I find it interesting that the VFX for this spot look as if they were done on a VIC-20. Check out the big man in all his tan on tan glory. This was a smokin’ hot machine for it’s day (a whole 5kb of RAM) and for just $299.95. Gotta love that they use GORF as one of the demos. Here’s the print add from the same campaign.
via io9
Nyarlathotep passed along this awesome pic that at first glance looks like some sort of Sci-Fi S&M setup but is really an early motion capture rig. There is more info on Dave Sieg’s Scanimation website about this image
I recall seeing a demonstration videotape in which a girl wore a harness equipped with motion sensors connected to a Scanimate. Each sensor was a goniometer, a type of rotary transformer which converts angular displacement into a corresponding phase shift between windings. The wearer of this harness could cause a stick-figure, generated by Scanimate, to mimic his movements in real time. Remember, this was done back in the early seventies, well before any of the recent magnetic or optical motion capture work.
I’ve searched the whole internet (well not really) trying to find the full demo video of this system but to no avail. Any hints from fellow VFXhackers out there could help us all scratch our vintage MoCap itch.
LINK to a cool movie of the Scanimation system in action for Dave’s site
This clip is 10 minutes of pure VFX gold. It’s a behind the scenes explaining the process behind the Death Star mission briefing in A New Hope. There are some great details here and the process really is a combination of practical and computer techniques. I love that the animation wasn’t keyframed but “performed” real-time by manipulating a bunch of dials and knobs. The creator of this animation was Larry Cuba, a CG pioneer who programmed the film Arabesque with with John Whitney.
LINK to an excerpt of Cuba’s 1985 masterpiece Calculated Movements
Special thanks to Agrapha for the Star Wars link
I recently got a chance to get a tour of the ILM facility at the Presidio in San Francisco. The place is just dripping with VFX history. Sure you’ve got the obvious awesomeness like Han Solo in Carbonite but there are lots of hidden gems too like the original door to Kerner Optical and the Optical Printer used on the original Star Wars film. One thing that caught my eye was a poster from the 7th Voyage of Sinbad that was signed multiple times by Ray Harryhausen himself. I asked my tour guide what the deal was with the poster and he was clueless. It just so happens the San Francisco Chronicle did a little piece about the poster last week. Here’s a snippet
But there’s one piece of art on the wall that few in the building take for granted: A giant print of the Cyclops from “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” with a signature scrawled on it once for every visit by the monster’s creator. It was displayed prominently in the lobby of the old ILM offices in San Rafael, and now gets a place of honor near the cast photos from each of the company’s productions.
“Every time I walk by that and see those signatures, I think, ‘This has got to be the coolest place in the world,’ ” says Tim Harrington, an animator in his mid-30s who is working on the new Indiana Jones movie. “Ray Harryhausen has been here five times.”
LINK to the full story on SF Gate (via VFXblog)
This commercial for VW is a stop-motion masterpiece. The detail in the character is amazing, check out the flailing arms on the Fay Ray when it’s in Kong’s hand.
LINK to Nova interview with David Allen about the inner workings of the Big Ape
special thanks to Nyarlathotep for the tip
An art student threw together this mash-up “just for fun. Not as a serious artistic endeavor” I don’t know, something like this my have added some interest to the prequels.
thanks to Motiongrapher for the link
Tired of all the Oscar rehash? Head on over to Superpunch and check out there collection of classic movie posters from the winners of the best visual effects Oscars from 1940-1979. The images are great and the site also includes handy links to purchase replicas of these cinematic milestones. Good luck getting your significant other’s permission to hang them in your living room.
LINK to Superpunch the blog
io9 has posted list with video clips of some the great spaceship destructions in film and television history. There are some great ones in here with some especially good examples of models being blasted with pyro. I have to say, the most exhilarating thing VFX is building something t hat looks really cool then packing it full of explosives and watching it get consumed in a ball of fiery oblivion. The only thing I take issue with on this list is the clip from Vanilla Sky which is a car stunt for cryin’ out loud and also the glaring omission of the Rodger Young destruction sequence from Starship Troopers.
LINK to full post on io9 (thanks to Nyarlathotep) for the link
CG Society just came out with it’s list of the 100 Greatest 3d Movies and it’s chock full of tasty links to a treasure trove of material on how the films were created. The list was generated by an online vote on entries from a short list of 150 films. Because of this, this list is a bit skewed towards newer films (Final Fantasy The Spirits Within is number 9 while TRON comes in at 18!). Aside from my feelings about the ordering of the list itself, the article is chock full of useful info. There are several charts and graphs (interesting to see that most of the fx work was done by only 3 companys) as well as a spiffy timeline. But by far the best part of this article is the related links associated with each film. You’ll find, among others, a great article on Low End Mac chronicling the birth of CGI and tid-bit from Alvy Ray Smith’s site talking about the genesis of The Genesis Effect. It’s worth taking the time to cruise through all links to get a taste of what it took to put these films together.
LINK to my vfxhistory tags on del.icio.us (feel free to add your own tags or suggest more in the comments!)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbxJajIGBWo[/youtube]
I loved my Apple ][e. It was the first computer I ever did any kind of graphics work on and seeing one warms my nerdy heart to this very day. So, I was glad to come across this clip from a guy who hooked up a time-lapse rig to his monitor in order to “render” animation using Apple’s famous machine that came standard with 64KB of RAM (easily upgradable to 128KB). Set your way-back machine to 1985 and imagine if you will a world without DVD tutorials, personal learning editions, GUIs or even the idea of a render farm. You’ve just stepped into the time and place where James Leatham created the screen graphics for the short film “Asteroid”. More Wood than Spielberg, the film contains the stilted dialog and obviously kit-bashed models you’d expect from super-8 Stars War rip off but Leatham’s animation stands out. The idea was to let the computer draw a frame to the display then trigger a camera to take a 1 sec exposure of the monitor. When you watch the video make sure you listen to the audio of James marveling at the fact that it takes two whole minutes to draw a frame! Those where the days.
LINK to Flickr feed of how to article
