RetroHack - A Look Into The History Of Visual Effects
A lot of you young Visual Effects artists out there come into this industry thinking it’s a brave new world. An uncharted territory just waiting to be plundered by your staggering keyboard dexterity and lack of the rudimentary social skills it takes to carry on a the most basic of conversations. But this is not so Padwans! Many a nerd before you has spent weekend after weekend away from the company of the opposite sex to make movie magic happen. In our new RetroHack segment we hope to educate those who know no VFX before the Matrix.
First up this tasty clip is a How-To of the Robert Abel produced spot “Brilliance”, more commonly known as Sexy Robot.
Notice the primitive tech featured in this vid. Things “switches”,”knobs”, and most shocking of all “shoulder pads” are now extinct to today’s CGI professionals. The most amazing thing about this that the “eight grueling weeks” of production mentioned in this segment has remained an industry standard for commercial projects. In some ways, all that has changed is the amount of polygons and pixels used to create a spot. Oh yeah and the amount of people in the biz has also increased 1,000 times over. And you thought you were the first kid in your cul-de-sac to take mouse in hand to try to make it in Hollywood. Hah!
LINK to more info on Robert Abel and Associates
October 20th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
First please correct the Able spelling in the “How-To of the Robert Able” to Abel. Secondly while their CG work was technically pioneering the quality of their work was a direct result of the multiple incredibly talented directors and designers they had on staff. In many cases they created the storyboards for their projects not ad agencies. In my opinion while their CGI work was outstanding their best and most creative work were commercials that utilized multiple techniques. 7-up and Levis for instance utilized Live-action, Miniatures , Maxiatures, High-speed photography, 4×5 Plate photography, Hand-Rotoscope, Hand Animation both front and back- lit. Motion Control Streak/Slit-scan Photography. Extensive optical printing. Stop-Motion . and even Live-action Motion Control (on audio cassette I think!). Back in the day before CG they did a flying around inside a Marantz receiver by building an entire stage into the interior, full of giant circuit boards, capacitors , resistors and the like. and filming moving around inside. They owned all of their own equipment , cameras , Animation stands, optical printers, Later their Evans and Sutherland Vector graphic system Much like today, small armies of people worked on these projects with lots and lots of overtime hours and since this was the late 70’s and 80’s unfortunately a lot of creativity and labor was driven under the influence of the “fashionable vices” of the day….sniff. But that was the look of the time as well lots of hot little twinkling star hits and candy apple colours. They did a Kawasaki motorcycle spot that was full of optical effects , mostly heavy 70’s style super psychedelic posterization, Kawasaki decided they could not air it as it seem to promote drug use and driving really fast but it looked really cool. They also did a sequence in TRON and a great many people working on it at other facilities had at one time done the same techniques at Abel’s They constantly came up with new ideas and ways to do Visual effects, and only in the latter years did they rely solely on CG. Bob Abel’s DP/Cameraman in the early days was the late Dave Stewart who was also one of the first Motion Control Cameramen evah. He went on to be Visual Effects DP on Star Trek The Motion Picture, Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Blade Runner. and Brainstorm Nuff said, except I will say that seeing Bob Abel’s work when I was younger was specifically one of the reasons I went into Visual effects. http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/tree/abel.html
October 23rd, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Thanks for the heads up Nyarls. Typo has been changed for the better. I too love the work of Abel and early CG pioneers. I remember seeing the stain glass window come to life in Young Sherlock Holmes and saying to myself “Now that’s what I want to do”. If that puts me one step removed from a 48 year old dude in a Tron suit on the geek spectrum, so be it!