![]() That first year, PDI earned only $500, from Hewlett-Packard for making slides. "I needed the discipline of going to an office." "I knew I couldn't work out of my home where I would have played with my dog and gone to the refrigerator all day," said Rosendahl, laughing. He used the money to rent a small office in downtown Los Altos, buy a Cromemco Z80 personal computer and pay for his living expenses while he figured out how to use the computer to make drawings. He started PDI with a $20,000 loan from his father, a Los Angeles heavy-construction contractor. He enrolled in his prep school's film course, and for his senior year project filmed along with two other students a 30-minute satire on "Mission Impossible."įor a simulated car chase, the teenagers "drove around the neighborhood at a pretty good clip in my mom's car," Rosendahl recalled, and "did stupid tricks like hanging out over the street with the door open to film from outside the car looking in."īy the time he graduated from Stanford University in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, Rosendahl had also developed a passion for computer graphics and hoped to be able to combine that with making films. Rosendahl said that growing up in Los Angeles made it almost inevitable that he would be "bitten by the entertainment bug" - no pun intended. Foster developed the water simulation system that audiences saw in a flood scene in which the ant colony faces destruction. One of the new software programs won a 1999 Sci/Tech award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for PDI's Rick Foster during last month's Oscar ceremonies. Rosendahl is especially proud of new software technology his company developed for "Antz" that, among other things, created 60,000 ants with individual characteristics marching off to battle, rather than using the traditional animation technique of replicating the same figures and faces for crowd simulation. It was a landscape that was familiar-looking, but had never been seen before." "But of course we weren't trying to represent the world as it really looks to an ant, but what we imagined it might look like. "Tim laughed that all he got was to go out in his back yard for his research," Rosendahl says. The trim, tousle-haired Rosendahl recalled that "Antz" director Tim Johnson remarked that animators who worked on "The Lion King" got to travel to Africa for their research, and those who did the art for "The Prince of Egypt" went to the Pyramids. ![]() They purchased several of those peephole lenses typically found in apartment house doors, then crawled around in the grass peering through them to get an ant's-eye view. Rosendahl said his creative people literally got down on their hands and knees to get ideas for depicting the world from the perspective of the ants. The film, which grossed $160 million at the box office for PDI and its DreamWorks partner, which owns 40 percent of the Palo Alto firm under a 1996 deal, catapulted Rosendahl and his company into the front ranks of the digitalized filmmaking industry. ![]() With Woody Allen voicing the whiny, neurotic, nonconformist main character, Z, and the voices of Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman and other stars in supporting roles, "Antz" appealed to a mature audience that could appreciate its intellectual humor and the political content of an ant colony's workforce rising up against a dictator general. Pacific Data, or PDI, as it's known, is a pioneer in computerized special effects in action films, compiling such credits in recent years as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Batman Forever" and "Batman and Robin." Special effects in the last included replacing human stunt performers entirely with their digitalized counterparts.īut with "Antz," Rosendahl's first venture into full-length animated feature film-making, PDI, in collaboration with Hollywood powerhouse DreamWorks SKG, computer-generated what one movie critic called a "milestone of animation complexity." The boyish-looking co-founder, chief executive officer and president of Pacific Data Images has taken exponential strides in advancing the craft of animation since those doodling days. ![]()
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