David DiFrancesco, is a photoscientist, inventor, cinematographer, and photographer. He is a graduate of Nutley High School and Wisconsin University. He is a founding member of three organizations which pioneered computer graphics for digital special effects and film with Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, including; New York lnstitute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, Lucasfilm computer Division, and Pixar Animation studios, financed by Steve Jobs, late president of Apple.
As director of the photoscience division at Pixar Animation studios, he and his team were responsible for the task of accurately transferring high resolution digital images to film. ln this role, he invented the world’s first laser scanning and recording devices for 35mm motion picture fim and established reliable, commercially successful methods for this process, called PixarVision. This pioneering work earned him two Scientific and Engineering Technical Academy Awards and 13 patents. ln 1996 the society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers adopted his recommended practices governing output of digital images to film.
ln 2004, he designed a custom LED-based stroboscopic lighting system to synchronize the animation of physical PixarToy Story characters in the Pixar Zoetrope first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Pixar’s 20th Anniversary exhibit. The original Pixar Zoetrope has traveled the world to various museums and several other zoetropes are on display at Disneyland’s California Adventure theme park in Southern California and other Disney theme parks.
His technical knowledge with zoetropes was put into use on a two-minute film entitled “Forza/Filmspeed,” directed by Jeff Zwart. The film revealed the world’s fastest Zoetrope in the form of high resolution still images taken from the Xbox game Forza Motorsport 5. Stills from the game were printed onto panels and staged at key intervals around a Barber Motorsports Park race track to recreate the illusion of movement known as the persistence of vision.