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Movie Landmarks for CGI Effects?
Daniel German asks: "I am in the process of preparing a lecture on the influence of computers and computer science in the movie industry. I'd like to include excerpts from the most important landmarks, and in order to give credit where credit is due, I'd like to ask for help from the Slashdot community. What are those movies and moments? The Westworld robot vision; the city landscapes of Blade Runner; Final Fantasy; Toy Story; the water beings from The Abyss; the starting sequence in Forrest Gump; bullet time; and so on. What do you consider to be the scenes that have become landmarks in computer generated special effects in Movie History? I am not only looking for Science Fiction, in fact, I'd like to have a wide range of examples on how computers have altered the way that a director can bring his or her vision to the screen "
Disny bought a cray and thought lets do something. hees plot good pictures(for the time)
Oh really?
Made me think for a while (I was 6 at the time) about whether that could really happen to me while I was futzing on the computer.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
The Ice Age scenes were quite spectacular. This one is definitely the imagination of the director.
Tron Terminator 2 Jurassic Park
Tron. Don't forget to mention this classic.
Although quite shoddy by today's standards, it got the ball rolling for computerized special effects in cinema.
The Last Starfighter came soon after. That was a bit more impressive.
I remember watching these films as a kid and being blown away.
Young Sherlock Holmes is listed on IMDb as the "First feature film to have a completely CGI (computer graphics image) character: the knight coming out of the stained glass window (animated by Pixar)."
Boids are fun, and used in Batman Returns, The Lion King and a lot of other movies to simulate flocks and flock-like things.
Star Wars vector graphics guidance system
Luxor Junior & the other Pixar early movies
actually, do you own research
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Pixar has used CG to tell stories that can't be easily told otherwise. I'd say that's a landmark.
Goo goo g'joob.
Computer-generated, or special effects in general? Big difference there. You can drop Westworld if you're talking CGI, BTW.
If just SFX, hey, Ray Harryhausen (sp?) did some great stuff "back in the day". Certain 2001: A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff. There's nothing in there that looks any worse than Star Wars: A New Hope, and it's a lot more realistic. (Fighters using aerodynamic maneuvers in space? Yeah, right.)
Certainly a lot of technology was invented at ILM for the first three Star Wars films, and you've gotta respect that.
Terminator 2 for the morphing.
Aliens for mixing live action and miniatures (the duel between Ripley and the alien queen was a mix - amazing stuff; just saw a special on the Alien series last night - AMAZING work and you never notice it's fake - that's why it's so great).
For non-human CGI, nothing has surpassed the original Jurassic Park, really - it's pretty much levelled off there, if not gone down a bit, likely due to budgetary concerns. The stuff Weta did for the LOTR movies is great, but isn't groundbreaking in terms of anything other than sheer scale.
For CGI humans, I'd have to say 'Final Flight of the Osiris' in the Animatrix is the best I've seen (same people that did the Final Fantasy movie), but it still has a long ways to go. The skin _still_ isn't right, though the movement is almost perfect. Hair is good, but not great (yet). I suspect hair will be perfected before skin will.
Here's the killer idea: what happens when the only thing left to artificially generate are the voices? Artificial voice actors? Yikes!
Tron wasn't even mentioned in the headline, but when it came out it was pretty much bleeding edge.
The VR sequences in Lawnmower Man were really out there as well.
I know this old school stuff might look hokey today but back then they were revolutionary.
As much as I'd hate to admit it, George Lucas has really raised the bar with episodes 1 & 2.
Also don't forget music videos. Dire Straits "Money for Nothing" comes immediately to mind.
Wasn't Lawnmower Man quite groundbreaking when it was released? It has quite a bit of good CGI in it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It was done entirely on computers, no models. The DVD has a documentary on it: it was a landmark in that it only used CGI for the ships, spaceflight, etc. Also, the kid brother in that was in Invaders from Mrs- another 80's classic, even if it was a remake.
IMDB Link[imdb.com].
Twister and the water in A Perfect Storm both had great effects. And let's not forget Dobbie in Harry Potter, and the Golem in LOTR:TT (which comes out today or tomarrow on DVD, FYI).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
So, this person asks you to do his homework for him, and because it's interesting, you fall all over yourselves to help him? I can't wait until the Harvard vs. Slashdot (Replace with University of your choice.) plagiarism case. :)
Because, if you mean computer science, then The Matrix and Reloaded must be the first movies ever about Godel's Theorem and the Halting problem. Remember the scene with the video displays behind the Architect? That was the diagonal argument. Remember the first meeting with the Oracle? It was basically a summary of the halting problem. Think about it.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
If you watch Monday Night Football, you'll see a bright yellow line superimposed on the field representing the first-down line. This has made a significant change for viewers at home; it makes it much, much easier for a viewer to tell whether it's fourth-and-inches or first-and-ten. It's a great example of how CGI has changed the viewing experience for the better: the change is subtle, innocuous, doesn't distract from the plays, and was not possible before the fusion of cameras and computers.
the original one(1927) had some pioneriing effects. ok not computer generated, but i doubt bladerunners effects to be computer generated mainly either(1981, and that may be a good thing as it ended up looking excellently dirty and realistic), and why make distinction between the two anyways? and in fact quite much of trons effects was manual labor too. in those older movies even the computer screens are done in some other (traditional) ways!
there hasn't actually been that many 'wow' effects just because of effects lately(in last 10y) other than the matrix(i hadn't seen a single trailer or any pr stuff about it before i went to see it and so didn't even know what to except.) and jurassic park which imho did pretty good on the effects side of things, of course not any level of effects could have elevated it into a masterpiece(maybe renders of natalie portman naked, obligatory joke). there was a series called 're-boot' some years back that was cool(imho, feel free to flame, but it was quite matrisque now that you think about it wasn't it?) that was the first things you would see on tv that was entirely cgi in big scale(as in many episodes and not just one short movie). shreck was also fun where while it was pretty obvious it was computer generated it wasn't made like it was a big deal(could have been animated just as well.) and really when it's not cgi for cgi's sake is when it's at it's best.
(the quite new anime version of metropolis is pretty good too)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
... are the ones you never see.
If memory serves, Back to the Future 2 made good use of CG effects by removing the wires that held the hover-boarders over the ground to appear as though they were defying gravity.
True Lies is one of the milestones in the digital fx industry. Not so much for 3D rendering, but for compositing and for motion tracking. You'd be surprised what all went into making Arnie pilot the Harrier over a city block.
It's neat to use computer generated effects to wow people, but there's little attention given to the digital effects that are used to keep people from being distracted. Who would have enjoyed BttF2 if they could see the wires holding up the hovery things?
"Derp de derp."
Those dinosaurs were CG, and considering it was released in 1993, it was pretty impressive. I think the dinosaurs required some terabytes to store each one.
T2 was phenominal, most will agree. Even now, the CG still impresses. I preferred it to Spiderman, for certain.
Interview with a Vampire.
You may ask why, and I will state right now that I'm not sure it is the earliest example, but it is so well done that you just don't notice. I was watching the DVD commentary track a while back and they comment on it a few times... The scenes on the mississippi with large numbers of incidental boats on the river in the bg... Stuff like that... Don't know the details of course.
I'll put it this way, I rate CG by how easy it is for me to notice it, the more I notice it, the lower the score usually(for live action, and those who try to be near to life like FF:tsw). And if the general public sees it as CG, then it just plain fails. And I don't mean this in a Jar-Jar sense either. Everyone knew he was CG, but his integration into the environment was superb, so the realism was way up there...
Anyway
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
If you don't have the expertise to research topics like this other than posting to "Ask Slashdot," maybe you should reconsider lecturing on such a topic. Teaching should be the overflow of something you know very well, not something unknown and thrown together by asking a web site. I hate to sit under lectures by people who don't know what they are talking about, and it is always very noticable.
Research papers are for learning---teaching/lecturing is when you already know and want to teach others what you have learned.
How 'bout the tic-tac-toe game in wargames? Just wondering how far you'd go.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Just follow these guys' works from their inception in 1976 and that will provide more than enough examples. Landmarks will mean different things for every individual...better stick with one or two companies. Everybody knows about ILM, and they set the bar.
We would also appreciate it if you could make your presentation materials available to Slashdot readers.
My first thought is Willow, for the Morphing. Willow is the film that pioneered morphing technology, though Terminator 2 really brought it home.
The digital limb removal from Forrest Gump was quite good, and really started that particular niche, as I recall.
Starship Troopers was the first to have a very, very large number of critters moving in Full 3D. And getting the motion right on six legged critters is not so easy.
Aladdin was the first movie I remember to have the mixed 3D/2D, especially the flying carpet, which was a texturemapped object.
You should do some checking around for early uses on Nonlinear Digital Editing, which has allowed lots of fancy editing, such as Fight Club, with the funky edits and transitions and such. Don't know what the earliest examples of that sort of thing are, though.
If you're going strictly film, then Toy Story was the first full-length. However, for sheer bulk with 3D, Reboot was on the scene about a year before.
And that's all that comes to the top of my head.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
I'm a big fan of the SFX, and yes, there are landmark scenes, but surely the 'influence' of Computer science on movies goes well beyond what you see on screen.
For example:
- Computer based editing suites for storing and editing sequences together.
- Motion capture cameras for unprecedented reality in later compositing.
- How about Word Processors for on-the-fly script revisions?
/* affect != effect */ void affect(int *thing,int effect) { *thing += effect; }
The diagonal argument?... um...no.
Showing a bunch of alternate Neo-reactions to the Architect's speach I'm quite sure is not what Cantor had in mind when he formulated his clever proof.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the Matrix is not about Godel's Theorem.
I'll entertain your defense of the Oracle meeting being a summary of the halting problem before I dismiss that outright.
p.s. I did "think about it" and I still want to know the the f you are talking about.
A couple of years back when I was living with two other guys myself and one other (both programmers) were trying to figure out just how they did this. What sort of algorithm is used to determine what to point over and what not to, how the cameras could be moving and the line staying stationary on the field, etc.
We shot ideas back and forth for about 10 minutes while watching the game. The third guy (a non-tech) just sat silently. After a while he finally came up with the solution for us. Looked at us both in disbeleif and said,
"What are you guys? Stupid? They do it with a computer!"
We started blankly for a good 2-3 seconds and just busted out in laughter.
When you say bullet time, do you mean the bullet CGI'd in? or just the camera panning? My understanding was that it was just an extension of the virtual camera system, which was originally developed using actual film. (Though the patent also covers use with digital capture...)
This sig intentionally left justified.
The students in one of my brother's classes were disappointed to hear that Forrest Gump didn't really employ an amputee - that they removed his legs with CGI.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As sort of a history buff, I was totally enthralled by the cgi recreation of ancient egypt in the opening scenes of the Mummy. I got an even bigger eyeful, of course, with The Gladiator and reconstructed ancient Rome. I think these are great examples of cgi creating not only fantastic fictional settings, but also in creating real, but impossible to film, settings.
I used to have a freebie subscription to a magazine which I believe was called "Computer Graphics". It may be around now but I haven't had a subscription in years.
It would be worth looking through back issues as frequently a front-page article dealt with breakthroughs and problems in CG. The oceans in Waterworld, animating hair, and so on.
It also had interesting articles on geeks and directors. I don't recall if it was Casper or Toy Story but one article mentioned the difficulty encountered when the director mentality collided with the computer animation mentality. The director kept going back to the animators for more "takes" while the geeks thought they had delivered finished product (hmmm...that actually sounds like a pretty common type of IT/management complaint outside of CG as well).
While it's easy to grab sci-fi adventures as examples as the CG is obvious (well done, perhaps, but we know that the death-star or pod-racer or whatever isn't real) don't forget to include examples where the CG is invisible - just another tool in the box so the director can add or modify elements in everyday scenes to create his or her vision.
In fact, if you are looking for influence you might concentrate on looking at the shift in tools over time. Sci fi flix have been around a long time but we no longer hang pie tins from strings. We used to blow things up for real but now it's frequently just bits and bytes. As we get better and better, CG becomes a more cost effective way of creating ever more parts of a movie. Given how well dead actors have been integrated into live-action films you might conclude that eliminating the actor (or at least outsourcing the mo-cap to India) is the "final frontier".
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Motion control, where a computer controls a camera that's shooting artwork could fall under this catagory, which makes many slitscan efx count.
You should be looking at Siggraph which has a good history section, unfortunatly it's buried somewhere on that site. If you read the first 10 years of Cinefex magazine you'll find what you're looking for.
With its CGI fog. Plus, it's non-Hollywood, non-American film. It could make for some nice variety.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
First fully computer-generated scene: The Genesis Planet formation in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (generated for the movie by ILM, actually).
How about the reflective morphing of the robot in Terminator II - where it breaks out of the helicopter?
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
Something nobody else has mentioned is rendering types. We've moved from phong and goraud shading to raytracing, to radiosity (which was used to great effect in Fight Club, but which generally takes too long for renders that it's left out of movies), and now HDRI (High Dynamic Range Images) are being used as global illumination maps. Essentially, this allows you to take a high-quality shot of the sky, for example, and light an outdoor scene based on the pixels in the image, giving a more natural look.
You should ignore the rest of the complaining trolls. You'd think that, considering how slashdot is an epicenter of OSS and free thought, that people would be a little more apt to give you starting points for your research.
- Cloud
The parting of the red sea was simply stunning!
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the snow on Sulley's fur!
The early ILM and Pixar stuff is a good start.
Just off the top of my heard (most of these have already been mentioned):
Star Wars (the Death Star hologram was a landmark - pretty bleeding edge for 1977)
Tron (firt movie with amajor CG component)
The Last Starfighter (I believe it was the first film with computer generated spaceships)
Luxo Jr (first CG to win an Academy Award)
T2 (significant step forward - caused a bit of a sensation at the 1991 Siggraph conference).
Jurassic Park (obviously)
Also don't forget the Max Headroom TV series. It wasn't CG, but everyone thought it was.
The way they combined the animation style with the computer generated car chase scenes in the "Initial D" animated series was simply stunning. They should win an award.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I'm told that Geri's Game, the Pixar short about a man playing chess with himself, was the first film in which clothing was modeled well. When Toy Story was made modeling clothing, hair, and skin was too difficult, so they didn't even try.
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Some very nifty CG use. The whole thing about being inside a painting, smearing things in the world was just unreal.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I really like how the swimming in the olympics (& the world championships)had the moving line showing the world record mark. That really makes some of the longer distance events much more interesting.
The only two real strong uses of CGI in movies that I can think of off hand, are FF:The Spirits Within and Lord of the Rings. FF:The Spirit Within, used the CGI to paint a futuristic world in amazing detail. The detail of that worls is what made that movie for me. LotR, on the other hand, used the CGI to give the movie an amazing epic scale. To give it the size and scope it needs to give it the right feel. Actually, a large part of it is that they were extremely artistic about the CGI, making it just sparkle. (Which is kind of the point I think) Now, there are other amazing uses of CGI..amazing scenes and ideas. But in my mind those two films come the closest to realizing the potential of CGI.
...the Last Starfighter! That movie was amazing at the time, and led to a long Wing Commander addiction.
The guy who invented this technique is called Dayton Taylor, and I seem to remember that it was written up on Slashdot some time before the Wachowsi brothers movie first appeared on our radar. That's how old Slashdot is. Doesn't it seem a long time ago now!
IIRC the inventor had originally envisaged its main application as being for televised sports games, to give a new twist to "action replay" of crucial moments. And it may have appeared in some TV commercials before appearing in any film. I doubt he realized back then that it would one day become a mainstream movie special effect. Or a Japanese comedy stage act.
What about Flight of the Navigator? The way that ship morphed all metallic and stuff when it was getting ready for high speed takeoff was awesome!
Also, who can forget the original effects master and blockbuster... Citizen Kane! No, I'm not kidding. That movie set new standards that are still used for movies today.
*slight crashing sound*
In my opinion, the two most interesting modern masters of special effects, by a wide margin, are David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Fincher is probably known to most Slashdot readers as the director of Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room, among others.
Jeunet is a French director, and wouldn't be as well known if not for the fact that Amelie was such a big hit a couple of years ago. In addition to that movie, he's also the director or co-director of City of Lost Children and Delicatessen.
(Interestingly, it turns out that Fincher and Jeunet also did the last two Alien movies, Alien3 and Alien: Resurrection. Neither reviewed very well, but both directors have gone on to establish pretty good reputations; it would be interesting to go back & watch them in comparison to their more recent work. In any case, I haven't seen these two movies, and they're not why I choose them as among my favorite modern filmmakers :-)
---
In any case, the thing I love about these guys is that, unlike a company like Pixar or a director like (say) James Cameron, these guys have digital special effects so ingrained into the way they make movies that it's no more of a gimmick than, say, choosing a camera lens of film stock to work with. Their movies are for the most part not gratuitous special effects extravaganzas, full of the standard pyrotechnics, monsters, and other gimmicks that are the hallmark of the standard, standard boring effects fare. (Okay, maybe trolling just a little in that last bit... :-)
Just to pick a few random examples off the top of my head:
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
As has been said for some other films, it had large amounts of CG, but they were so well done that you didn't even notice. If I recall correctly, the liftoff scene was CG. Even though it appears to be the same old footage you've seen a million times on the discovery channel, it's not (for one, it's a lot cleaner than that 30-ish year old footage).
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
The inner universe in TRON
The face-bashing in IRREVERSIBLE
MATRIX's Bullet-time
The walking stained-glass apparition in YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES
The T-1000 from TERMINATOR 2
All of FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN
TOY STORY
The zoom down from orbit in GOJOE REISENKI
The merging of CGI and hand-drawn work in SPIRITED AWAY
The Disney movie Flight of the Navigator probably had the earliest CG spaceship. It was a silver blob shape. I suspect it has the earliest attempt to use CGI to represent a real-world object (rather than an item that is supposed to be computer-generated) in a movie, but I am not sure. Anybody know of earlier examples?
I would say the biggest advance in the last twenty years has been in computer aided acting. Perhaps it's just because I don't know as much about how it's done, but I find it much more impressive than all the flash-boom-and-lots-of-nicely-lit-splines side of the biz.
For example, I've seen several John Travolta movies over the last decade or so where it was posible to forget for a scene or two that he was a smarmy self absorbed scientologist. As I said, I have no idea how they did this, but I was impressed. All I know is we've come a long way from the days of having the short guys stand on boxes to kiss the tall girls.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. At this rate, I wouldn't be suprised if Keanu Reeves comes out with a movie someday that doesn't remind me of excellent!
While studying music studio techniques at uni I had the opportunity to compose and perform a piece on a VCS3 (think pre-putney), one of the earliest commercial analog synths.
This "portable" british beast was housed in solid wood casing, "wired-up" by sticking metal pins into a matrix, the controlled by a button and a joystick.
To get any sort of pleasant sound from it (even if only once: analog = never the same twice) required serious effort. TheDoctor Who performers were using even older equipment, recording single fragments onto tape, then splicing till Apollo440 looks like childs play...
Now that was some serious effort - but resulted in a theme song that I will never forget.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
The cityscapes in Blade Runner were all models. They did use computer controlled cameras, but that was about it.
From the ILM books and 80's Siggraph annuals you should look at:
The early days -- Replacing models with CGI. The spectical of CGI itself.
TRON (CGI + Live Action + Rotoscoped Animation)
Young Sherlock Holmes (stained glass knight)
The Great Mouse Detective (use computers to create 'pencils' for clockworks scene)
Star Trek II (Genesis Planet animation -fractals)
Last Starfighter (cgi spaceship)
Abyss (cgi/actor interaction)
The middle phase -- Hybrid/Partially Synthetic actors. Partially Synthetic environments.
Jurassic Park (synthetic non-human actors, sorta)
Flintstones (dino)
Babylon 5 - (synthetic environments, desktop-level software)
Star Wars - The Phantom Menace (Yoda, Jar Jar)
Then we have a leap. With The Matrix you now have the ability to create a synthetic camera. Add to this the leap in sythetic environments (subway fight scene).
The next phase is going to be realistic human synthetic actors. So far, the results are not that impressive. Spiderman CGI was over animated as was the cgi humans in the Matric reloaded.
Artists will need to realize that the squash and stretch so necessary to create convincing motion in non-realistic animation carries with it, the immediate recogition as non-real. Subtle effects based on movement, cloth and interaction with the environment will come in the next five years to create realistic human movement. Creating the realistic human face will take a lot longer.
Tron was the film that started out the entire film/CGI thing.
Get the recent DVD edition and watch all the documentary stuff. Get the Cinefex issue.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
A list like this is difficult to compile. If you included every single film that made an advance in CG, you'd end up with a mile-long list. Since the original poster asked for influential uses of CG, I'm only going to include films that had a big impact on Hollywood and its view and use of CG. Films that, while certianly worthy in their own right, didn't impact Hollywood in regards to their use of CG are excluded from my list.
They are:
Willow (first film to use morphing)
The Abyss (water tentacle)
T2: Judgement Day (T-1000; was more than just the standard 2D morph)
Jurassic Park (dinosaurs)
Forrest Gump (Various invisible 2D effects, digital removal of Gary Sinise's legs the most notable and most well done)
Titanic (realistic CG water, CG stunt doubles)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Gollum)
I'm intentionally excluding movies like Tron and The Last Starfighter, because they weren't very influential. Tron bombed, The Last Starfighter broke even, and more importantly nobody "Ooh"'ed and "Aah!"'ed their use of CG. I'm not saying that the CG in those movies wasn't done well, just that it didn't influence many people.
Try watching some of the extras on the DVD - they used quite a lot of CGI to do touchups and whatnot. Rather subtle, too.
CGI is great in its place - my recommendation for a CGI benchmark would be Terminator 2. But these days CGI seems to be being used in all the wrong places. I first remember going 'what the hell?' when I watched the ending of The Dead Hate The Living. Not because it was a crappy film - it wasn't exactly an epic but it was a fun little film, but because they had a guy being shot in the head via the gift of a CGI rendered blood splat. It looked terrible and struck me as a perfect example of CGI being mis-used. And then things got worse. Not just with CGI replacing standard Tom Savini style special effects but with CGI being used to entirely animate humanoid characters. CGI has not reached the level when it can convincingly render a character that is indistinguishable from a real human/humanoid. And yet it's been used as such in Spiderman, The Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded, Die Another Day, The Mummy 2 et al. Maybe I'm being fussy, but or me it damages the movie experience when you see a character who is blatantly rendered. CGI dinosaurs I can live with, but other than that movie makers need to hold back on the CGI a little till it can actually do what they want it to do without making characters stick out like a sore thumb.
There's a great article in the September 2003 "Siggraph Edition" of Animation Magazine with the same title as my subject. Basically, four brilliant Visual Effects wizards pick their favorite moments. It would be worth checking out if you can find a copy.
Two personal picks of mine would have to be Gollum for being such a successfully integrated CG character. Especially considering the way they did it using motion capture of Andy Serkis. Another wonderful use of computers was in "O Brother, Where Art Thou". All of the film was scanned into digital form at Kodak's Cinesite facility. Then the brother's Coen were able to do massive color alterations to the film; for instance making the leaves in the forest a fully different color than they were. There was a great article, I believe in Cinefex, about this.
What exactly?
You're talking about the hallucinations, right? Like the roommate and the little girl. If only Nash could see them, then they must have been created using effects and stuff in order for the audience to see them too, right?
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
There is always one movie moment that will stick in my mind. Laura Dern is sitting in the jeep looking at a leaf and Sam Neal forces her head round to look at two dinosaurs feeding off the tops of trees. Those two 'animals' looked so real on the movie screen that I knew from that point on that things would never be the same.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.
I'm pretty sure The Net with Sandra Bullock provided us with the first use of a 33-bit IP address.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
The MIT Technology Review had an article last year about digital effects in movies. It starts off discussing the movie Castaway with a picture of Tom Hanks climbing rocks by a parking lot, then the same picture with the island background. According to a Sony VP, "Any shot that had ocean or sky in it, was pretty much a special effect."
If I recall correctly, that was the first movie that had real computer generated CGI effects on screen (not to mention a ton of money spent on Cray's supercomuter time).
Also the TV show 'Amazing Stories' had the first CGI opening. You could compair those effects to those of Babylon 5, to show how far things have come since the 80s.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I remember the scene where they found the water like alien to be amazing, this was 1989.
Awesome movie. Anyway, I believe this was the first film to be 100% digitally filtered. The whole movie was shot in the summer where all the grass was green, yet the movie was filtered in a way to make it look like it took place in the dust-bowl era (ie brown grass and such.)
Unless I had seen the documentary on the DVD I never would have known.
I believe Pixar's first feature film work was in The Wrath of Khan. They did the exploding planet with the Enterprise flying away. This was when they were still a part of Lucas's empire. Lucas had to sell some divisions of LucasFilm when he got a divorce, since California law says spouses must split things 50-50. That's when Steve Jobs bought it and named it Pixar. I'm pretty sure Lasseter was a part of it even then.
Alex.
All of the spaceships and space dogfighting were done with computer animation. I didn't realize it when I first saw it, but now it stands out like a sore thumb.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
didn't they use massive special effects in Gigli to shrink JLo's arse? omg, teh megahurtz!!
this sig has been discontinued.
"It would be wise to mention that most (all?) new animations are done with computers. I don't know which was the first movie to use mostly computers to render the final picture instead of handpainting everything. It's also worth pointing out that latest consumer hardware could probably render Jurassic Park level graphics in real time."
Yes they are.
"Bunny" on the "Ice Age" DVD was nice.
CGI has indeed come far. Anyone remember "The Mind's Eye", or the sequals?
Jurasic Park was the first major movie to use computer graphics instead of models for the dinosaurs. They actually had hired a model make to do the stop action dinosaurs but the CG were so good speilberg went with them..
I think it was THE major moment when computers where used in films.
Before that there was a sequence in the move "Young sherlock holmes" that used CG to model stained glass knights. But it was a much smaller part.
I'm surprised these haven't been mentioned yet!
BTW Did I mention I have an academy award? I don't think I did. Not that qualifications have anything to do with judging quality.
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You have to include The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers... without the computer-rendered armies, the battle scene would have been impossible. Also, Gollum was done with CGI.
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as someone else already mentioned, the DVD includes a very detailed documentary on all this.
IIRC, almost the entire movie had CGI enhancements. The black-and-white-to-color-and-back was digitally rendered. So those special effects were integral to almost every single scene, as well as (and more importantly) the whole story.
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Depending on your definition of CGI you might want to include the FX shots in the original Star Wars. While the shots were based on model photography and blue screen shooting, which are not very revolutionary or technological, they used computers to track the camera movements and count the number of frames so that the different items in the scenes could be integrated seamlessly. It allowed them to replicate camera timing and movement for all the elements in an FX shot so that when the elements were combined you could not tell that the elements had been shot separately. This as far as I know was the first use of microprocessor technology in special effects shots!
How about Gladiator as a counter example? The CGI was totally gratuitous: they put the Colosseum in the wrong place. Millions in the budget, but no $1.29 for a map of Rome, I don't get it.
A lot of the US folks won't get it but cricket has had a healthy application of computer effects done to it. Most of these come in to play when there's a dogy PBW or caught behind decision.
In the case of an LBW, the path of the cricket ball is extrapolated from it's path before it hit the pad, then superimposed on a 'virtual' pitch to see if it hit the stumps or if it veered to either side or over the top.
Considering that most LBW decisions come from spin bowlers where not only do the path and speed of the ball need to be considered, but also the amount of spin on the ball itself.
There's a similar theory in caught behind decisions where the deviation from the path of the ball as it passes the edge of the bat is considered. This generall happens with seam bowlers which is even scarier because the path of the ball is determined by the *amount of friction* on one side of the ball!
Add to that we've been getting 'wagon wheels' and 'worms' presented to us on screen for years.
On the whole though, I have to say that the addition of computers to sports has certainly enhanced the watchability of all sorts of sports. I didn't geat to see it but I hear the Matrix camera rotation effects at the 2001 superbowl were pretty impressive.
I can't believe that everyone who has been modded up has forgotten T-rex and other dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. If memory serves me right, this was the first instance of computer graphics being used to make a realistic skin for an animal. I have to say that I was extremely impressed when this movie came out. Another that was probably a good landmark was probably "For the Birds" by Pixar animation. They showed the use of feathers that would help them to create the fur effect on Scully in Monsters Inc. Everyone else has some really good points that I don't need to reiterate here.
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In independance day, all the F-18's in the big battle at the end were CGI. I'm ex-air force and used to work on F-15's and I remember that movie as being the first to use CGI to fool me.
If you liked the animation in FF: TSW, check out 'Last Flight of the Osiris' on the Animatrix DVD; they've really improved their skills. The opening sword fight is masterfully animated.
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I'm amazed so few people have mentioned B5. OK, it was a series with some extended episodes rather than a movie, but...
This was pretty much the first time space-based sci-fi went completely CG for the effects, with no models at all. They also did it very realistically: not only does the station rotate to give artificial gravity, it launches its fighters using that rotation, and the fighters themselves perform manoeuvres that are realistic in zero-g, rather than the remarkably atmospheric effects you see in most sci-fi TV/movies. When a ship gets hit by a beam, it doesn't explode into a huge ball of fire, it separates out into thousands of little pieces, which fly apart in all directions. Hell, according to JMS there was significant interaction with NASA -- in both directions -- about spacecraft design...
I think using CG allowed the various space effects to look a lot more realistic than anything that had gone before. Star Wars, Star Trek, all the movies people have mentioned above that used models... They all had their place, but none of them had either the realism or the sheer scale of the big space effects in B5.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This is like asking for the all-time demo reel, it's pretty subjective. But I'm surprised people aren't going back even farther, to the really groundbreaking works, like
Robert Abel's Sexy Robot (early mocap), James Blinn's Voyager simulations, Nam June Paik's analog video synthesizers.. I could probably think of a few more.
Everyone cites The Last Starfighter, I got a chance to look through their shop, they had a Cray and a CM-2, running Symbolics software, it was awesome. But that wasn't what made TLS a breakthrough. The movie went millions over budget due to the effects. It never made back production costs, not by a large margin. Studios put a curse on CG movies, it was now considered the kiss of death to spend millions on CG, you couldn't make your money back. But the studio was surprised when it learned that it was a huge hit on VHS tape. This was the first time Hollywood realized you could salvage a financial flop with the tape sales and rental revenues, it turned the business upside down.
Ok, I'm a professional filmmaker, here's my 2 cents...
It is impossible to seperate film and television because most network programming is not shot using video cameras, but film.
So, with that in mind, the most significant revolutions in computer effects for filmed media are...
Computer control of lasers to lay down fractal patterns directly onto film (see Dr. Who opening sequences, the "Vertigo" title sequence, and the ultimate use as the wormhole effect in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Computer control of the motion of models.
Go-motion technology developed by ILM for Star Wars.
The main title sequence for "Superman: The Motion Picture."
Jim Blinn creates his famous CGI solar-system flybys for the Jet Propulsion Lab.
Standardization of computer-generated title sequences.
The "computer recognition and interface theorization" period of the early 1980's (WarGames, Tron, Real Genius, Black Hole, The Last Starfighter, Superman III, etc.).
The pseudopod in The Abyss.
The stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes (NOT Young Indiana Jones).
The CGI compositing revolution that occured between Back To The Future Part III and Forest Gump (the ILM guys got together and said 'there has to be a better way to do this') that was made possible by the move from optical printer technology to scanning and direct laser printing onto motion picture film negatives.
The compositiong revolution included such fantastic side-effects as the change from bluescreens as a chemical process in development of the negatives (see "The African Queen" for the old way) to the computer process now commonly-called chroma-keying, wire removal, and eventually digital grading.
Star Trek: The Next Generation incorporates Macintosh generated animations into on-set displays.
The photorealism achieved in Jurassic Park (i.e. the 'yeah, the t-rex is fake, but so is the jeep').
An ILM animator puts a beveled edge on a mirror for "Contact."
Pixar begins experimenting with artificial characters in entirely artificial worlds for the big screen.
The Foundation Imaging-Video Toaster sparked revolution that began with the pilot episode of Babylon 5, continued in the wormhole effect seen in the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and culminating in the Federation-Klingon-Cardassian-Dominion battle fleet sequences of the last 3 seasons of Deep Space Nine.
ILM develops their new carving system for "Minority Report."
Cinesite begins the digital grading revolution, often to the chagrin of cinematographers, seen in "Traffic," "O' Brother Where Art Thou?," and "The Lord of The Rings."
There are many more little steps in there, but those are the most important ones I can think of off the top of my head.