Early CGI is Awesome

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hm yeah

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Computer Dreams (first version)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL0RH3x7Zzo

Beyond the Mind's Eye
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRVpYpJhMZ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbbgjQ_83wY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbG34c1qorQ

Odyssey Into the Mind's Eye
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2KrZSEXbgE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIyv2jpZXtw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pTRxtQ3ndk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcaOQzPsdYE

Back when CGI was an amazing new art form, artists did all kinds of amazing, crazy, mind-blowing stuff. No one cared how good water or fabric looked - real water and real fabric were good enough. No, CGI was for AWESOME, AMAZING things.

These are just starting points. Go dig deeper!

I've noticed from going over past early CGI compilations, that single videos could be hacked to bits and appear as tiny segments in many different compilations released by different companies. Some films I've never seen in completion.

How mysterious.

Share vids you find, and your thoughts!


(Hey, click on my website icon. I have a present for you) [updated 11/7/13]
 
Jewelsmakerguy said:
I'm sure most of us remember this, and if not. Enjoy it anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Witbl6dHw8s

I remember seeing that music video when I was 3 or 4 and my mind being blown away by the computer animation. Nowadays if a kid that age saw it for the first time, they'd probably say "What is this crap? It looks like shit."

Here's some other interesting videos:

Here's one of a test footage from the original Toy Story. Fun fact - apparently a Disney executive wanted Woody to be a dick to be "edgy" and "adult" and it pretty much made the movie unbearable to watch so they changed it:

[youtube]ins_UsIAThY[/youtube]

And here's an early CGI test film done by Disney:

[youtube]LvIDRoO8KnM[/youtube]
Click to expand...
 
[youtube]-3ODe9mqoDE[/youtube]
I'm sure everyone will know this.
 
hm yeah said:
Beyond the Mind's Eye
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRVpYpJhMZ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbbgjQ_83wY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbG34c1qorQ
Click to expand...

FUCK YEAH BEYOND THE MIND'S EYE!

Or, if you're a Canadian like me, you'll probably remember them as some of the Short Circuitz clips that aired between shows on YTV in the mid 90's (a.k.a. The greatest time period in the history of forever).

[youtube]kpbmd_aXy1o[/youtube]

This is from Animusic, which I believe is from the early 2000s, so it might not count, but I can't not bring up "Resonant Chamber Music":

[youtube]toXNVbvFXyk[/youtube]
 
Aye, early CGI is pretty neat especially BTME, heck it's soundtrack is just as impressive as the video. Somewhere I have one of those old "Computer Animation Festival" VHS lying around that I need to digitize and upload for the masses.
Here's a few that I've always liked.

Grinning Evil Death
[youtube]5XdUWhbAl8Q[/youtube]

Flying Logos
[youtube]9hIOfEiy4lc[/youtube]
 
^ I love Flying Logos!

Grinning Evil Death doesn't sound familiar. Might have missed that one.

edit: oh, I have seen Grinning Evil Death before. That's a strange one.
 
Going back to the early 1980s, here's some demo reels of the TRON lightcycle guys...
[youtube]WxetroPVCl0[/youtube]
[youtube]lAYaX6NuI4M[/youtube]


Some short films from pre-Shrek PDI:
[youtube]HOUYSLStGak[/youtube]
[youtube]hzl9Tp24H44[/youtube]

Even some Japanese CGI:
[youtube]5RaDIBXkU3U[/youtube]
 
Jewelsmakerguy said:
Some short films from pre-Shrek PDI:
Click to expand...

I loved both of those a kid. If you want true obscurity, there was a Macintosh shareware game in the early 90's called Quagmire where the protagonist was clearly inspired by Botco.
Quagmiretitlescreen.png
 
[youtube]SPMFhcC4SvQ[/youtube]
Some really early CGI animation from 1974.
 
[youtube]MLNvUsTBGyE[/youtube]
This was done with the most powerful computers at the time. Today, that's equal to a smartphone.

Fuck you Star Wars.
 
I'm actually not very fond of CGI because of what it did to the Horror film industry. I remember when the special effects were their own thing and each movie had it's own special flair *SIGH*
 
^ I used to be EXTREMELY bitter (when I was a really anal 12 year old to 15 year old) because CGI booted out traditional animation, which I had a special interest in and aspired to do as my career.

I'm still a bit bitter, but I've also let go of that ridiculous pipe dream, and now I'm just bitter about CGI being all about rendering the best water and fabric and shit like that.

THAT SAID,

[youtube]XiTgoRR3tbk[/youtube]
 
I remember back in the 90s when I was a kid, there was a TV channel for kids called YTV (up here in Canada). Every so often, instead of showing commercials, they'd show short CGI animations between shows. They were called Short Circuitz. I didn't realize it at the time, but they were probably taken from longer videos like the one OP posted.

Here's one I actually remember pretty clearly. It gives you an idea of what they were like:

[youtube]FOavf3_e6Ac[/youtube]
 
Punks. All of you.

None of you know the difference between raster-scan displays and the vector-scan variety, but vector machines used to be big news 'cause all you had to do was solve the vertices and it'd draw the edges. Think Asteroids. I'm not going to explain any more beyond that, so look it up yourself if interested & spare me yr. dunce-shrugs.

WHEN I WAS BUT A WEE UNDERGRAD, I had a couple of friends who were grad students in EE. There was an "EE grad student's locker room" in the engineering building, because EE grad students didn't get to, like, sleep. Or eat. So for some reason they had this room where they could do neither. Anyway, in said room was an old Hewlett-Packard mainframe collecting dust under a plastic sheet. Motivated by hellionism, one night three of us pulled the sheet off, connected a 300 baud RS-232 terminal, and fired the thing up. What the hell, it came on.

One of the cabinets was a tape drive (the stereotypical 9-track reel-to-reel kind), and since the manuals were helpfully stashed on top of the whole pile, we were able to dive in to try and figure out how to make it do something interesting. The machine had an insanely huge 8 kilobytes of main RAM, I think, and we were able to read one record off the tape into memory. By sheer luck, I was taking an 'intro to computer graphics' course that among other things included programming an ancient vector machine called a DEC-GT40, and what was on the tape looked a hell of a lot like the GT40's octal code. ("DEC" was "digital equipment company," and they were huge from the late '60s to the mid-'90s. "Huge" means "big enough to give IBM a run for their money," i.e. they absolutely owned the minicomputer market. Anybody remember the VAX-11? No, of course you don't. After microcomputers took over, they were bought by Compaq, who was eventually bought by HP or Dell or somebody.)

An expedition was dispatched across the parking lot to the computer center (this was, remember, quite late at night) to hijack the GT40 and a vector monitor. Both were handily located on one of those ubiquitous cart-things that people put projectors and such on. Disguised as "people who looked like they knew what they were doing, sort of," we trundled the GT40 + monitor back across the parking lot to the engineering building, hooked it up to one of the H/P's ports, and streamed the tape into it.

It was a couple programs written by an undergrad waaay back when, and the tape had probably been sitting on the machine since he left. Space Wars and Moon Rocket Lander, programmed by Warren Bushnell. (He founded a little thing called Atari afterwards.)

I found myself sitting next to him at the bar one afternoon during GDC '95 (either that or '96) and related the tale. He was all "so do you know where that tape still is?" (No, unfortunately it'd been a million years since the last time I saw it.) Still, he bought me a beer.
 
hm yeah said:
^ I used to be EXTREMELY bitter (when I was a really anal 12 year old to 15 year old) because CGI booted out traditional animation, which I had a special interest in and aspired to do as my career.

I'm still a bit bitter, but I've also let go of that ridiculous pipe dream, and now I'm just bitter about CGI being all about rendering the best water and fabric and shit like that.

THAT SAID,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiTgoRR3tbk
Click to expand...

I still think model effects like those used in 2001 are more realistic than anything I've seen since. It's something about how it can reproduce the stark light of space on objects that looks more like actual NASA photography than computer animation.
 
Marvin said:
I watched a little bit of ReBoot at some point.
Click to expand...

I'm surprised how popular ReBoot became after the fact. I remember watching it as a kid and really liking it but it didn't start to grow popular until the last 10 years or so.

I remember I went to buy something off somebody on Craigslist and they were wearing a Reboot button on their shirt.
 
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