So far in class we have worked on two projects that dealt with rendering images, so I thought I would look a little deeper into the computer animation revolution we have seen in the film making industry over the past thirty or so years.

A Brief Film History

Computer generated imagery (CGI) was first used in the 1970’s with films such as Star Wars and Alien; however, the trend never truly caught on in Hollywood until the 1993 film Jurassic Park dazzled viewers with its fully integrated CGI dinosaurs. The following year, Forest Gump introduced Hollywood to the CGI effect of limb removal. From there, CGI in film and television soared to unparalleled popularity.

In 1995, Toy Story, the first fully computer-generated film, was released. This revolutionized the animated film industry, as all previous cartoons had been painstakingly drawn frame-by-frame by hand. Interestingly enough, the first full length Disney feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, took approximately three to four years to design, draw, and produce. Toy Story, on the other hand, took about a decade from conception to release, and Pixar’s animation studios had 294 processors rendering away 24 hours a day to produce the film.

Is CGI here to stay?

The debate between production time vs. final product is an interesting one. The average frame of a Pixar film takes approximately six hours to render, but can take as many as 90. At 24 frames per second, in a film lasting approximately 80 minutes, this equates to 28800 days worth of rendering! (Across hundreds of computers, of course) The world was introduced to the abilities of CGI’s use in feature length films, but was it ready to throw away traditional animation for fully computer drawn films?

Now, over a decade after Toy Story’s release, the answer is a resounding yes. It is extremely difficult to find a Hollywood movie that does not use CGI animation in one way or another in the 21^st century, whether it is using computer drawn backgrounds in fantasy films or special effects in blockbusters such as Transformers or Lord of the Rings. It has also been quite a while since a feature length, hand-drawn film was released. While not leaping into the realm of 3-D animation, the majority of animated cartoons on television have swapped from hand drawing their episodes to using computers to run the show.

While computers become stronger, software develops, and programmers create faster algorithms for rendering, CGI will continue to grow in popularity, and the rate of film release will increase substantially.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-generated_imagery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_CGI_in_movies

http://www.pixar.com/howwedoit/index.html#

Documentation on various little animation strategies used in recent Pixar films:

http://graphics.pixar.com/

Finally, a little spot for the professor:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/%7Edjames/research/index.html