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Pixar’s Co-Founder on AI: What Happens to Creativity?

2026-11-03 · other · Alex Mashrabov, Ed Catmull · recording, 1 h 38 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Studio work & business (also: Productions (case studies), Pre-production & story) · mode: Explainer · tags: guest or collaboration, fiction

Higgsfield CEO Alex Mashrabov interviews Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull: Ed traces the 20 years from Utah to Toy Story, Pixar's habits (artists and engineers as peers, publishing everything, the Brain Trust and outside notes) and says AI is at the beginning; creators still lack the discipline of lighting, timing and pacing, films stay team efforts of well under 100 people, and costs may halve in the near term.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Cold open and introduction of Ed Catmull

  • ★ Alex Mashrabov says that when Higgsfield started in 2023 it had just one book in the office, a book about Pixar written by Ed Catmull. — 00:00:26 · Higgsfield AI, Ed Catmull

00:01:33 — What people said when Pixar started; the two teachers who shaped him: Ivan Sutherland and Alan Kay

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the release of Toy Story was the culmination of 20 years of work. — 00:01:33 · Ed Catmull

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says Pixar's goal was a film where people did not notice the technology; when almost every review gave only a sentence or two to it being computer generated, they knew they had succeeded. — 00:02:25 · Ed Catmull

    “Our goal was to make a film where people did not pay attention to the technology”

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says early computer graphics were not considered relevant by most of the film world, a different dynamic from the fear around AI today. — 00:03:35 · Ed Catmull

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says his teacher Ivan Sutherland taught that whatever your big vision, you take one step at a time and solve the problem in front of you. — 00:04:27 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says Alan Kay taught him to grasp the implications of compound change such as Moore's law, and that people still find those implications almost impossible to understand. — 00:05:21 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says attempts to explain exponential growth essentially fail: people just think it means fast. — 00:05:50 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says his foundation was the mindset that things will change in unpredictable ways, so the job is to engage with the problem. — 00:06:30 · Ed Catmull

00:07:04 — The Disney job he turned down, why he believed a CG feature was possible, and why AI is only at the beginning

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says that after an exchange proposed by Ivan Sutherland, Disney offered him a job designing the new Space Mountain ride at Disney World, which he turned down. — 00:07:33 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Disney saw computer imagery of the time as irrelevant to its work: it was not negative, it simply could not see beyond what existed. — 00:08:02 · Ed Catmull
  • ★ Ed Catmull says only about three US places studied computer graphics; at the University of Utah his classmates included Alan Kay, Jim Clark (later founder of Silicon Graphics) and John Warnock (founder of Adobe). — 00:09:06 · Adobe, Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull recalls overhearing at a Society for Information Display trade show that the government was wasting money on the University of Utah's graphics program; he thought they had no idea what was coming. — 00:09:33 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says people look at the slop in early AI work and conclude that more of it will not work at all, judging where the field is going by what they see now. — 00:11:16 · AI look, Ed Catmull

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says AI is at the beginning and will change; its problems are the job, and the companies working on it must fix the problems they can see. — 00:11:44 · Ed Catmull

    “We're at the beginning. And it's going to change.”

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says a computer lets you emulate the future: work on the important problems before they are economical, so they are solved when the economics change. — 00:12:12 · Ed Catmull

00:13:28 — How engineers and artists work together; how eight creatives changed Higgsfield

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull calls the assumption that engineers are more organised than artists a misconception; as groups, world-class engineers and artists are equally able to manage. — 00:13:28 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says that visiting technology companies for Lucasfilm, he found their engineers told a different story than their executives, a kind of class structure he wanted to avoid. — 00:15:13 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says that when Pixar rewrote its animation system, animators rotated into the engineering team, so at the end they felt the system was their product. — 00:15:39 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says that although publicity credits the artists, inside Pixar artists and technical staff must work together as peers, socialise and even marry, and that forms the culture. — 00:16:48 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says everyone at Pixar took pride in risky ideas such as a rat who wants to cook or an old man flying away in a balloon, because risky work is more likely to be rewarding. — 00:17:14 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield burned $10 million of the $16 million it had raised within its first 18 months. — 00:17:42 · Higgsfield AI
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says that in March last year (2025) Higgsfield noticed there was no model and no way to do camera control. — 00:18:18 · Higgsfield AI
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield's engineers worked closely with its initial eight-person creative team for a couple of weeks to build camera control. — 00:18:47 · Higgsfield AI
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield's creative team grew from eight people to over 200 today, and most product features now come from the creative team. (hedged) — 00:18:47 · Higgsfield AI

00:19:17 — How artists drive new technology: Lucasfilm, from 40,000 polygons to RenderMan and Toy Story

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says creatives giving engineers direction is the way the process always worked; it is obvious to him but he does not see other people doing it. — 00:19:17 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says he was brought into Lucasfilm to put together a group for computer graphics, digital audio and video editing. — 00:19:45 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Walt Disney understood technology was part of the creative process, and George Lucas was the first since him who understood it and had the resources to fund it. — 00:20:56 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says engineers do not know what to build and artists do not know what is possible, so artists must patiently work with an early, not-good-enough system alongside its builders. — 00:22:24 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says that in the early computer graphics years the state of the art was 40,000 polygons per image. — 00:22:54 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says his team estimated it needed 80 million polygons per image for film, work that led to the RenderMan rendering tool. — 00:23:24 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the change began with James Cameron's The Abyss: its one special effect convinced Cameron that computer graphics could be used for a main character. — 00:24:14 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Terminator 2 (1991) had the first major all-CG character in a motion picture, and Jurassic Park (1993) shocked everybody. — 00:25:10 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull thinks Jurassic Park had only about four or seven minutes of computer graphics; Steven Spielberg is the master of doing a lot with a little. (hedged) — 00:25:36 · Ed Catmull
    • check: four minutes or seven minutes — doubtful
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Toy Story (1995) was the first film made entirely in computer graphics, the turning point of the transition to digital. — 00:26:03 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Pixar made the RenderMan interface public; others made free implementations, and the only way to compete against free was to be a lot better. — 00:27:14 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says RenderMan was used for the special effects at ILM and other effects companies, including Weta in New Zealand. — 00:27:14 · Ed Catmull

00:28:13 — Why his team published all its research; what Steve Jobs saw in the group

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says that from New York Tech on his team published everything, unlike secretive rivals, because when things change fast you cannot keep a technology secret. — 00:28:39 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says publishing attracted people to work on the interesting problems, because they liked being part of something with societal impact. — 00:29:33 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Steve Jobs bought the group from Lucasfilm in 1986 and, though notoriously secretive, never once questioned his decision to publish everything. — 00:30:02 · Ed Catmull
  • ★ Ed Catmull says Disney, also secretive, let Pixar keep publishing everything after the acquisition because Pixar was already successful. — 00:30:30 · Ed Catmull
  • ★ Ed Catmull says Steve Jobs changed dramatically over the years he knew him. — 00:30:57 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Steve Jobs believed computer graphics would become important and knew he was buying the best computer graphics group in the world and its potential. — 00:31:54 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says early Pixar struggled selling to medical, image-processing and university markets, while a small side group made short films that earned nothing but solved the artistic problems. — 00:32:51 · Ed Catmull

00:33:21 — Luxo Jr., the Oscar it did not win, and the word "AI"

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says John Lasseter's Luxo Jr. was nominated for an Academy Award and should have won, but the animation community keyed on the term computer animation. — 00:33:21 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull is upset that the term AI was settled on, because like computer animation it triggers the feeling that the computer is doing the work. — 00:34:05 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the number one question about Luxo Jr. was whether the big lamp was the mother or the father, which showed the audience was in the story, not the technology. — 00:35:00 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the issue has always been using people and tools to communicate something, getting away from audiences asking how it was done. — 00:36:21 · Ed Catmull

00:37:16 — AI art and the artist behind it; will an AI-assisted film win an Oscar by 2030

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says generative AI is inherently derivative, since its training imagery comes largely from real-world information; the question is who is driving it. — 00:37:44 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says every art form, from watercolour to stop motion, has an artistic eye behind it deciding what is good enough and what is not. — 00:38:43 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says some AI work feels clipped together from pieces of what AI can generate; he still sees the technology in it today and says we are not there yet. — 00:39:38 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says artists want control of the timing, lighting, pacing and framing in AI tools. — 00:39:38 · Ed Catmull

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says the list of reasons people gave for rejecting computer graphics, audio or video tools was the toolmakers' list of things to improve, and that is where AI is today. — 00:40:04 · Ed Catmull

    “that list was their reason for not accepting something was actually our list of things to improve”

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says computer-generated background characters and creatures have been in films since the mid-1990s and are accepted, because they arrived gradually and were fill-in. — 00:41:38 · Ed Catmull

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says the reaction to AI differs from computer graphics: then it was a question of relevance, now it is a fear of displacement, including in writing, and he does not deny the fear. — 00:42:11 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says that when visual effects moved from building physical things to largely CG, the field and the number of people in it grew dramatically. — 00:42:36 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says having a tool that generates images says nothing about the filmmaking: the question is whether the story holds up. — 00:43:30 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull calls the heavily CG Andor series beautiful filmmaking that everybody accepts, because audiences judge whether they like the film. — 00:43:58 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull thinks an AI-assisted film winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature by 2030 is highly unlikely. — 00:44:22 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says developing a film and adapting the technology has its own life cycle, so with the end of 2026 approaching an AI Oscar will not happen within three years. — 00:44:49 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says concerns about the protection of intellectual property in AI are legitimate and will keep creating problems. — 00:45:18 · Ed Catmull

00:47:17 — Trailer of a Higgsfield hybrid-animation short film

00:48:06 — Ed reviews the trailer and the festival shorts: would Pixar greenlight it

  • ★ Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield's team took maybe less than two months to assemble the hybrid-animation short whose trailer Ed Catmull watched. (hedged) — 00:48:06 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says a feature is greenlit differently: people lose objectivity about their own story, so Pixar uses mechanisms such as the Brain Trust to get an objective message about how well the story works. — 00:48:32 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says he cannot judge much from a trailer, but the look and consistency of Higgsfield's hybrid-animation short work as a trailer, and its ending, cutting back to the child, was good. — 00:49:23 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says that of the festival short films he saw, all but one had some element that did not match consistent short filmmaking. — 00:49:49 · Higgsfield Global Film Festival, Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says the AI shorts' images looked very good for their style; what fell short were the other things that matter in storytelling: lighting, timing and pacing. — 00:50:16 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says a humorous short needs to end on a good solid note, and a short that demonstrates an art style must carry something with it that is evocative or makes you curious. — 00:50:43 · Ed Catmull

00:51:40 — Why filmmaking is a discipline; what AI means for writers

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says phones made everybody a photographer, giving billions of snapshots, yet few great photographs. — 00:51:40 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says great photography is a discipline most people do not know exists: to take good pictures, learn the discipline. — 00:52:35 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says something like 3 billion phones can take film-resolution images, yet few feature films have come from that. (hedged) — 00:53:04 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says a motion-picture camera in your pocket does not make you a filmmaker, and AI is now another such tool. — 00:53:58 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says AI filmmaking is not asking for something that looks cool and iterating on it: learn the lighting and the pacing, and the short and long films will get better. — 00:53:58 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the craft of filmmaking is learned by study: looking at what others have done, reading about it and applying it. — 00:54:30 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull calls the worry that AI will replace the writer on a "make me a script" request a bogus threat from people who do not know what they are talking about. — 00:54:57 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says much of what a story communicates is nonverbal, and good acting is when the spoken words contradict the nonverbal ones. — 00:55:26 · Ed Catmull

00:55:49 — How good AI tools are today; the lesson of feedback from the CG years

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says AI tools are there for certain kinds of films, but the discipline, often an understanding of timing and pacing, is not there yet. — 00:56:18 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says he would watch an entire film with the quality and pacing of Higgsfield's hybrid-animation trailer; the trick is to extend it into the arc of a feature. — 00:56:47 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says a feature film has a standard three-act arc developed over years, which should be violated only by someone who knows why. — 00:57:14 · Ed Catmull
  • ★ Alex Mashrabov says Amina presented Higgsfield's hybrid-animation short at SIGGRAPH. — 00:57:43 · Amina
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull's lesson from computer graphics is to know what you have, learn what else you need and work to get it, staying clear-eyed about what works through feedback from others. — 00:58:25 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says in good group feedback you say what you think without becoming attached to your suggestion or taking it personally; the filmmakers stay responsible. — 00:59:49 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield's projects are open source so people can collaborate and learn, helping tens of millions of creative professionals onto AI video. — 01:00:12 · Higgsfield AI

01:00:49 — What the AI equivalent of Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park will look like

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says audiences accepted the Terminator 2 character because human emotion on its face was not expected; the uncanny valley had not been overcome. — 01:01:18 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Jurassic Park's dinosaurs had nothing to be compared with but drawings or stop motion, so they were a leap forward. — 01:01:43 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the Toy Story characters were all made of plastic only because that was all the compute power of the time could do. — 01:02:59 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says the turmoil over poorly made AI content has become politicised, which makes it harder, but economics and artistic direction mean AI filmmaking is going to happen. — 01:04:20 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull thinks the first successful AI film will be stylised, or AI will come in through special effects of non-real characters, used without calling attention to itself. (speculative) — 01:04:46 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says studios will take care of talented actors and writers, who feel threatened by AI but are not really threatened. — 01:05:15 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says AI is in a phase of telling good from bad, in which the task is to use the good side rather than get rid of the bad. — 01:05:45 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says making art requires getting paid, so people need to work out the economics; wanting good art and business success is fine. — 01:06:13 · Ed Catmull

01:07:06 — What AI creators still need to learn: pacing, story structure, where the eye looks, the establishing shot

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says Higgsfield can help by teaching people the discipline of the other parts of filmmaking, such as lighting, pacing and story structure. — 01:07:06 · Higgsfield AI, Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says pacing is important in a longer story because some people lose objectivity about it. — 01:08:12 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says eye-tracking maps show viewers look where the artist wants them to, and lighting is part of directing where they look. — 01:08:40 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the establishing shot, where viewers' eyes roam, exists to give brief context on where you are, so more time goes to what matters in the story. — 01:09:08 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says Ed Catmull's book shaped how he and his co-founder build Higgsfield, which struggled for its first 18 months as a group of engineers before creatives came to drive the process. — 01:09:31 · Higgsfield AI, Ed Catmull

01:10:21 — Pixar's culture: no second class, protect the film, flat communication, Brain Trust and Steve Jobs's notes

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says a feeling among some people of being second class crept into Pixar's culture three times, even while they were watching for it. — 01:10:50 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says a company must spend time on how it values people, or it slips into something bad for the soul of the organisation. — 01:11:19 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says every decision at Pixar is whether it works for the film: the producer's explicit job is to protect the film, which includes the director and crew. — 01:13:12 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says companies where the profit margin matters more than the product succeed short term and end in disaster long term. — 01:13:41 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield keeps its organisation as flat as possible so it hears feedback directly from creatives. — 01:14:02 · Higgsfield AI
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says Higgsfield recently made a skill for AI educational, narrative content over 10 minutes long, which came from Adil, its spokesperson, and is now part of the product. — 01:14:02 · Higgsfield AI, Adil
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says a film needs a structured organisation behind it; what needs to be flat is the value system, the feeling of everyone's contribution. — 01:14:32 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says Pixar's communication bypasses the structure: artists and animators talk directly to technical staff, while a chain remains for final decisions, so everyone feels ownership. — 01:15:30 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says there are few tools for honest feedback to leaders who lose objectivity: the Brain Trust, an audience screening (late in the game) and an outside voice. — 01:15:57 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Steve Jobs was Pixar's outside voice once a quarter, giving notes he did not mind being ignored, and was kept out of Brain Trust meetings because his voice was too powerful. — 01:16:52 · Ed Catmull
  • ★ Ed Catmull says Steve Jobs had no input into Toy Story. — 01:17:43 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Pixar formed the Brain Trust when its outside adviser at Disney left, because those in the middle of a film are blinded and need someone to wake them up. — 01:18:41 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Steve Jobs never gave a note at the board's film reviews that other filmmakers had not already given the directors. — 01:19:08 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says directors learned to ignore each other's notes but could not ignore Steve Jobs, because he was so articulate. — 01:19:37 · Ed Catmull

01:20:05 — Why he is not worried about AI and why no one can predict where it goes

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says he is not worried about AI: it is a new suite of tools, but filmmaking is people working together, and people do not change at the rate of Moore's law. — 01:20:05 · Ed Catmull

    “We're not changing at the rate of Moore's law. We're still people.”

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says he can feel where things are going 10 to 15 years ahead, beyond which it is highly unpredictable. — 01:21:43 · Ed Catmull

  • ★ Ed Catmull says neither Apple nor Android foresaw that apps would be the phone's revolution: Steve Jobs first wanted apps kept within Apple and saw his mistake within months. — 01:23:32 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says that, like social media and the internet, AI is going to democratise both good and bad; the question is how to engage and move it toward great use. — 01:24:23 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says AI's adoption is faster than computer graphics' because we are farther along the compounding curve, so beyond the next several years it cannot be predicted well. — 01:24:50 · Ed Catmull

01:25:21 — What AI means for film budgets; whether one person can make a film

  • ★ Alex Mashrabov says script pickup rates stay low, maybe below 2%. (hedged) — 01:25:21
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says talk of AI cutting film costs by a factor of 50 or 100 is not useful; the limiting factor will be the creative power of the team, which needs several artistic talents. — 01:26:17 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says making a film alone as a goal is a terrible goal, about oneself rather than the film; films are collaborative efforts of many people. — 01:26:43 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says YouTube is probably the biggest streaming platform, full of short-form work, so long-form films need lower costs. (hedged) — 01:27:43 · YouTube, Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says film studios are behind the curve because none had technical people in their leadership. — 01:28:09 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says one person will be able to make a film, but the share of such films he or anyone would want to see is tiny. — 01:29:25 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Frozen, a sister story, drew on interviews with the women at Disney about their sisters, capturing something a single person could not. — 01:30:18 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says a good story depends on a diversity of views, and the best films are collaborative team efforts of artists, technical people, production people and actors. — 01:31:42 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says the question with new AI tools is whether you can put the pieces together better and more economically, so more people can get involved. — 01:32:47 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says the team that worked on Hell Grind was over 15 people. — 01:32:47 · Hell Grind

01:33:14 — The ideal team size for an AI film

  • ★★ Alex Mashrabov says the Hell Grind team's success rate was one generation in 64: for the 90-minute film they generated over 100 hours of AI content, so human taste matters more than ever. — 01:33:14 · Hell Grind
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says Pixar and Disney films normally had about 300 people directly on production. — 01:33:40 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says changes are found near the end of a film, and with a lot of material and 300 people they are painful and expensive, but you have to be willing to make them. — 01:34:05 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★ Ed Catmull says that before generative AI he thought the optimal feature team was about 100 people, and AI changes that. — 01:35:27 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull says the optimal team size for an AI-era feature is still an open experiment, but it is not 10 and definitely should not be over 100. — 01:35:54 · Ed Catmull
  • ★★★ Ed Catmull thinks it is realistic that AI should cut the cost of a film in half in the near term, which the changing economics of distribution require. — 01:35:54 · Ed Catmull

01:36:54 — Ed's advice for filmmakers: engage fully with the tools

  • ★★★ Ed Catmull's main advice to filmmakers: AI is coming whether we like it or not, so engage fully, by learning the craft, adding to it and working with the toolmakers and artists to shape it. — 01:36:54 · Ed Catmull

    “our best act is to engage fully with it”

  • ★★ Ed Catmull says filmmakers who bump against the tools' limits and complain are how the problems get fixed and the field moves forward. — 01:37:30 · Ed Catmull

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Alex Mashrabov · Ed Catmull · Pixar · Toy Story

Also: People: Adil · Alan Kay · Amina · George Lucas · Ivan Sutherland · James Cameron · Jim Clark · John Lasseter · John Warnock · Steve Jobs · Steven Spielberg · Walt Disney

Projects: Higgsfield Global Film Festival

Works: Andor · Frozen · Hell Grind · Jurassic Park · KÖK BÖRÜ · Luxo Jr. · Odyssey · Ratatouille · Terminator 2 · The Abyss · Up

Organizations: Adobe · Apple · Disney · Industrial Light & Magic · Lucasfilm · New York Institute of Technology · Silicon Graphics · University of Utah · Weta · YouTube

Concepts: AI look · Brain Trust · Establishing shot · Moore's law · Uncanny valley

Events: SIGGRAPH 2026

Products: RenderMan

Also centred on Alex Mashrabov: Higgsfield Crosses $1B Annualized Revenue Run Rate Milestone

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