Emeryville Tutors

About Emeryville

Emeryville, located in the geographical heart of the tech boom and Silicon Valley, is home to the headquarters of dozens of companies—companies responsible for the speed at which this page loaded, the aspect ratio of the screen you’re using to read it on, and the platform that hosts it. One of these companies, well-known and well-loved by many, is Pixar.

Pixar, formally referred to as Pixar Animation Studios, is an animation film studio based in Emeryville, California that is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Known for its animated films, such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, Pixar is a relatively young company. It began as Graphics Group, before its breakout as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 for 7.4 billion dollars, a transaction that resulted in Jobs becoming Disney's largest single shareholder at the time. What was needed, however, was a site to produce the vision of the new Disney-Pixar movies.

When Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple and Pixar, and John Lasseter, then the executive vice president of Pixar, decided to move their studios from a space in Point Richmond to larger quarters of their own, they chose a 20-acre site in Emeryville, California, formerly occupied by Del Monte Foods. The first of several buildings for Disney-Pixar, the high-tech structure was designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, and has special foundations and generators to ensure constant film production, even in the event of major earthquakes. The outward character of the building is intended to refer to Emeryville's industrial past—Emeryville had a long-time tradition in manufacturing and American industry, even before the first world war. The two-story steel-and-masonry building, internally, is a collaborative space with many pathways, reflecting the merger values between Disney and Pixar. Arguably, these two companies, with forces joined, represent some of the most creative projects in film and culture in a very long time.

Today, visitors can tour the Pixar headquarters. It is a site that rivals the Disney animation studios in southern California, and Pixar maintains much of its original identity as a graphics group, even after much change since its inception in the late 1970s. Everyone who is anyone in the animation and film world has worked with or influenced the direction of Pixar, and as a result, it has enjoyed unprecedented success, worth billions of dollars at the time of this writing.

Students in Emeryville are by no means expected to have Pixar-caliber levels of success, but they will find excellent professionalism and abilities in the tutors who work with them. Grade Potential tutors are there to build up the good ideas and show their clients the necessary skills for success, despite setbacks and struggling grades.