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 "

Comments

I'm not making this up.

[pi_rules]

If you watch Monday Night Football, you'll see a bright yellow line superimposed on the field representing the first-down line.

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.

CA-acting

[MarkusQ]

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!

More bits

[jolshefsky]

I'm pretty sure The Net with Sandra Bullock provided us with the first use of a 33-bit IP address.