Timeline: A brief history of CGI in the movies
Computer-generated imagery has been an uphill development in Hollywood for decades, with filmmakers always looking for the next step in creating and improving their visual media. Whether it’s 2D pictures or the more frequent 3D graphics, making and executing characters, worlds and isolated special effects, CGI plays a vital part in the new era of filmmaking.
The history of CGI charts back decades ago, beginning in the early 1970s after experimentation with film properties revealed what the medium could achieve. Each stepping stone in computer-generated imagery was necessary, as even the smallest CGI moments or images helped construct the technology’s cinematic status.
The development of CGI has appeared in various film genres and eras, ranging from family animations to epic adventure and award-winning franchises adapted from classic literature. These films have thrown audiences into awe from their never-before-seen spectacles and have garnered rewards from numerous award outlets. On the other hand, CGI has also added a few ugly moments with Cats and bizarre moments in Wonder Woman also springing to mind.
With this extensive and intriguing history in mind, let’s go through a timeline of GCI’s time and progress in cinema from the ’70s to contemporary moviemaking, featuring good and bad times.
CGI at the Movies:
Cinema’s first 2D image
Westworld is a science-fiction Western hybrid film directed by Michael Crichton. The plot showcases two adult guests, played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, visiting an interactive amusement park containing lifelike androids, one played by Yul Brynner, that unexpectedly begin to malfunction.
Brynner’s character, a gunslinging robot, is given a point-of-view shot throughout the film to place the audience in his perspective. This factor was created through digital image processing to pixellate photography, the first use of 2D animation in cinema, with each frame being colour-separated and scanned into rectangular blocks.
Cinema’s first 3D image
Futureworld is the follow-up to Westworld, directed by Richard T. Heffron and written by Mayo Simon and George Schenck.
In the meta drama, two reporters in the poorly received film are sent to Futureworld to write a story on its re-opening.
Similar to its predecessor, Futureworld presented technological progression in 3D imagery. A brief sequence sees Fonda’s head and hand rendered into three dimensions, a little moment that took great lengths and extreme concentration to create. It was rewarded by the Oscars with a Scientific & Engineering Academy Award.
Cinema’s first 3D wideframe graphics
Star Wars: A New Hope is George Lucas’s sci-fi space opera epic. The culturally monumental film follows a young Jedi who becomes involved in a rebellion against the Galactic Empire.
A New Hope made cinematic waves in many ways, including the medium’s first use of 3D wide-frame graphics. The film’s infamous Death Star sequence was approached by working from a photograph of the matte painting of the Death Star and creating a computer picture by combining several circles and arcs. To create visual effects, the figure was rotated, which could also change its size.
Cinema’s first fully CGI character
Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes is a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes and John Watson during their early boarding school days. Levinson’s award-winning film features the character of a knight made out of a stained glass window, which Lucas’ company also created. It is claimed that this stained glass knight is regarded as the first “fully 3-D digital (or CGI), or computer generated, photorealistic animated character in a full-length feature film.”
It was also the first computer-animated character to be “scanned and painted directly onto film using a laser”. It took animator John Lasseter and the LucasFilm Graphics Group (which would later become Pixar) at ILM about six months to create this digital swordsman.
Cinema’s first water effects
The Abyss is a 1989 science-fiction film directed by box-office king James Cameron. It stars Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Michael Biehn as a search and recovery team searching for a sunken American submarine in the Caribbean.
Cameron’s film showcased the first CG computer water effects, seen in a 75-second sequence that took more than six months to create, from photography to touching up the details, including designing a program that could simulate the watery with incredible realism.
Cinema’s first physically textured CGI
Steven Spielberg’s American classic Jurassic Park describes a prehistoric-themed park with de-extinct dinosaurs and disastrous events.
Jurassic Park shows some terrifyingly realistic dinosaurs with impressive physical textures created by Lucasfilm. Only four of the 14 minutes dinosaurs appeared onscreen were computer animated, the rest were painstakingly modelled by hand and the CGI had to be textured to match.
Cinema’s first full-length CG film
Toy Story was directed by John Lasseter and produced by Pixar Animation Studios in their feature debut. The family film tells the story of a child’s toys who come to life when he is not in the room.
This beloved animated classic, based on Pixar’s short film Tin Toy, was the first entirely computer-animated feature film. “If we’d known how small our budget and our crew was,” writer Peter Docter shared, “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.”
Cinema’s first large-scale CG battle scenes
Peter Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is a surreal blend of science-fiction, horror, war and ideological discussion. It narrates a group of 23rd-century American high schoolers joining an intergalactic military base in the fight against large insect-like creatures.
Despite being a box office flop, Verhoeven’s cult classic was the first movie to showcase a large-scale CG military battle, thanks to the VFX artistry of Phil Tippett and Tippett Studios. These battle sequences feature brutal imagery of bodies being dismembered and alien creatures being burned alive, making for a visually striking yet disturbing effects landmark.
Cinema’s landmark CG effects
Titanic is the pinnacle romance movie with a splash of history and disaster, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio working under James Cameron’s direction.
Titanic has many cinematic historical citations to its name. From the CG point of view, it showcased over 500 visual effects shots to represent one of the biggest disasters of the 20th century. Vital technological advancements had to be conducted to show the graphically stunning scenes of water flowing through the ship, involving more than four studios.
Cinema’s first use of photogrammetry
The first rule of Fight Club is ‘don’t talk about Fight Club’, we’re about the break that: the 1999 cult hit directed by David Fincher stars Edward Norton and Brad Pitt as two sides of one damaged psyche. The two personalities form an underground fight club so American men can regain self-esteem following a ‘crisis of masculinity’.
Following Fincher’s career as a commercial director, Fight Club, based on Chuck Palahniuck’s original novella, has serious anti-commercialism tones. This value is established in the opening sequence, where Norton walks through his product placement kitchen. As Fincher wanted to avoid the camera being seen in the stove’s reflection as it passed, the effects team rendered wire-frame 3D models from photographs to map and recreate the set seen in previous shots.
Cinema’s first photorealistic human actors
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a 2001 computer-animated science fiction film directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy franchise. Its plot focuses on a group of scientists working to free a post-apocalyptic Earth from the Phantoms.
Despite being a terrible film story-wise, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within holds merit in featuring the first uncanny photorealistic humans in animation. This landmark involved rendering the characters down to the last detail, involving 141,964 frames, each taking an average of 90 minutes to generate.
Cinema’s motion capture and CG artificial intelligence
Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is an epic fantasy adventure film directed by Peter Jackson. It follows three storylines from Middle Earth, including Frodo and Sam, as they continue their journey from the last movie.
No stranger to impressive CGI performances, Serkis appears as Gollum, an entirely CGI role that required the studio to create new software from scratch. In addition, traditional animation techniques, including rotoscoping and keyframing, were used to transform the actor into Gollum.
Cinema’s first motion-capture Feature film
Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express is a 2004 Christmas animated movie starring Tom Hanks in multiple distinct roles, with Daryl Sabara, Nona Gaye, Jimmy Bennett, and Eddie Deezen. It centres on a magical train that takes children to the North Pole to meet Santa on Christmas Eve.
As touching and heartfelt as this classic seasonal animation is, the visuals read as startingly uncanny. Zemeckis’ film involved Hanks working in a stop-motion suit that tracked his movement, which was then sent to computers to be changed into groundbreaking performance-driven animation. However, many audience members thought the effect was strange and the technology somewhat stalled thereafter.
Cinema’s facial capturing
Avatar is a 2009 science-fiction spectacle directed by CG fanatic James Cameron. During the 22nd century, a marine heads to the colonised alien planet Pandora, where he inhabits a genetically engineered boy of the race who lives there to learn their ways.
Likewise to Titanic, Avatar was groundbreaking in both technological and box-office realms. The film saw motion capture become 3D e-motion-capture, allowing the striking visuals and beautiful world-building to be exposited in 3D.
