Chapter 1, page 13 explains that Ed Catmull "had two heroas as a child: Walt Disney and Albert Einstein. "I remember watching one of the Wonderful World of Disney programs where animators were drawing on the desk and right there, the characters would come to life on the desk. I knew I was an illusion, but there was just something magical about it. I couldn't imagine anything better than being an animator. I'd watch all programs about it, and I brought art books and animation books and practiced drawing. At the same time, I really liked science and math, and back then, the image of the science was Albert Einstein. So here were these two idols, and I was drawn to both of them.""
This evidences that the 2D animations that Disney produced may have been the inspiration that influenced Ed to take part in the virtual reality course in University and may have inspired him to become and animator. The fact that he was into science as much as animation might have been another sign of what was going on through his mind when he decided to create the revolutionary computer animation.
On Chapter 1, page 14 of To Infinity and Beyond: The Story of Pixar Studios" by Karen Paik, the author quotes "Catmull eventually earned two bactelor's degrees, one in physics and one in computer science."
This shows that Ed Catmull was not only into art but into the concept of how the electronic side of how computer worked at the time. This might have played a part in Catmull's revolutionary creation of the wireframe hand that was used in a movie open to the public 4 years later.
Catmull quotes that "I was intending at that time to work on computer languages. But my first grad course was a computer graphics course. As soon as I took the first class, I just fell in love with it. It blew everything else away. Here was a program in which there was art, science and programming all together in one place in a new field, and it was wide open. It was like being at an Easter egg hunt where you're at the front of the line. You could just go out and discover things and explore."
The author further explains that "At the time, the brass ring for the field was photorealism - not as the ultimate goal, since "you could always just photograph reality" but because reality was so complex that being able to match it would mean they had truly mastered technology."
They are basically saying that Catmull and his fellow students had an objective that photorealism was a primary goal for them but they focused even more on capturing reality since they believed it would prove to be the key in mastering technology.
Ed Catmull said "Tackling a hard problem brings energy into a group of people and gives you a sense of camaraderie. Here was a whole community of people trying to solve the problems of computer graphics, writing papers and exchange ideas. This whole field was marching forward with great excitement. That sense of community was so strong that it inspired me to try to recreate it after I left."
Basically how I interpret this quote is Catmull wanted to further his knowledge on how the basic principle of computer animation would work and he wanted to push himself even more by dealing with the problems that inevitably would've occurred with it.
At the time in the University of Utah, many of the students were training on computer simulated reality. On page 15, the author of the book states "Jim Clark, who was interested in what would eventually be in virtual reality, helped start Silicon Graphics and Netscape. John Warnock, who was studying 3D rendering, co-founded graphics arts company Adobe. Alan Kay, who was working with language paradigms and models of interaction with systems, went on to do important work in developing object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces.
Ed Catmull, of course, wanted to use computer graphics for animation."
It seems that Catmull wanted to try a different tactic to the average computer graphical arts that were being done by the University students at the time since most of them wanted to do rendering. Ed seems to be the one of the main people who started this whole concept of computer animation.
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