Tiny Toy Stories

John Alan Lasseter is an American animator, film director and the chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He is also currently the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering. Lasseter's first job was with The Walt Disney Company, where he became an animator.... Next, he joined Lucasfilm, where he worked on the then-groundbreaking use of CGI animation. After the Graphics Group of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm was sold to Steve Jobs and became Pixar in 1986, Lasseter oversaw all of Pixar's films and associated projects as executive producer and he directed Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Cars, and Cars 2. Lasseter is also the creator of Cars. He has won two Academy Awards, for Animated Short Film , as well as a Special Achievement Award . Lasseter was born in Hollywood, California. His mother, Jewell Mae , was an art teacher at Bell Gardens High School, and his father, Paul Eual Lasseter, was a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership. Lasseter grew up in Whittier, California. His mother's profession contributed to his growing preoccupation with animation.
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Alvy Ray Smith III is an American engineer and noted pioneer in computer graphics. He is a co-founder of the animation studio Pixar which he co-founded along with Edwin Catmull and Steve Jobs. In 1965, he received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from New Mexico State University. In... 1970 he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, with a dissertation on cellular automata. From 1969 to 1973 he was an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at New York University. While at Xerox PARC in 1974, he worked with Dick Shoup on SuperPaint, one of the very first computer paint programs. Smith's major contribution to this software was the creation of the HSV color space. In 1975, Smith was recruited to join the new Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology, one of the leading computer graphics research groups of the 1970s. There he worked on a series of newer paint programs, including the first 24 bit one ; as part of this work, he co-invented the concept of the alpha channel. He was also the programmer for Ed Emshwiller's pioneering animation Sunstone.
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