Transcript

LOREN CARPENTER

This is a little film I made in 1980. And the landscape is constructed by me – by hand – of about a hundred big triangles.

MARCUS DU SAUTOY

Yep. So that doesn’t look very natural.

LOREN CARPENTER

No, it’s very pyramid-like. So what we’re going to do is take each of these big triangles and break it up into little triangles, and break those little triangles up into littler triangles, until it gets down to the point where you can’t see triangles anymore.

MARCUS (VOICEOVER)

What Loren had realised was that he could use the maths of fractals to turn just a handful of triangles into realistic virtual worlds.

LOREN CARPENTER

We turn the fractal process loose and instantly it looks natural. We went from about a hundred triangles to about five million. And there it is.

And then we jump off the cliff to show that it’s a real three-dimensional world.

MARCUS DU SAUTOY

We’re swooping over the landscape.

LOREN CARPENTER

And we’re going from ten miles away, to ten feet away. And all that detail was generated on the fly as we came in.

MARCUS DU SAUTOY

And here’s that fractal quality, this infinite complexity at work.

LOREN CARPENTER

It’s exactly what I wanted.

MARCUS (VOICEOVER)

By today’s standards, this animation may not look like much. But in the 1980s, no-one had ever seen anything like it.

MARCUS DU SAUTOY

If you did that by hand, to do that frame by frame, it would’ve taken you--

LOREN CARPENTER

A hundred years.

MARCUS DU SAUTOY

A hundred years! And this took-- to generate--

LOREN CARPENTER

It took about 15 minutes per frame, on a computer that’s about a hundred times slower than my phone.

MARCUS (VOICEOVER)

That one short film changed the face of animation, and revolutionised Hollywood. Loren went on to co-found Pixar, one of the most successful film studios in the world.