“At Pixar, we believe strongly that filmmakers should develop ideas they are passionate about. This may sound like a no-brainer, but in fact in Hollywood, the big movie studios have whole departments devoted to acquiring and developing projects that will only later be paired with a director-for-hire.”

American computer scientist and animator

Edwin Earl Catmull is an American computer scientist and animator, best known as a co-founder of Pixar and a former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. His work helped shape modern 3D computer graphics, and he received the 2019 ACM Turing Award for those contributions. Catmull’s career sits at the intersection of technology and animation. He is widely associated with the development of computer graphics techniques that made complex digital imagery possible, and with the studios that brought those tools into mainstream filmmaking.