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A lush, pictorial history of the significant moments in the development of digital FX in the movies
The Jurassic Park trilogy is released on Blu-ray for the first time later this month. It was a milestone in the development of digital FX, and still looks fantastic today. But while it forever changed the way films FX are produce, it wasn’t the first film to use CGI by far, and things have developed a long way since.
This featured is an updated and expanded version of one that appeared in an SFX Collector’s Edition in 2007, with new material and trivia provided by Steve Jarratt, editor of 3D World Magazine e, so he knows what he’s talking about. Enjoy.
1973
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Soylent Green
The first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space , makes an appearance. The game, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and published by Nutting Associates, appeared in 1971, a year before Atari’s Pong. So technically, this is the first instance of CGI in a movie, though it’s kinda cheating…
1976
1977
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Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
The animated wireframe graphic that appears in the Rebel Alliance’s briefing for the Death Star attack run is noteworthy for being the first substantial animated CG sequence (rather than the few fleeting seconds in previous movies). It was painstakingly hand-crafted by Larry Cuba, working in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois.
1979
The Black Hole
The opening credit sequence, showing a wireframe representation of a black hole’s gravity well, was, at the time, the longest computer-generated shot committed to film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxWCH7PfieM
Alien
When the Nostromo enters the orbit of the planetoid Archeron (also referred to later as LV-426), the nav computers display a CG wireframe display of the ship’s flight path, and then of the rocky planet surface. The effect was created by Systems Simulation Ltd of London.
Into the ’80s on the next page…
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