Working under the auspices of George Lucas’ Computer Graphics Project, his team pioneered animation’s first use of motion blur, a significant breakthrough, while taking a big step towards Pixar’s modern-day fluidity by abandoning geometric form for a much curvier palatte of shapes. With it John Lasseter pushed yet more CG boundary. This gleeful one-minute short about a giant-honked android and his buzzing nemesis was technically a Lucasfilm, but, for all intents and purposes, it was Pixar’s first animation. Significance: Pixar’s first-ever animation The stuff really stands up today.” The Academy agreed – Young Sherlock adorned 221B with an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. It was really great being there, working on it with the pioneers of that whole process. For Muren, the technique – real-life models that were then painstakingly digitised – was frustrating, but revolutionary: “You could design the thing exactly the way your mind conceived it. “The room was always open for discussion, and Dennis really listened to everybody,” Lasseter reflects on Muren’s dailies sessions every morning. For John Lasseter the experience constructing the movie’s stained glass knight was formative, ILM boss Dennis Muren’s collaborative approach defining his own approach at Pixar and Disney. In 1984, a gifted young Lucasfilm employee was given the chance to work on a scene in Barry Levinson’s detective romp Young Sherlock Holmes that, for the first time in cinema history, aimed to blend CG and live-action seamlessly. Significance: Pixar’s first work on stained glass warriors Triple-III, the CG pioneers of Westworld, were called in to realise Syd Mead’s designs for Sark’s ship and the solar sailer. were working with, they conjured entire CG sequences in Tron World, more than a quarter of an hour’s worth of digital effects in total, including the 3D light cycle race that streaked across our subconscious in a neon blur. Despite the constraints Lisberger and co. To put into context, that’s about 1/2000th of the capacity of your average PC. Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi was seminal because it didn’t so much push back the boundaries of CGI as ramraid them with a light cycle, and it did it using a computer that boasted – wait for it – 2Mb of memory. Most impressive, as a certain ex-Jedi might say. ![]() Ridley Scott called on similar wireframe technology for Alien’s LV-426 fly-over two years later, but it was Cuba, a true pioneer of CGI, who got the ball rolling. A special making-of feature that's well-worth ten minutes of your time, gives a fascinating behind-the-screens look at how his wireframe work came together. What he came up with was a wireframe mock-up the Empire’s moon-shaped HQ that made the Rebel Alliance’s IT department look seriously good. That was thanks largely to computer animation boffin Larry Cuba who toiled away for months on the city’s University of Illinois campus to match George Lucas’ idea for the pre-Death Star attack briefing. Like Bernie Mac, Baby Face Nelson and the giant barbecue rib, 3D graphics were born in Chicago. Now, if only that whole 3D malarkey had worked out. Their hard work was recognised by the Oscars a decade later with a Scientific & Engineering Academy Award. No whizzy glasses were required to see Peter Fonda’s head and hand rendered into three dimensions – only a few seconds of the Fonda bonce actually appeared in the film – but creating the images was a seriously painstaking process. This time they gave audiences a first glimpse of 3D. Futureworld, in which more terror droids are unleashed, this time into a Crystal Maze-like future zone, gave Triple-I the chance to push the CG boundaries even further. Westworld was not just influential (see also: The Terminator), it also inspired a sequel. According to our sources, each frame of footage was color-separated and scanned so it could be converted into rectangular blocks, then colour was added to make a coarse pixel matrix that could be output back to film. ![]() (better known as ‘Triple-I’ or ‘III’), was truly revolutionary. and Gary Demos of Information International, Inc. Brynner’s robo-vision, a pixelated POV digitally processed by computer graphics whizzes John Whitney Jr. Yul Brynner plays a gunslinging android in Michael Crichton’s ‘70s sci-fi Western – think the terminator crossed with an evil Shane – a film notable too for being the first major motion picture to use CGI. Significance: Cinema's first 2D computer images With Tron Legacy out and making us all reflect on how far computer graphics have come since 1982, we thought that this would be a good time to look at the history, evolution and occasionally devolution of the art form.
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