Red's Dream - Production

Production

According to Lasseter in the short's audio commentary, Ed Catmull wanted the Pixar staff to make a film using the Pixar Image Computer and the rendering software Chapreyes. Lasseter began to develop the story of a circus clown who is upstaged by his own unicycle while at the same time, animators William Reeves and Eben Ostby starting working on their own separate ideas. Ostby had wanted to animate a bicycle, and Reeves began working on a city during a rainy night. Ultimately, the three combined their ideas, which resulted in the creation of Red's Dream. The film project came with two technical rationales. The bike shop scenes at the beginning and end were to demonstrate the tendering of highly complex imagery; with the bikes and their spokes and the shop fixtures, a typical frame of the scene had more than ten thousand geometric primitives, which in turn were made oup of more than thirty million polygons.

The idea of a bike shop setting was inspired by Eben Ostby, a cycling enthusiast and graphics programmer at Pixar, who had been working on generating a complex still image of a bike shop.The dream sequence was to be a demonstration of rendering with the Pixar Image Computer. An engineer named Tony Apodaca had converted Pixar's rendering software to run on the PIC, but it turned out that the machine's design left its processors without enough memory for a program as complex as Reyes, and so Apodaca was able to convert only a portion of Reyes's features. On account of those limitations, the dream sequence was cruder in its look than the rest of the film, and Red's Dream was both the first and last Pixar film to be made with the Pixar Image Computer.

Space at Pixar was growing tight in its Marin County bungalow; while Red's Dream was underway, the animation group—Lasseter, plus several "technical directors" who created models and shaders and such—worked out of a hallway. Toward the end of production, Lasseter worked and slept in the hallways for days on end. One night about two weeks before the deadline for SIGGRAPH, an engineer named Jeff Mock brought his camcorder around and shot an ersatz interview with Lasseter, who joked about the conditions. He had just spent five days animating a sequence of three hundred frames-twelve and a half seconds of film.

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, part of Disney's legendary Nine Old Men, visited Lasseter at Pixar after Red's Dream had just been finished and they watched a screening. Thomas was evidently freed of his former doubts about computer animation, expressed in 1984 essay in which he argued computer animation could never produce anything as meaningful as its hand-drawn predecessor. He shook Lasseter's hand afterward and said meaningfully, "John, you did it."