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Ed Catmull, the Pixar co-founder who later served as president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, has joined the jury of the Higgsfield Global Film Festival, a new competition devoted exclusively to generative AI filmmaking.
The contest is being organized by Higgsfield AI to promote its genAI filmmaking platform. Entrants must be Higgsfield subscribers, and each submission must be produced inside the company’s Cinema Studio.
Announcing Catmull’s involvement on LinkedIn, Higgsfield co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov described Pixar as an early inspiration for the company.
“We admired how Pixar brought artists and engineers together to build something neither could create alone,” he wrote, adding that the philosophy influenced how Higgsfield built its own platform. Mashrabov said Catmull will help judge what he called “the first generation of AI filmmakers.”
Higgsfield is, predictably, foregrounding Catmull’s animation credentials in its promotional campaign, identifying him as a five-time Oscar winner, Toy Story executive producer, Turing Award recipient, and former Disney Animation president. On X, the group describes him as “the man who invented 3D graphics.”
Catmull, who retired from Disney in 2018, is an especially meaningful recruit for Higgsfield, which is positioning generative AI as the next major technological shift in filmmaking. Recruiting one of the executives tied to the greatest era of technological innovation in the medium’s history allows Higgsfield to draw a direct line between Pixar’s CG revolution and its own generative AI platform.
Whether anyone on the outside buys that, or whether those two technological shifts will have similarly positive consequences on artists making the films, is another question.
Photo Credit: Web Summit 2015 – Dublin, Ireland, CC BY 2.0 – Wikimedia Commons