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John Knoll on CGI, Tron And 25 Years of Change
StonyandCher writes to tell us John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, is using the 25th anniversary of Tron as a platform to look back at the last 25 years of visual effects. "The type of imagery that was possible to create at the time was very clearly computer generated; it wasn't going to fool anybody into thinking it was live action. That was a limitation of the technology that worked very well within the story, that fit right in and made a lot of sense: if you're telling a story about events taking place inside a computer, inside a big virtual environment, what techniques should you use? Parts of the film were done by shooting live action then doing rotoscope and other optical techniques over the top of it, but the stuff that really looked cool and stood out was the stuff that was computer generated."
I think it was before The Abyss, which won the 1989 best visual effects, but I'm not sure when. Certainly The Abyss was a watershed in many respects. It introduced morphing for motion blurring, as well as the first use that I'm aware of of computer-rotoscoped human forms (both techniques were used to make the water tentacle).
The article mentions Tron. In another post I mentioned The Abyss. What other films advanced the art and perception of computer-generated effects? I can think of:
Toy Story (and Geri's Game, which I think was attached to Toy Story)
This film really advanced the public perception that movies could be all-CG, and opened the door for all of the CG films that followed.
Terminator 2 (another Cameron film)
This was, I think, the first use of a CG character in a live-action film.
Titanic (Cameron again)
The impact on the public with respect to the computer animation was minimal, but on Hollywood it was a huge deal. The fact that the ship was regarded as realistic by so much of the audience opened the door for dozens of projects that replaced models and stock footage with CG. It was, arguably, the most realistic CG in film to that date, and changed a lot of directors' and studios' perceptions.
Anything anyone else can think of?
How did Knoll or the author manage to snub Information International Inc. (aka Triple-I) , the very people who created the graphics for TRON?
Most people will read this story and think ILM did the graphics for TRON.
Shame on you, Computerworld and John Knoll!
Obviously, you're not in the business.
On any major film, they will have all sorts of specialties. Some people just model, some people rig, some people paint textures, some people light the scene, some people manage the render farm, some people do the special effects, some do the composite, some people animate.
But, yes, it is an assembly line, and things are standardized as much as possible, but the assembly line does change a bit depending on the show.
Only on really small productions do you have one person doing everything.