Early computer animated film produced in 1986 at Apollo Computer. Directed by Michael Sciulli and Melissa White and released the same year as Pixar's Luxo Jr.
Comments: 50 percent: “Wow, this is so cool!” “I remember seeing this as a kid, blew my mind.” “This is so aesthetic.” “Miss this old-school animation style.” 50 percent: “I PAY THE PRICE TO ROLL WITH IT, WASTE YOUR LIFE AND YOU WON’T GET IT, PLAYED OUT WITH NOWHERE TO GO GET IT, MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE A HO DON’T IT, KNOWN FOR IT"
This was the golden age of computer animation. I was humping to get into Pacific Data Images (now Dreamworks) as well as Pixar (which was largely medical imaging with a R&D department experimenting with animation and driven by Eben Ostby). These are the days of Tron and what now looks like very sterile images, but we were out of our minds that we could create images this way. Thank you soooo much for keeping this stuff around!!!
This is one of the early CG short films that inspired me to pursue a career in computer animation. Unfortunately, I have only a 20-year-old VHS copy of it. This is the result of transferring it using the best industrial SVHS deck I could find in conjunction with a timebase corrector and inverse telecine processing. At least the color is fairly decent. Hopefully a better version will eventually surface...
I remember first seeing this particular animation on some PBS documentary in the early nineties. And even then it blew my mind as to how amazing computer graphics could be, even at that time in the mid-1980s. We've come a long way since then, of course, but watching this, 30+ years after its creation, still impresses me no end.
I remember seeing this short in "The Mind's Eye", I've always wondered what the source material was. Thanks so much, you definitely made part of my childhood complete in solving this mystery.
Very cool to see this again. I was a hardware Engineer at Apollo at the time, and I believe my workstation was one of those used in the nightly render work. I hope I get to see some of the creators of this video tonight at the annual Apollo Alumni reunion at the Westford Regency!
What a fantastic job you and your coworkers did creating a perfect synthesis of music and animation. I first saw this as part of the special Computer Animation Magic aired on PBS in the late 80s on a gorgeously vibrant CRT TV. A true landmark of CGI! I'll never forget it.
Thanks for posting this. Even though the sophistication that goes into something like Cars 2 is on a higher level, they're just standing on the shoulders of the people who did this. So much cool stuff was happening in the 80's. And the fact that few people knew about it, you had to seek out obscure animation festivals and midnight movies only made it cooler.
Loved this as a kid, the imagery was so striking and even back then I loved CGI! These early pioneers were amazing, but even say ten years previously from now an ordinary PC could run it in realtime.
dunes yeah, now i know where this animation came from. i remember seeing this in "the mind's eye" in a computer class i was in. i loved that tape and i ended up bying that one and the other release called "beyond the minds eye".
now imagine if Mario Bros encountered this dimension instead of the mushroom kingdom universe 0.0 that would be digitally cool and creative other level, no?
You've made such terrific contributions to the field of computer graphics, Dr. Arvo! It must have been fun working on this film back in the day. I'm so glad you don't mind my posting the video.
Hopefully that will never happen. All the information here is priceless, in particular the comments made by the animation team. Sad news about Dr. Arvo; fifty-five is much too young. I've been scouring the net reading about his accomplishments, thanks to the comment posted by Mr. Hinckley.
I was pretty startled to discover this on RU-vid, although I wish there were a higher quality version available. I wrote a texture/pattern editor specifically for this project; it was used for creating some of the textures and patterns in the movie. All the software for designing the scenes, rendering the frames, and distributing the work had to be created from scratch. And while a modern PC could certainly do this, even now it probably wouldn't use pure raytracing for rendering. It's too slow.
I remember seeing this on a PBS documentary about computer grafix, yes 20 years ago. I remember because silly 8 year old me thought it would be nice to copy this for a school art project. 5000 man-hours my ass.
There are two computer animations I'm dying to find... one of a girl in leopardskin diving from a pyramid and morphing into a butterfly from about 1989 and another about plants firing out huge clumps of pollen made of polygons which I think was done on a Thinking Machine's computer. If you know where to find them, please post!
You've probably already found what you're looking for, but the first one is called "The Little Death" by Symbolics. No clue about the second, but lemme know if you found it!
@@t_k_blitz4837 Yes, thank you, you are right, that is what I meant. Here is the other one: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZRHH6Y6iggo.html It is amazing this is the first I have seen if your reply, and even more amazing that I wrote my comment when I was in my late 30s and now I am in my early 50s.
Thanks. You could probably send a DMCA takedown notice and get this version removed, but please don't... it would be a shame to lose some of the great comments here. Dr. Arvo has passed away and won't be posting again.
This film is available on a DVD called COMPUTER ANIMATION CLASSICS. However, I rented it and found the quality to be only marginally better than this version, plus it's horizontally squeezed a bit and the credits are lopped off (even before the word "apollo" is formed at the end). Thumbs down...
1:39 , Is there a name for this genre of music? I’ve always enjoyed music that sounds like this, but I don’t know what it’s classified as, so it’s hard to find.
