Research

This research shows how CGi has changed through time and how it has affected how we view films 

Westworld

Year: 1973
Significance: Cinema's first 2D computer images

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. Brynner’s robo-vision, a pixelated POV digitally processed by computer graphics whizzes John Whitney Jr. and Gary Demos of Information International, Inc. (better known as ‘Triple-I’ or ‘III’), was truly revolutionary. 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. Presto, infra-red androidvision. Simple really, when you think about it.

Tron

Year: 1982
Significance: first extensive 3D

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 – 2Mbof memory. To put into context, that’s about 1/2000th of the capacity of your average PC. Despite the constraints Lisberger and co. 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. Triple-III, the CG pioneers of Westworld, were called in to realise Syd Mead’s designs for Sark’s ship and the solar sailer.

The Abyss

Year: 1989
Significance: Water effects

To create cinema’s first CG computer water effects, The Abyss’ worm-like subsea pseudopod, effects guru Phil Tippett pointed James Cameron towards George Lucas’ ILM. Work on the 75 second sequence was ultimately divvyed up between seven different FX houses, with ILM taking on the bulk of the work and designing a program that could simulate the watery beast-tube-thing with incredible realism. The whole process took more than six months – the set had to be photographed from every angle so the effects could be composited onto the live-action – which delayed the film’s release, but it was worth waiting for. Another Oscar winner.

Jurassic Park

Year: 1993

Significance: First physically textured CGI

Empire voted Jurassic Park’s first glimpse of those ginormous, tree-munching Brachiosauri as its 27th most magical moment in cinema history. It was a breathtaking reveal: physically textured dinosaurs so realistic it felt like they might come pounding out of the screen. Again, Lucasfilm’s ILM division provided the Oscar-winning visual effects wizardry. The CGI was bleeding edge, but the studio also used a smorgasboard of physical effects on the movie: of 14 minutes of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, only four minutes were entirely computer generated. Along with the CGI, animatronics and stop-motioned miniatures were used to create the thunderous Gallimimus stampede, and a computer-generated stunt double created for the first time (he was munched by the animatronic T-Rex). Perhaps the movie’s effects DNA – Lucas’ CGI mingling with stop-motion of the kind pioneered by Ray Harryhausen and the animatronics Stan Winston helped developed – explains why Jurassic Park remains magical to this day.

Toy Story Year: 1995 Significance: First full-length CG film The first ever full-length CG feature, Toy Story was a mighty undertaking undertaking with a team of animators less-than-mighty in number. 27, in fact.  “If we’d known how small our budget and our crew was”, remembers writer Peter Docter,  “we probably would have been scared out of our gourds. But we didn’t, so it just felt like we were having a good time. ” Up to that point Pixar’s longest CGI animation had been Tin Toy, a full 80 minutes shorter than Buzz and Woody’s first outing.  The challenges were compounded by a seriously inexperienced crew (half hadn’t even used computers before) and Disney’s budget constraints.  It was enough to have Rex cowering in terror, but Pixar came through, again mingling super-detailed animation with emotional beats. Bill Reeves, Toy Story’s supervising technical director, looks back on the experience with pride: “To this day, it’s the hardest, most exhausting, and still most fun I’ve ever done at Pixar. We were essentially kick-starting an industry in terms of CG films.

Titanic

Year: 1997
Significance: Landmark CG effects

The most expensive film of its time, commanding a hefty budget of $200 million, James Cameron’s Titanic required over 500 visual effects shots to recreate one of the biggest disasters of the 20th century. Not only were the fundamental pieces of the ship – the hull, boiler room and boat deck – generated by computers, but major advancements were made in the depiction of flowing water that allowed the audience to immerse themselves in the illusion of a watery grave. More than four studios were reportedly involved behind the scenes, tasked with the meticulous nature of wire removal for flying objects and falling people, and the eventual grand-scale destruction of the ship. It was good enough to fool Davy Jones himself.

The Matrix

Year: 1999
Significance: Development of bullet time effects

The Wachowski brothers and their VFX supervisor John Gaeta looked east to help inject The Matrix with its hyper-real action beats. Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo’s view-morphing techniques were a major influence on the movie. Multiple cameras, CG and wire work-driven motion played with viewers perceptions and created the rotating, slow-motion bullet-time: a full-throttle extension of traditional time-slice photography. Helping with the wire work was Hong Kong action cinema choreographer Yuen Woo-ping – a veteran Jackie Chan and Jet Li collaborator whose martial arts whirlwind Fist Of Legend had caught the Wachowski’s eye – who also enhanced the Oscar-winning effects team create Neo’s suspended, airborne kung fu fights.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers

Year: 2002

Significance: Motion-capture and CG artificial intelligence

With Avatar and District 9 now behind it, Weta Digital has joined Pixar and ILM at the bleeding edge of CG special effects, but it was Peter Jackson’s Tolkien epic that got the ball rolling. Thanks to Andy Serkis’ remarkable performance and Weta’s digital effects team, Gollum became the first motion-captured CG character to interact directly with other actors. Traditional animation techniques, including rotoscoping and keyframing, were used to replace Serkis’s face with Gollum’s after Jackson decided against making Gollum an entirely CGI character. “We have little piece of Gollum in the first film,” says Jackson, “little teasing the blips of Gollum in the mines. That was our R&D kind of prototype Gollum. We basically threw him away at the beginning of this year because we were able to do so much better. We rebuilt Gollum from scratch – using new software that had been written, new software that our guys had written – and improved him a lot.” LOTR was also notable for its MASSIVE software (acronym boffins will know it better as ‘Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment’), which generated artificial intelligent CG orcs by the thousands, lending its epic battles serious levels of realism.

The Polar Express

Year: 2004
Significance: First motion-capture feature film

While the debate over performance capture rumbles on, at least in some sections of Hollywood and at Meryl Streep’s house, its journey into the mainstream began with Robert Zemeckis’ chilly choo-choo adventure. Zemeckis, whose digitised box of tricks injected Forrest Gump, Zelig-like, into various historic scenes, whipped off Gary Sinise’s legs and won him an Oscar in 1995, reunited with Tom Hanks, clad him in a fetching mo-cap suit and set to work pushing the boundaries of the medium. Ping pong balls – sorry, mo-cap markers – tracked Hanks five different performances, feeding them into computers which whizzed them into revolutionary, performance-driven animation. Zemeckis’ innovation built on Peter Jackson’s work with Gollum in LOTR. He developed it further with Beowulf and A Christmas Carol, but The Polar Express was the first major game-changer, an entirely mo-capped movie. The problems Zemeckis had with those scary dead-eyes have since been solved by Weta’s facial rig on Avatar. Which is just as well because if Santa came down our chimney with those blank peepers, we’d run screaming.

Avatar

Year: 2009
Significance: Facial capture

On Avatar, motion-capture became 3D e-motion capture, thanks to Weta Digital’s pioneering facial capture rig, state-of-the-art prosthetic work and texture painting that made the CG performances sing. There were also post-production meetings in which the actors talked through every beat of every scene with the people who would render their Na’vi counterparts. While the studio boasted plenty of LOTR veterans, as well as the battle-hardened MASSIVE software, James Cameron raised the bar still higher, demanding that every plant, tree and bioluminescent speck be individually rendered. No mean feat considering a single Pandoran plant comprised of a million CG polygons (Gollum was 50 polygons). Cameron’s Lightstorm Studio sent across the mo-cap data and camera moves to Wellington, where Weta rendered them into sparkling Pandora-ready animation using one of the world’s biggest servers to store the data. But it was the giant leap forward in facial performance capture – a wave farewell to dead eye syndrome – that Cameron is most proud of. “It’s funny that the press has latched on to the 3D thing for Avatar," reflects the director, "because in a way 3D was the least of Avatar for me. We spent two years in R&D to develop the facial capture, the CGI. For me this was the big thing.”

http://screenrant.com/christopher-nolan-imax-3d-cgi-mlee-164945/  - this discusses how Christopher Nolan knows how CGI and the use of technology has changed the way we view films.

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/05/22/did-you-notice-the-fake-rdj-in-iron-man-3

This shows hoe much CGI is used in films now and that this is helpful because it shows that CGI is in near enough every film and it can help solve problems

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/18/captain-america-chris-evans-body_n_850347.html

This shows how much CGI has changed through out time and how it has changed since The Abyss 

http://mubi.com/topics/will-cgi-replace-actors-one-day-or-are-actors-interchangeable-widgets-part-2

This is a forum website which somebody has started a conversation discussing how they think that CGI will one day take over Celebrities and they will no longer be needed in big movies 

http://www.empireonline.com/features/history-of-cgi

This is a article on how the cgi has changed throughout time and this also shows that how one film can make an impact on other modern day films.