Edwin Catmull is a legend when it comes to using computer-animated storytelling.
Having discovered several fundamental aspects of computer graphics technology, Catmull played integral roles at Lucasfilm and then Pixar, where he served as the company’s chief technical officer and helped develop the popular rendering system used in movies like “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo.”
Today, Catmull is president of both the Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. But despite his reputation as a pioneer, Catmull is skeptical of one particular technology: virtual reality.
“It’s not storytelling,” Catmull told The Guardian in an interview. “People have been trying to do [virtual reality] storytelling for 40 years. They haven’t succeeded. Why is that? Because we know that if they succeed then people would jump on it.”
Catmull said he believes virtual reality can be useful for video games, but not so much for telling stories.
“Games are very successful. It’s its own art form though, and it’s not the same as a linear narrative,” he said. “Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You’re not just wandering around in the world.”
Catmull says he admires all of the companies trying to succeed in virtual reality, like Facebook-owned Oculus VR. After all, Pixar was once a company trying to prove to people that computer animation can be an art form. But Catmull simply believes making compelling narratives is difficult across all media, and virtual reality is still in its experimentation phase.
“We have a lot of startup companies here, and some will fail and some will succeed. It’s only by trying a lot of things that you can actually make the progress… They’ll learn something from it and they’ll go somewhere else, and some will actually have gained from that experience, even though it’s painful when you go through it. So it’s a process that we should willingly embrace.”
Read Catmull’s entire interview over at The Guardian.
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