Pixar VP: Behind the Making of CARS

Earlier this week Greg Brandeau, Vice President of Technology, Pixar Animation Studios, gave a presention at Storage Networking World  held in San Diego:  The File Storage Story Behind the Making of the Animated Feature Film Cars.

The mission: build Pixar into a great feature animation studio. So stated Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO, in a letter to Pixar shareholders in June 1998. Since then, Pixar has gone on to produce and win awards for a number of feature films, including A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and Finding Nemo. Bringing a computer-animated feature film to fruition, however, is fraught with challenges. On the production side, each frame packs a digital punch because there are virtually hundreds of details—facial expressions, lighting, shadows, movements—that need to be rendered electronically. Considering that 24 frames of animation is required to fill each second of film time, its no wonder that Pixar’s requirement to serve up 240 billion data requests per day was daunting.