I’m Michael B. Johnson, but if you have trouble using more than one syllable for someone’s name :-), please call me wave.

I work at Pixar Animation Studios, where I’ve been since I started as a summer intern in 1993. I run the Moving Pictures Group in Pixar R&D.  MPG is a crack group of misfits that designs, builds and supports our custom workflow for film development, especially in the Story, Editorial Art and Production Management departments.  This means we get to work with the directors, editors, producers, and story artists who help begin the process of bringing our movies to life.

Before Pixar, I was at the MIT Media Lab in the Computer Graphics & Animation Group.  I finished my SMVS in 1991 (my thesis was “Build-a-Dude”) and finished my Ph.D. in 1995: WavesWorld: A Testbed for Three Dimensional Semi-Autonomous Animated Characters.

My wife, daughter and I live in the Bay Area where we managed to find Edna Mode’s house (built in 1949 by John Ekin Dinwiddie).  It’s a great mid-century modern house built of redwood, glass, and concrete.  We’ve slowly been fixing it up with our friends at Slant Studio. 

I’m on the board of directors of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.  It’s just turned 22, and once again I organized a fund raiser at Pixar for them - check out the pictures!

You should also check out my dad, Robert J. Johnson - there’s a reasonably up to date show of his work on his web site. Please note that this link was broken for a bit; so try it again - he’s also recently added some more work to the site.

Talks

I’ve given a fair number of talks in the past few years.  Here are some highlights:

I was honored to speak in Beijing December 2005, where I was one of the two keynote speakers (along with Nicholas Negroponte & Adrian Cheok) at the first ACM Multi-Media Conference of China.

In March 2006 I was one of the keynote speakers at the Digital Entertainment Leadership Forum in Hong Kong at the really amazing CyberPort. In August 2006 I was a keynote speaker at the first annual Picnic conference in Amsterdam for their Cross-Media Week.  I had such a great time, I went back again in 2008 and 2009. 

In summer 2007 I spoke at the British Film Institute’s South Bank Center on July 16 at the Watershed in Bristol on July 19. I was the keynote at "NEXT: Nordic Exceptional Trendshop",  Århus, Denmark and at "X|Media|Lab Suzhou: Wealth of Animation”, Suzhou, China. I also spoke at Adaptive Path’s UXWeek, a neat conference on Interaction Design.

In 2008, I was keynote speaker at Gartner’s “Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit”, and at Adobe and Stanford’s D School Plerkshop on Creativity, Work and Play.

In 2009, I keynoted the BBC’s Children Festival in London, which was great fun.  I also spoke with my friend Gentry Underwood from IDEO at PICNIC again, and spoke at my under grad alma mater, U of I U-C in their “Design Matters” series.  It was wild to see how much the campus had changed since I was last there.

Look around, and send me mail if you have any questions or comments.