Exonian Profiles
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Academy Award–winning filmmaker Tom Porter ’69 hopes that everyone will go see his latest movie. He just hopes that none of his work is visible. As supervising technical director of Monsters, Inc., Pixar’s new computer-animated film about the monsters that lurk in children’s bedroom closets, Porter has spent the past four years overseeing the modeling, shading and lighting of countless monsters large and small. “You just hope the audience is caught up in the story and its characters and that none of this technical work is apparent on first viewing,” says Porter. What is readily apparent, however, is how well audiences young and old have responded to Monsters, Inc., which took in more than $63 million in its opening weekend alone—the best opening ever for an animated film. When work first began on Monsters, Inc. in 1997, says Porter, it was just four or five people (led by director Peter Docter) meeting to develop the story. By the time the film was in full swing, that number had grown to more than 150. “It’s a galloping environment,” says Porter. “The creative folks are always coming up with more ideas, more inventions. My job is to identify the technical problems that need researching.” On Monsters, Inc., the chief problems were fur and clothes. The film’s hero, Sulley, a shaggy, eight-foot-tall monster (voiced by John Goodman), spends much of the film “racing around, fur blowing in the breeze,” says Porter, often accompanied by Boo, the 3-year-old girl he has befriended. It was essential that all 3 million strands of Sulley’s feathery blue-green fur and Boo’s pink T-shirt respond realistically to those breezes. Realism would seem like the least of Porter’s worries: after all, this is a movie in which the hero’s best friend, Mike (voiced by Billy Crystal), looks like a cross between Cyclops and a Granny Smith apple. But then Porter has devoted his career to solving technical problems that have brought earlier Pixar films like Toy Story joyously to life. That he ended up working with computers at all is a bit of a fluke: A math major at the University of Pennsylvania, Porter planned to study more of the same in grad school but for an offhand remark by one of his professors. “He told me, ‘Computers are going to be big,’ ” Porter says with a laugh. Within a few years of getting his M.S. from Stanford, he landed at Lucasfilm, Ltd., working in the computer animation division, which was later bought by Steven Jobs and rechristened Pixar. During his 15 years at Pixar, Porter has won three Scientific and Engineering Academy Awards for his breakthroughs in some of the fundamentals of computer animation: digital painting, digital image compositing, and for his work on solving the motion-blur problem. Each technical advance has allowed Pixar’s animators greater freedom to tell their stories and audiences greater freedom to suspend their disbelief and take flight along with the characters. In a climatic chase scene near the end of Monsters, Inc., Sulley, Boo and Mike do indeed take flight, and when they do so, Sulley’s fur coat whips convincingly this way and that—thanks to a simulation program Porter’s colleagues developed that attaches hair to animated figures and “understands how each strand responds to gravity and other environmental forces.” Porter is especially proud of another, earlier scene, in which Sulley tumbles down a snowy mountainside. “There was some tough physics to work out to make sure the snowflakes were caught in the fur,” he says. The physics may be lost on the average viewer, but, as with much of Porter’s work, not the sense of wonder. —Beth Brosnan |
