In 1937, Walt Disney Studios released its first fully animated feature film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and in doing so, pioneered a new form of family entertainment. The film was produced over the course of three years using 250,000 drawings all done by hand on paper. Fast forward 60 years and many technology innovations later, and the movie “Toy Story” made history as the first feature film made entirely with computer-generated imagery (CGI).
The creation of animated films has evolved from a largely manual page-by-page, painstakingly long process to a more efficient digitized process. The estimating world has undergone a similar evolution over the last 30-plus years. Initially, all estimating work was done via paper and pencil, but as technology has evolved, it can now be done almost exclusively electronically with computer-based tools that automatically calculate the measurements and include specific product data that is more accurate and easier to access. Let’s take a closer look at how the estimating and takeoff processes have evolved.