What was the first movie to use CGI?
The film industry has become dominated by special effects and digital technology that can be used to achieve just about anything, with modern animated films becoming nearly unrecognisable in their style and studio movies being overridden with superficial settings and poorly lit scenes due to their reliance on CGI.
While this technology has helped advance many aspects of film production, it has also come to be a bit of a pest, with many film lovers yearning for the days in which gaffers were employed, and real-life locations were used for full immersion and creative expression. But, alas, this is not how things work anymore, and many filmmakers have combined this technology with the use of AI to completely embrace creative obsoletion and destruction of art as we know it.
With recent discoveries about how performances in The Brutalist were enhanced using AI in order to make the accents more convincing, many creatives are beginning to talk about the ethics of this practice and its impact on actors.
While the film industry’s future is a slippery slope, and countless conversations are being had about it, now feels like a good time to reflect on its beginnings and the emergence of digital technology as a whole, starting with the early uses of CGI.
Firstly, what was the first movie to feature a fully CGI character?
Computer Generated Imagery has evolved quickly over the years, with the technology first being used nearly four decades ago. During the early days of its creation, it was fairly basic and limited in its capabilities but has since become an entirely different beast. The possibilities now seem endless, with entire movies relying on this technology, with studios like Disney attempting to recreate their classic animated films with CGI.
Despite being considered a fairly recent trend, CGI was first used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958, and the animated patterns in the opening credits were constructed using this technology.
While it is not rare to see a completely digitally created character in modern cinema, it was during its early days of inception, with one film from the ‘80s breaking boundaries by including a fully CGI character. Young Sherlock Holmes, released in 1985, was the first production to have a character created using this technology, with a glass knight seen jumping through a stained-glass window.
The sequence was made in collaboration with LucasFilm’s special effects company, which is unsurprising given how prominent they were in the pioneering of this technology for the Star Wars franchise.
So, what was the first movie made entirely with CGI?
However, the first film to be made entirely with CGI didn’t happen until much later when Pixar used it to create Toy Story in 1995. After redefining the medium’s format entirely, the film is cited as one of the most influential projects within their filmography, becoming a crucial story within their legacy as a studio.
Since then, the technology has only grown and new ways have been found for its utilisation within film production, with directors like Ridley Scott and James Cameron making careers out of stories that rely on this technology. It has become a sorely debated topic in recent years, but many filmmakers stand by their use of it and the possibilities that it opens up for cinema.
