becomes inanimate again. Production Red's Dream was the second short film produced by computer animation studio Pixar, following Luxo Jr., the studio's previous short film. For their next short film, which was to be presented at the 1987 SIGGRAPH convention, Ed Catmull wanted the Pixar staff to make a film that made use the Pixar Image Computer and the rendering software Chapreyes. Lasseter began to develop a story about a circus clown who is upstaged by his own unicycle, while William Reeves and Eben Ostby were simultaneously working on their own ideas; Ostby had wanted to animate a bicycle, and Reeves was working on creating a rainy setting in a city. Ultimately, the three combined their ideas, which resulted in the development of Red's Dream. The idea of a bicycle shop for a setting was inspired by Ostby, a cycling enthusiast and graphics programmer at Pixar, who had been working on generating a complex still image of a bike shop. Lasseter, Reeves and Ostby wanted to try and give the film a distinctly "dark and moody" look by having it take place in a rainy city setting. When developing the story for the film, Lasseter said that he wanted to create something with more "pathos" behind it, jokingly referring the film's development as Pixar's "blue period" due to the emotional drive behind the short. The film project came with two technical rationales; the bike shop scenes at the beginning and end were intended to demonstrate the rendering of highly complex imagery. Due to the geographical complexity the spoked bikes and the shop fixtures, a typical frame of animation from the scenes contained more than ten thousand geometric primitives, which in turn were made up of more than thirty million polygons. The dream sequence. on the other hand, was to demonstrate the rendering capabilities of the Pixar Image Computer. An engineer named Tony Apodaca had converted Pixar's rendering software to run on the PIC, but it turned out that the machine's design left its processors without enough memory to use a program as complex as Chapreyes, and thus Apodaca was able to convert only a portion of its features for use with the computers. On account of these limitations, the dream sequence ended up looking cruder than the rest of the film, and Red's Dream was both the first and last Pixar film to be made using the PIC. The clown,