Both ED CATMULL (co-founder of Pixar) and SCOTT ROSS (co-founder of Digital Domain) headlined Siggraph Pioneers events in Vancouver
At the Siggraph Conference held in Vancouver, BC, Canada from August 10 – 14 2025, Pioneers Chair Ed Kramer led two separate events featuring founders of seminal companies in the history of computer graphics. Links to the videos of both events are posted below.
On Sunday, 10 August, Ed Catmull gave the prestigious Pioneers Featured Speaker address for 2025. Catmull’s presentation was the kickoff event of the conference, and drew a record standing-room-only crowd to hear his recollections about the making of Toy Story, the world’s first all-CGI animated feature film. His presentation happened to fall on the 30th anniversary of the 1995 blockbuster, so Siggraph Computer Animation Festival Chair Dawn Fidrick worked with Pioneers Chair Ed Kramer to make Catmull’s talk the introduction to a special 30th anniversary screening for conference attendees of a pristine remastered copy of the landmark film. Video of Catmull’s moving talk is available on Siggraph’s YouTube channel at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Uq8b2ooVk
Then on Tuesday, 12 August, Kramer moderated a discussion with Scott Ross, who headed Industrial Light + Magic in the early years of The Abyss and Terminator 2 and went on to found Digital Domain studios, garnering Oscars for Titanic, What Dreams May Come and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Ross recently published a memoir, UPSTART: The Digital Film Revolution Managing the Unmanageable. In it, his personal journey serves to illustrate the problems inherent in the “broken” VFX financial model, and makes the powerful case for a Visual Effects industry trade association. Ross also confronts the challenges of Artificial Interlligence head-on when it comes to the imminent and pervasive changes coming to the VFX industry. This video can be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Uq8b2ooVk
Note: If you are receiving this, it is because you visited my website www.WizardsofHollywood.com and joined my mailing list. This may have been at one of my presentations throughout Colorado, or at the Cleveland Comic Con, the Boston Sci-Fi Festival, the Dublin or New Zealand World Cons, or other events while I was preparing to make my Wizards of Hollywood documentary.
What happened to that documentary? The final business plan for the film was completed with my business advisor in March of 2020. I was about to approach investors and start serious fund-raising, but unfortunately, it was also two days before the world shut down because of Covid. During those two lost covid years, I was able to conduct one interview, safely interviewing Bonnie Arnold, the co-Producer of TOY STORY, from quarantined studios in both Denver and Los Angeles.
But also during this time, my online teaching load dramatically increased, and I no longer had the time to devote to making a full-length documentary. Also during this time, I became Chair of the Siggraph Pioneers group. Since then, I have devoted a great deal of effort staying true to my personal mission of introducing the world to important but little-known artists and developers throughout computer graphics history.
The Siggraph Pioneers are a community of almost 700 artists, developers, researchers, educators and entrepreneurs who have been working in computer graphics and interactive techniques for more than 20 years. Many, like myself, have been working for more than twice that time! The content I have helped create can be found by visiting our website and clicking the “Online Content” button:
https://www.siggraph.org/siggraph-365/pioneers
This content includes panels with pioneering experts on many topics including the Pioneers of Analog Animation, the Pioneering Graphics Processors, Pioneers of Digital Art, Pioneers of Computer Graphics Education, two panels on a Pioneer’s Perspective on Generative AI, and the Pioneers of Computer Graphics for Aerospace. It also includes interviews with seminal Computer Graphics artists, chairs of a number of Siggraph Conferences, videos of many of our previous Featured Speakers, and an annual In Memoriam video honoring those industry pioneers lost in that year.
I still own all the artist interview footage shot during the development of Wizards of Hollywood, and have not given up on the idea of creating a documentary highlighting the pioneering artists and the CGI backstories from classic films.
I also recently helped edit a fascinating book on the history of CGI for movies, by author Mark J. P. Wolf, titled Calculated Imagery: A History of Computer Graphics in Hollywood Cinema. (They even used my quote for the back of the book jacket!)
Thanks for sticking with me on this journey, as I actively pursue the next iteration of Wizards of Hollywood!
-edk
