William Reeves (animator)

William Thomas Reeves ( born July 19, 1951 in Toronto, Canada ) is a Canadian computer scientist who has contributed to significant advances in computer graphics and animation. He is a three time Academy Award winner.

Life

Reeves studied until 1974 at the University of Waterloo mathematics and graduated with a bachelor's degree. This was followed up in 1976 a master's degree in computer science at the University of Toronto and eventually at the same university his dissertation, which he successfully defended in 1980. In his Master's thesis Reeves had dealt with the implementation of interactive computer graphics in small computers; his thesis was entitled Quantitative representations of complex dynamic shape for motion analysis.

In 1980, Reeves was brought from George Lucas to the department of computer-generated special effects by Industrial Light & Magic, which belong to Lucasfilm studio for animation techniques. He was from 1982 to 1986 Project Manager of the model creation and animation teams. At the time he was involved among other things as a computer graphic artist at the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi. His 1982 developed image synthesis technique " Particle Systems " allowed the generation of very complex and detailed images and was subsequently used for the computer animated representation of fire, grass, flowers and trees. The function allowed, among other things an explosion scene in Return of the Jedi as well as the animation of thousands of trees in The Adventures of André and Wally B. For the development of Particle Systems Reeves won the 1997 Oscar for science and development.

Steve Jobs bought the division in 1986 and renamed it Pixar. Reeves was next to Jobs and John Lasseter one of the founders of Pixar. Here he was responsible for many innovations. Among others, he was one of four technicians who Pixar's proprietary animation program for modeling, animation and lighting, puppet, developed what Reeves was in 1998 with his second Oscar in the category "Science and Development". As technical director Reeves was involved in short animated films such as The little lamp. For Tin Toy, Reeves created by John Lasseter, he won an Oscar.

Reeves is married and has three children.

Filmography

Publications (selection )

Awards

823924
de