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Movie Landmarks for CGI Effects? 165

Posted by Cliff from the breakthroughs-in-sfx-technology dept.
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 "
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Movie Landmarks for CGI Effects? More

Movie Landmarks for CGI Effects?

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  • Disny bought a cray and thought lets do something. hees plot good pictures(for the time)
    • True. Tron was definitely groundbreaking.

      But for the questioner: what is considered "landmark"? Is it a CG effect that was copied in other movies and became a standard? Or was it simply something that resonated with the audience but had CG elements in it?

      For the moment, I'll define "landmark" movies with CG content as 1) ones I remember for years afterward and 2) ones that have technology/a way of life that I would very much like to have some day. So there are two others I would mention:

      5th element
      Jo

  • Tron (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Clockwork Troll ( 655321 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @07:48PM (#6789381) Journal
    I think the scene when Flynn gets digitized in Tron [imdb.com] (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.

    • Re:Tron (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Does anyone remember the "If You Had Wings" ride in Disney World's Tomorrowland from the mid-late 80's?

      They had this one room that the ride car went through slowly (but just fast enough to support the motion illusion), with various images projected onto a dome ceiling screen.

      One of those was from the Tron sequence you mentioned - probably as close to being digitized as one can get :-)

  • The Ice Age scenes [yahoo.com] were quite spectacular. This one [yahoo.com] is definitely the imagination of the director.
  • Tron Terminator 2 Jurassic Park
    • Rodger Rabbit
      Star Wars Episode II (the planet where all the clones are produced, looks like something designed by Apple)
      • Close. All the animatics were made in Final Cut Pro and many of those scenes were in pretty good shape as roughs before they were ever handed to ILM.
  • 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.

    • The Last Starfighter (Score:3, Informative)

      by bob301 ( 552317 )
      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][imdb.com].
    • This is an excerpt from Understanding Computers [unc.edu], an old Time-Life book, that covers how the CG inTRON and The Last Starfighter were done that you may find of interest for your lecture.
      • The features on the Tron 20th Anniversary edition DVD also cover quite a bit about the CGI, the companies they used and why, how they did certain things. It's very interesting, and a good insight to early CGI.

        What I found ironic was that the movie didn't get an award for special effets, since the Academy considered using a computer for special effects to be 'cheating', but only a relatively small part of the movie used the CGI. All of the backlight glow effects and such that gave the movie the feel that

  • Young Sherlock Holmes (Score:4, Informative)

    by AlexisKai ( 114768 ) * on Monday August 25, 2003 @07:54PM (#6789428) Homepage
    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 (Score:3, Informative)

    by reynaert ( 264437 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @07:55PM (#6789438)
    Boids [red3d.com] are fun, and used in Batman Returns, The Lion King and a lot of other movies to simulate flocks and flock-like things.

  • Predator vision (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @07:55PM (#6789442) Journal
    Star Wars vector graphics guidance system

    Luxor Junior & the other Pixar early movies

    actually, do you own research

  • Pixar (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothic_Walrus ( 692125 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @07:55PM (#6789443) Journal
    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.

    • Monsters, Inc. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cloudless.net ( 629916 )
      I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the snow on Sulley's fur!

    • Re:Pixar (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cmpalmer ( 234347 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @04:02PM (#6797779) Homepage
      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.

  • CGI or SFX? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @07:57PM (#6789454)
    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!
    • I think that Final Flight of the Osiris had really good human animation, but the biggest problem with it is facial expression. Anger looks really fake, when usually the expression is pretty good. A nice example is when one of the gunners says, "Come get some!" The person's forehead isn't wrinkled at all, but the rest of her face looks like she's angry. Also, when she talks, her mouth moves a lot, but her cheeks and jaw seem to stay still, and all that moves is the small area around her mouth, which stret

    • Re:CGI or SFX? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:25PM (#6789680) Homepage Journal
      "A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff."

      Not sure exactly what this sentence meant, but it reminded me of something little-known about 2001. The computer displays they had in that movie were not computer generated at all. They were hand animated.

      The amazing thing is that they're damn convincing. They had rotating objects, for example. They actually shot video of a rotating object and the animator traced over it frame by frame to film and play on the screen.

      Kick ass stuff. ;)

      • Re:CGI or SFX? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @12:27AM (#6791186) Homepage
        "A Space Odyssey was the beginning of the realistic stuff."
        Not sure exactly what this sentence meant, but it reminded me of something

        I think I know what he meant. 2001 was the first movie I ever saw that realistically portrayed the near future based on technology that was about to come on-line and on obvious trends such as the commercialization of space. While earlier films showed space as being the domain of some sort of unitard-clad one world government paramilitary rocket jockeys, 2001 treated space travel as a routine and mundane activity requiring a stewardess to coach the regular joes who were commuting to the orbiting hotel through the safety procedures. It's been a long time but IIRC it also portrayed videophones and credit cards as commonplace and boring. Weight was provided by spinning the station not by a pseudo-scientific gravity generator. And the capabilities of HAL seem almost prophetic in retrospect. I'm sure there are many more examples if I watched the movie again. I think it strikes closer to the mark even than many movies made today. Realism is definitely one of the major distinctions of that movie.

    • Re:CGI or SFX? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Gaijin42 ( 317411 )
      Actually, Westworld had the first CGI ever. The targeteing system that Yule Brenner had overlayed over what he saw was computer generated. It took a rediculous amount of time to render each frame.
    • If we are going to count SFX, the theme song and sound effects for Doctor Who were unquestionably ground breaking.

      While studying music studio techniques at uni I had the opportunity to compose and perform a piece on a VCS3 (think pre-putney), one of the earliest commercial analog synths.

      This "portable" british beast was housed in solid wood casing, "wired-up" by sticking metal pins into a matrix, the controlled by a button and a joystick.

      To get any sort of pleasant sound from it (even if only once: an

  • Tron wasn't even mentioned in the headline, but when it came out it was pretty much bleeding edge.

    The VR sequences in Lawnmower Man were really out there as well.

    I know this old school stuff might look hokey today but back then they were revolutionary.

    As much as I'd hate to admit it, George Lucas has really raised the bar with episodes 1 & 2.

    Also don't forget music videos. Dire Straits "Money for Nothing" comes immediately to mind.
  • Wasn't Lawnmower Man quite groundbreaking when it was released? It has quite a bit of good CGI in it.
    • Twister and the water in A Perfect Storm both had great effects. And let's not forget Dobbie in Harry Potter, and the Golem in LOTR:TT (which comes out today or tomarrow on DVD, FYI).
    • Willow had great effects. Pixar has done some great stuff, of course. I think Final Fantasy is the farthest we've come. I also liked the plot, but I think they'd have been more succesful if they just took the story from FFVII or IX, but that's me.

      How 'bout the tic-tac-toe game in wargames? Just wondering how far you'd go.

  • ... you can't go wrong with Star Wars. Yes there are a ton of things wrong with the movies from a technical standpoint (like those matte errors in so many flying X-Wing scenes and various ships actually flying _through_ asteroids) but for all those wrongs it did so much right. I won't say it was one of the first, I'll just say it was one of the best.

  • Plagiarism.... (Score:2, Redundant)

    by dmayle ( 200765 )
    So, this person asks you to do his homework for him, and because it's interesting, you fall all over yourselves to help him? I can't wait until the Harvard vs. Slashdot (Replace with University of your choice.) plagiarism case. :)

    • Re:Plagiarism.... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Greventls ( 624360 )
      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 you looking for the influence of... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:09PM (#6789564) Journal
    ...computer science or of computer graphics. The title says one thing, the story another.

    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.

    • ...computer science or of computer graphics. The title says one thing, the story another.

      If you're looking for both, I think Tron is a good answer. One of the first movies to use CGI (the first?), and had a LOT of comp sci terms thrown into it in a time when very few people owned a computer, let alone knew what they meant.

  • Monday Night Football. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:16PM (#6789613)
    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.
    • Don't forget the ads that they superimposed on the field.

    • I'm not making this up. (Score:5, Funny)

      by pi_rules ( 123171 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:58PM (#6789946)
      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.
      • FYI, it's done by instrumenting all of the parameters of the camera. The computer knows the inclination, azimuth, and zoom of the camera, in realtime, measured by rotary encoders of some kind, I presume. Before the game they calibrate the whole mess by pointing the camera up and down the field, and telling the computer where all the edges are, etc. It then has a fancy model of all of this which it uses to determine where on the frame to draw the line. I don't mean to trivialise it, as apparently it was
      • The company that does it is Sportvision [sportvision.com] they have some fairly interesting technologies other than just the first down line.
    • how about the short 3 foot walls that surround the the baseball field behind homeplaye? Notice those advertisements, well many of them are computer generated onto that little wall. Same with some NBA courts, i do believe.
    • A lot of the US folks won't get it but cricket has had a healthy application of computer effects done to it. Most of these come in to play when there's a dogy PBW or caught behind decision.

      In the case of an LBW, the path of the cricket ball is extrapolated from it's path before it hit the pad, then superimposed on a 'virtual' pitch to see if it hit the stumps or if it veered to either side or over the top.

      Considering that most LBW decisions come from spin bowlers where not only do the path and speed of th
  • the original one(1927) had some pioneriing effects. ok not computer generated, but i doubt bladerunners effects to be computer generated mainly either(1981, and that may be a good thing as it ended up looking excellently dirty and realistic), and why make distinction between the two anyways? and in fact quite much of trons effects was manual labor too. in those older movies even the computer screens are done in some other (traditional) ways!

    there hasn't actually been that many 'wow' effects just because of
    • IIRC, Lensman (a really bad anime version of EE "Doc" Smith's yarns) was the first anime with computer graphics. Starfields, mostly, plus some (now) really bad looking ships. It may also be the first CG in a full length animation.

      I really liked the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast, and An American Tale had some impressive rotating gears (I think it was AAT). Not impressive now, but for the dawn of good CG, it was amazing.

      --
      Evan

  • The landmark effects... (Score:5, Informative)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:20PM (#6789648) Homepage Journal
    ... 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?
    • ... are the ones you never see.

      True..

      Listen to the director's commentary for Blade2.. there's a scene in the sewers, where Ron Perlman sticks his gloved hand into the sun, and his glove starts to smoke..

      The smoke was CG.. Guillermo del Toro makes a big deal about how he loves to use CG for stuff like that - stuff that could easily be done with other methods (and usually is)..
  • Those dinosaurs were CG, and considering it was released in 1993, it was pretty impressive. I think the dinosaurs required some terabytes to store each one.

    T2 was phenominal, most will agree. Even now, the CG still impresses. I preferred it to Spiderman, for certain.
    • "T2 was phenominal, most will agree. Even now, the CG still impresses. I preferred it to Spiderman, for certain. "

      I just watched T2 recently. I think the reason T2 is preferred to Spiderman FX wise has more to do with the director than with the technology. The T-1000 never tried to do anything completely impractical.

      I have to admit, I'm curious who'd win between a T-1000 and Odo.

    • Not all of the dinosaurs are real, the ones where lots of people are in the scene, and they touch the dinosaurs are usually models. Like the breathing thing, that was a model. One interesting thing about Jurassic Park is that it was probably the first movie of its scale to bother matching the grain of the film in all of the cg stuff, so that the dinosaurs didn't end up looking sharper than everything around them, a common problem with cg stuff(see the stuff that was redone in Star Wars )

  • Might I suggest? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dJCL ( 183345 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:27PM (#6789687) Homepage
    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

  • Preparing for a Lecture? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jpsowin ( 325530 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:31PM (#6789717) Homepage
    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.
  • Just follow these guys' works from their inception in 1976 and that will provide more than enough examples. Landmarks will mean different things for every individual...better stick with one or two companies. Everybody knows about ILM, and they set the bar.

    We would also appreciate it if you could make your presentation materials available to Slashdot readers.
  • My first thought is Willow, for the Morphing. Willow is the film that pioneered morphing technology, though Terminator 2 really brought it home.

    The digital limb removal from Forrest Gump was quite good, and really started that particular niche, as I recall.

    Starship Troopers was the first to have a very, very large number of critters moving in Full 3D. And getting the motion right on six legged critters is not so easy.

    Aladdin was the first movie I remember to have the mixed 3D/2D, especially the flying ca

    • Re:Let's see... (Score:3, Informative)

      by cei ( 107343 )
      Beauty and the Beast beat Aladdin by a year, with the ballroom scene...

      • Re:Let's see... (Score:3, Informative)

        by mughi ( 32874 )

        Beauty and the Beast beat Aladdin by a year

        True...

        However, 'Rescuers Down Under [imdb.com]' in turn beat Beauty and the Beast by a year (with CG that was integrated much better) and 'The Great Mouse Dective [imdb.com]' 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 fu

  • When you say bullet time, do you mean the bullet CGI'd in? or just the camera panning? My understanding was that it was just an extension of the virtual camera [virtualcamera.com] system, which was originally developed using actual film. (Though the patent also covers use with digital capture...)
    • A somewhat less influential, but closely related effect, is "bullet tracking". This is where the camera follows behind the bullet along it's path to collision (probably at about 1/20 actual bullet speed).

      I first saw it as "arrow tracking" in that horrible Robin Hood movie. It was definitely the best part of the movie. Since then, I think "Three Kings" used it best.

      Perhaps it's not even a digital effect, though. Remember the opening sequence to Naked Gun?

  • Non-Sci Fi examples (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Felgerkarb ( 695336 )
    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.

  • Rambling Thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @09:16PM (#6790063)
    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".
    • outsourcing the mo-cap to India

      Scary thought: in the sixties we had the spagetti western, when for budget reasons "American" westerns were filmed in Italy. Could the oughts (or whatever this decade is called) end up having the curry scifi?

      In the spagetti westerns, Italian actors were passed off as Mexicans. I wonder if any director today would dare to do the same thing in India...

  • exactly what are "landmarks in computer generated special effects" really depends on your definition of "computer generated"
    Motion control, where a computer controls a camera that's shooting artwork could fall under this catagory, which makes many slitscan efx count.

    You should be looking at Siggraph [siggraph.org] which has a good history section, unfortunatly it's buried somewhere on that site. If you read the first 10 years of Cinefex [cinefex.com] magazine you'll find what you're looking for.

  • City of Lost Children (Score:3, Informative)

    by Curien ( 267780 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @09:19PM (#6790085)
    With its CGI fog [sonyclassics.com]. Plus, it's non-Hollywood, non-American film. It could make for some nice variety.
  • How about the reflective morphing of the robot in Terminator II - where it breaks out of the helicopter?

  • Rendering types (Score:3, Insightful)

    by i0wnzj005uck4 ( 603384 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @09:25PM (#6790148) Homepage

    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.

    • Even cooler than image based lighting is photon mapping. You get pretty much the same result but it's a lot faster. And you more or less just continue to add new physical models on top of existing systems to create even better effects. One of the latest additions is subsurface scattering which is used to recreate the effect of light penetrating eg skin and lighting it up from within. This effect is used in The two towers (Gollum) and Harry Potter 2 (Dobby).
  • The parting of the red sea was simply stunning!
  • The way they combined the animation style with the computer generated car chase scenes in the "Initial D" animated series was simply stunning. They should win an award.
  • Some very nifty CG use. The whole thing about being inside a painting, smearing things in the world was just unreal.
  • The only two real strong uses of CGI in movies that I can think of off hand, are FF:The Spirits Within and Lord of the Rings. FF:The Spirit Within, used the CGI to paint a futuristic world in amazing detail. The detail of that worls is what made that movie for me. LotR, on the other hand, used the CGI to give the movie an amazing epic scale. To give it the size and scope it needs to give it the right feel. Actually, a large part of it is that they were extremely artistic about the CGI, making it just spar
  • Many people think The Matrix [slashdot.org] was the first Hollywood movie to use "bullet time". Not necessarily so [anu.edu.au].

    The guy who invented this technique is called Dayton Taylor, and I seem to remember that it was written up on Slashdot [slashdot.org] some time before the Wachowsi brothers movie first appeared on our radar. That's how old Slashdot is. Doesn't it seem a long time ago now!

    IIRC the inventor had originally envisaged its main application as being for televised sports games, to give a new twist to "action replay" of cruci

  • Fincher & Jeunet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Monday August 25, 2003 @11:10PM (#6790833) Homepage Journal

    In my opinion, the two most interesting modern masters of special effects, by a wide margin, are David Fincher [imdb.com] and Jean-Pierre Jeunet [imdb.com].

    Fincher is probably known to most Slashdot readers as the director of Fight Club [imdb.com], Se7en [imdb.com], and Panic Room [imdb.com], among others.

    Jeunet is a French director, and wouldn't be as well known if not for the fact that Amelie [imdb.com] 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 [imdb.com] and Delicatessen [imdb.com].

    (Interestingly, it turns out that Fincher and Jeunet also did the last two Alien movies, Alien3 [imdb.com] and Alien: Resurrection [imdb.com]. 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 [imdb.com] boring [imdb.com] effects [imdb.com] 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
  • As has been said for some other films, it had large amounts of CG, but they were so well done that you didn't even notice. If I recall correctly, the liftoff scene was CG. Even though it appears to be the same old footage you've seen a million times on the discovery channel, it's not (for one, it's a lot cleaner than that 30-ish year old footage).

  • CA-acting (Score:4, Funny)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @12:46AM (#6791241) Journal

    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! [billandted.org]

  • Blade Runner *NOT* CGI (Score:4, Informative)

    by brian0x00FF ( 701559 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @01:57AM (#6791591)
    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.
  • Tron was the film that started out the entire film/CGI thing.

    Get the recent DVD edition and watch all the documentary stuff. Get the Cinefex issue.

  • In mostly-chronological order (Score:3, Informative)

    by KewlPC ( 245768 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @03:13AM (#6791813) Homepage Journal
    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 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.

      You must have not been conscious when Tron came out. People ooh'ed and ahh'ed over the effects. Film/art/whatever can be (in fact, must be) influential by not being memorable

  • More bits (Score:4, Funny)

    by jolshefsky ( 560014 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @07:31AM (#6792446) Homepage
    I'm pretty sure The Net with Sandra Bullock provided us with the first use of a 33-bit IP address.
  • If I recall correctly, that was the first movie that had real computer generated CGI effects on screen (not to mention a ton of money spent on Cray's supercomuter time).

    Also the TV show 'Amazing Stories' had the first CGI opening. You could compair those effects to those of Babylon 5, to show how far things have come since the 80s.
  • Awesome movie. Anyway, I believe this was the first film to be 100% digitally filtered. The whole movie was shot in the summer where all the grass was green, yet the movie was filtered in a way to make it look like it took place in the dust-bowl era (ie brown grass and such.)

    Unless I had seen the documentary on the DVD I never would have known.

  • Pixar's debut was significant (not Toy Story) (Score:3, Informative)

    by xanderwilson ( 662093 ) on Tuesday August 26, 2003 @10:38AM (#6793651) Homepage
    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.
  • All of the spaceships and space dogfighting were done with computer animation. I didn't realize it when I first saw it, but now it stands out like a sore thumb.
  • Jurasic Park was the first major movie to use computer graphics instead of models for the dinosaurs. They actually had hired a model make to do the stop action dinosaurs but the CG were so good speilberg went with them..

    I think it was THE major moment when computers where used in films.

    Before that there was a sequence in the move "Young sherlock holmes" that used CG to model stained glass knights. But it was a much smaller part.
  • I'm surprised these haven't been mentioned yet!
  • the last starfighter [imdb.com] is THE landmark movie for CGI effects, in that all of the special effects were done with a computer (a cray supercomputer which was tied up with the production for several months). The movie itself is quite bad and the CGI loks primitive by today's standards (heck, my desktop PC can render better graphics) but its influence was undeniable and, perhaps until Pixar and the advent of the full-length, entirely CGI movie, it was the most important milestone for CGI use in movies.

    as someone

  • I can't believe that everyone who has been modded up has forgotten T-rex and other dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. If memory serves me right, this was the first instance of computer graphics being used to make a realistic skin for an animal. I have to say that I was extremely impressed when this movie came out. Another that was probably a good landmark was probably "For the Birds" by Pixar animation. They showed the use of feathers that would help them to create the fur effect on Scully in Monsters Inc. Ever

  • If you liked the animation in FF: TSW, check out 'Last Flight of the Osiris' on the Animatrix DVD; they've really improved their skills. The opening sword fight is masterfully animated.

  • I'm amazed so few people have mentioned B5. OK, it was a series with some extended episodes rather than a movie, but...

    This was pretty much the first time space-based sci-fi went completely CG for the effects, with no models at all. They also did it very realistically: not only does the station rotate to give artificial gravity, it launches its fighters using that rotation, and the fighters themselves perform manoeuvres that are realistic in zero-g, rather than the remarkably atmospheric effects you see i

  • This is like asking for the all-time demo reel, it's pretty subjective. But I'm surprised people aren't going back even farther, to the really groundbreaking works, like
    Robert Abel's Sexy Robot (early mocap), James Blinn's Voyager simulations, Nam June Paik's analog video synthesizers.. I could probably think of a few more.
    Everyone cites The Last Starfighter, I got a chance to look through their shop, they had a Cray and a CM-2, running Symbolics software, it was awesome. But that wasn't what made TLS a bre

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