Science & Tech Quote by Chris Wedge

Technology arrives in Chris Wedge's memory not as a sleek promise but as a bodily handicap: drawing with your foot, trapped in a ski boot. It's a wonderfully unglamorous image for a field that loves the mythology of frictionless innovation. The intent is plain: to puncture the idea that early digital tools were intuitive or liberating. The subtext is sharper. Wedge is framing creativity as something that first has to fight its interface. The obstacle isn't imagination; it's mediation. The computer becomes a prosthetic you haven't learned to walk with yet.

That "most indirect way to work imaginable" lands because it captures a specific kind of late-80s/90s artistic frustration: the lag between what you can see in your head and what the machine will let you execute. Indirection is the point. Animation is already a craft built on delay - you labor now for motion later - and early tech compounded that delay with clunky inputs, limited processing, and software that demanded you think like a technician. The ski boot isn't just discomfort; it's an imposed posture.

Then he pivots: "but the potential had us all excited". This is generational. Wedge belongs to the cohort that helped turn CGI from novelty into infrastructure, and he remembers the faith required before the payoff was visible. Ending with "I started in stop motion" is strategic self-positioning: a reminder that his sensibility was trained in tactile physics and frame-by-frame discipline. It explains why the tech felt unnatural, and why he could still recognize its future. The machine was awkward; the ambition was not.