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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 "
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
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!
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].
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.
Well, provided he cites Slashdot, what is the problem. For some of my papers, I have cited IRC conversations and the like. The teachers/professors usually put question marks by the source.
... 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."
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.
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.
Beauty and the Beast beat Aladdin by a year, with the ballroom scene...
This sig intentionally left justified.
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".
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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.
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
It's worth noting that Larry and Andy W cited Godel, Escher, Bach as an influence in an article in Time or Newsweek at around the time the original Matrix was released.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
True...
However, 'Rescuers Down Under' in turn beat Beauty and the Beast by a year (with CG that was integrated much better) and 'The Great Mouse Dective' beat B&B by 5 years
In The Greate Mouse Detective, the climx in the works of Big Ben is the main thing to take note of.
Rescuers was much more impressive, but underrated. It's computer work was much less jarring that Beauty (where the ballroom looks like a completely different movie), and was used to further the story. From an animation standpoint, it was quite impressive. The opening sequence, for one, really used things to help the story without jumping out at you.
Oh, and 'Oliver and Company' did have some also, but not as much to note
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
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!
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.
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.
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)
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.