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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 "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the snow on Sulley's fur!
Much of the Architect scene is about how the Matrix is inherently flawed, like any axiom system. The video displays are like an explicit enumeration of Neo's responses which Neo wants to act differently from. The diagonal argument, clear as day.
And it goes on...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Not sure exactly what this sentence meant, but it reminded me of something
I think I know what he meant. 2001 was the first movie I ever saw that realistically portrayed the near future based on technology that was about to come on-line and on obvious trends such as the commercialization of space. While earlier films showed space as being the domain of some sort of unitard-clad one world government paramilitary rocket jockeys, 2001 treated space travel as a routine and mundane activity requiring a stewardess to coach the regular joes who were commuting to the orbiting hotel through the safety procedures. It's been a long time but IIRC it also portrayed videophones and credit cards as commonplace and boring. Weight was provided by spinning the station not by a pseudo-scientific gravity generator. And the capabilities of HAL seem almost prophetic in retrospect. I'm sure there are many more examples if I watched the movie again. I think it strikes closer to the mark even than many movies made today. Realism is definitely one of the major distinctions of that movie.
You make the simple part sound overly complex and the complex part overly simple.
Yes, the cameras are all instrumented, but the sensors that provide that data have been around for decades. A GPI interface out of the camera head delivers real-time spherical coordinate data--altitude and azimuth, basically, along with lens parameters. That's the easy part.
The hard part is getting a good real-time chroma key. If you'll notice, the players appear to stand on top of the yellow line. In other words, the line is drawn over the field--the grass and the white numbers--but not over the players, even when they're wearing white uniforms.
This is very tricky, and requires a fairly powerful computer to do in real-time.
The high definition version is correspondingly more powerful still.