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Last May, Belgian school HELHa invited us to attend a series of conferences by Pixar President Jim Morris. We wrote about this event at the time.
Thanks to this opportunity, we were able to ask Jim Morris about his career, spanning almost 200 movies at ILM and Pixar, how he feels looking back at projects that didn’t meet up expectations (John Carter which he produced, Lightyear), his day to day work, technology, AI at Pixar, how Pixar became a more diverse company, the future of streaming, Pixar’s carbon footprint, stylized animation. We also asked him about HELHa and Jean-Yves Arboit, who is teaching CG at HELHa and is a long-time friend of Jim Morris.
Huge thanks to Jean-Yves, by the way: this interview would not have been possible without him, since it took place at HELHa during the aforementioned event.
00:00 – Introduction
00:15 – ILM, The Abyss & Always
02:04 – John Carter
03:25 – Beginnings at Pixar, day to day job as Pixar President
05:42 – Disney Animation vs Pixar
06:12 – Studios helping each other, open source
06:48 – Technology (vision, technology groups at Pixar, RenderMan)
08:36 – AI at Pixar?
10:33 – Diversity at Pixar
13:22 – Disney+
15:01 – Carbon footprint, net zero?
15:37 – Looking back at Lightyear
17:02 – Stylized animation at Pixar?
19:20 – Jim Morris & HELHa
Related interviews:
- Our interview of Steve May, CTO – Pixar.
- Our interview of Dylan Sisson – RenderMan.
- On Lightyear, our interview of director Angus MacLane & producer Galyn Susman.
