World of Little Adam was Fred Ladd, not Fred Patten.

…There they attended lectures by Jim Blinn and Charles Csuri.
For several years in the early ‘80’s I taught an introductory computer graphics course at Art Center College of Design with the assistance of Bob Schaff. We gave a special 4 to 6 week concentrated version of this course at ACCD to a group of Disney animators, one of whom was Tina Price. Charles Csuri was not a part of this program (but he might have interacted with the Disney people in some other way that I don’t know about.)

…Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension (1996)…was the first 3D stereoscopic short undertaken since Friz Freleng’s Lumberjack Rabbit in 1953.
[indent]Jim Blinn: The Pixar short KnickKnack (1989) was done in stereo 3D.
Author: Okay, so I’ll change it to WB’s first stereoscopic short undertaken…

Alvy Ray Smith: I, having grown up in New Mexico surrounded by Spanish and speaking it (poorly), led off the discussion by suggesting that the name of the machine be like “laser,” a noun that looks like a Spanish verb (the Spanish infinitive always ends in –ir, –er, or –ar). David DiFrancesco and I were seriously investigating lasers at the time for Lucasfilm’s digital film printer, so the word was on my mind and I had pointed out this “Spanishness” to David previously. I suggested, to get started, “pixer,” to make pictures, to look like “laser.” This was pronounced Spanish style: pix-EHR. Loren Carpenter pointed out that “radar” had a very high-tech sound to it. I enthusiastically said –ar is also Spanish verb ending, so “pixar” (pix-AHR) works too! That was it. Nothing to do with Latin (which I don’t know) and everything to do with Spanish. Sounding more high tech rather than sounding better. It’s a fake Spanish verb for “to make pictures.” Later when the new startup company was looking for a name and in desperation (no two of us could agree on a name and we had to have one for the paperwork), I suggested we use the machine’s name for the company name. It was accepted unexcitedly!

Alvy Ray Smith: Jobs mis-stated. He didn’t found the company. He financed it as its venture capitalist (see the founding documents on http://alvyray.com/Pixar/). The goal of the company he financed was to make money selling hardware. Of course, there was always the real goal of making the first movie, but he never said that or signed up to it even. The first time that Jobs claimed he was a cofounder was in the red herring (prospectus) for the IPO of the company (for going public) in 1995, nine years after the founding. In the prospectus Jobs also claimed to have been CEO of Pixar since its founding, which was also not true.

Alvy Ray Smith: There were two cofounders of Pixar, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, in the sense that we conceived of the company, did the deal, signed all the documents, and hired the 38 other founding employees that we brought with us from Lucasfilm. Tony Apodaca, Tom Duff, Pat Hanrahan, and Darwyn Peachy were not among them. The full and correct list may be found on http://alvyray.com/Pixar/, which shows a page from the founding documents.

It states that on Page 59 there is a mention of Alvy Ray Smith , which in fact it does not contain.