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.