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

Tron

[The Clockwork Troll]

I think the scene when Flynn gets digitized in Tron (1982) will forever be memorable to me.

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.

Young Sherlock Holmes

[AlexisKai]

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)."

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.

The landmark effects...

[NanoGator]

... 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?

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.

Fincher & Jeunet

[babbage]

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:

• In "Amelie", almost the whole movie is washed over with a greenish-yellow tint. The first impression this gives may be a sense of the old sepia-toned movies & photographed, but that's not right: sepia tone is tan colored, not green or yellow. Jeunet got the effect by digitally pushing the color palatte in post-production so that, like the choice of soundtrack music, the tint of the film would help set the mood. Very subtle.
• In "Panic Room", Fincher does of a series of tracking shots that would be impossible to do with a physical camera. One of these shots has the camera make a perfectly straight zoom from one end of the apartment to the other, going smoothly over furniture, under cabinets, and through the handle of a coffee pot. In another shot, the camera zooms through a keyhole to shows what's going on in the next room, and in yet another shot the camera goes in through a ventilation grate, down the duct, and out another grate in a different room. These camera shots are only possible because the coffee pot was never there, the keyhole was either not there or was part of a carefully done jump-cut, and the ventilation shot is all cartoon, seamlessly blended into the rest of the action.
• In "City of Lost Children" -- which is a really wonderful movie by the way, like a weird, beautiful 21st century fairy tale -- one of the characters is a hitman who's weapon of choice is a trained flea assassin: as he plays his music, we see the flea leaping down the street, finding its quarry, jumping on the scalp, and injecting a poison among the hair follicles on the skull. All of this is done from the flea's point of view: those hair follicles loom as large as oaks. But there's little gratuituous about it: if you want to have a flea

Blade Runner *NOT* CGI

[brian0x00FF]

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.