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

Pixar

[Gothic_Walrus]

Pixar, as a whole, is probably one of the best examples. Pixar uses the technology to great effect, but their movies don't just succeed because of the CG. All of their movies have had great storylines and characters, even if the plots were somewhat predictable. The other thing that the Pixar movies have in common is that all of their films would have been damn near impossible to animate or film in a more traditional fashion.

Pixar has used CG to tell stories that can't be easily told otherwise. I'd say that's a landmark.

Re:Pixar

[cmpalmer]

Everytime I watch a Pixar film, or the new Star Wars films, or Jurassic Park, I always wonder what a movie audience from the 1950's (or even the 60's or 70's) would think of them. Would an explaination of "it's drawn by computers" mean anything to them? I remember being completely blown away by the tentacle in The Abyss -- here was something that was (a) impossible, and (b) completely realistic. I was one of those people who always noticed every matte line in Star Wars and every cable on the police spinners in Bladerunner (I spent my adolescence reading Starlog, Famous Monsters, and the like) and these first glimses of CGI amazed me.

When people say that, eventually, synthespians will be indistiguishable from real actors, the programmer/skeptic in me scoffs, but then I think that, twenty years ago, I don't know if I would have believed that Pixar films, Gollum, or even Jar Jar would have possible so soon, so maybe I'm wrong.

BTW, "invisible" CGI is my favorite, too. The "oh wow" moment came for me when I saw them filming Arnold jumping the motorcycle off the overpass in T2 and he was hanging off big, thick, black cables that were painted out. For some reason, this was cooler than the morphing terminator.

Are you looking for the influence of...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...computer science or of computer graphics. The title says one thing, the story another.

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.

Preparing for a Lecture?

[jpsowin]

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.

Re:What the f are you talking about?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Come on now! What was written over the door as Neo enters the kitchen. "Know Thyself". If that's not an invitation to self-reference I don't know what is. The whole conversation revolves around would I do this if I knew that she knew that I was going to do it.... What is the Oracle called? "The Oracle". What is the Comp Sci terminology for a system than can solve the halting problem? An "Oracle".

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...

Re:CGI or SFX?

[Radical Rad]

"A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff."
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.