John Lasseter _ Biography
Posted by tyrone on November 20, 2007
John Alan Lasseter
John Lasseter was born on January 12th 1957 he is an Academy Award-winning American animator and the “chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He is also currently the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lasseter) and widely considered an innovative genius, he has been called the “current Walt Disney.”
Early Days
John Lasseter father was a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership, and his mother an art teacher at “Bell Gardens Senior High School”, John Lasseter was a graduate of the “California Institute of the Arts” where is met his future colleague Mr. Brad Bird, the creation of “Pixar” was brought on by a lamp he saw in a shop, his idea was to bring that lamp to life.
Working at Disney
After he graduated, he obtained a job as an animator at Walt Disney’s feature animations. Whilst work on “Mickey’s Christmas Carol is was asked to see the first lightcycles sequences for the film “TRON” use the days state-of-the-art CGI, he saw the potential of the new technology and saw the he could use the “tech” to enhance animation into the 3 dimensional era which he had not considered before that time, this “tech” inspired him to create a feature length film and he choose the story “The Brave Little Toaster”, unknowingly he had “stepped on the toes” of he superiors how had already been aware of the 3D potential to create a great feature length film, because he went around he superiors one of them decided that when John Lasseter pitched the idea of the “Brave Little Toaster” he would turn it down, which happened, and to make things worse after the meeting had ended, he had a phone call and was told that he’s job had been terminated and that the film would be little made as a 2D feature length film.
After being fired, John Lasseter went to a computer graphics conference at the “Queen Mary in Long Beach”, where he met and talked to “Catmull”, Lasseter had made a deal to work as an “interface designer” with “Catmull” with his colleagues on their first CGI short film: “The Adventures of André and Wally B”, the film was more revolutionary than John Lasseter had first visualized before he joined “Lucasfilm”, since his idea had been to create only the backgrounds of computers. But in the final short film everything was computer animated, including the characters. After this CGI film, things would continue to grow until there first feature length film, ‘Toy Story’.
Pixar
John Alan Lasseter is a founding member of Pixar, where he over sees all of Pixar’s films and other associated project, he also personally directed Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, and Cars. He won two academy awards one for his short animation film ‘Tin Toy’ and the other the ‘Special Achievement’ for ‘Toy Story’, John Lasseter was nominated on 4 other occasions in the animated feature category for ‘Car’ and ‘Monsters INC’, “In April 2006, Disney purchased Pixar and Lasseter was named Chief Creative Officer of both Pixar and Disney animation studios. He was also named Principal Creative Advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he will help design attractions for Disney’s theme parks”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lasseter)
