![]() In the mid-2000s, as computing power and memory grew, animators could add complex textures and control hundreds of points on a figure via Geppetto, and with increased efficiency. By placing CGI creatures in an identifiably real environment, Disney had created the standard for the ambitions of many science-fiction and fantasy films in the following years, including The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter franchises. As all characters were dinosaurs, and therefore did not interact with human actors, there was no need to have “stand-ins” when the crew filmed the real-world backgrounds and environments. In the same year, Disney released Dinosaur, which was the first feature to place CGI animals against live-action backgrounds (Thompson and Bordwell). ![]() From this statistic alone, the need for improved efficiency is evident. For a 90-minute film, that is 7.8 million frames to be rendered individually. The film industry standard is 24 frames per second, and prior to the Geppetto system, artists created characters and rendered them frame by frame. Not only did Geppetto ensure that a given character would always move in the same manner, it also dramatically increased the efficiency of computer-generated imagery production. The animators would identify points on the characters’ figures that they could control, and the rest of the figure would follow, thereby creating movement, much like the strings of a puppet. Like its puppet-master namesake, the Geppetto system allowed animators to control their digital creations like puppets. ![]() Lucasfilm shortly thereafter spun off LCDD as Pixar, and the company exclusively used CGI animation in all of its short and feature film productions.īy 2000, Pixar had created the “Geppetto” system of digital character control. He leveraged technology developed by LCDD in 1982’s TRON, which consisted of 15 minutes of pure CGI and 25 minutes of mixed CGI and live action (Thompson and Bordwell). The first step away from practical effects and toward CGI came in 1978, when George Lucas founded Lucasfilm Computer Development Division (LCDD) to develop digital applications in filmmaking. Chewbacca from Star Wars), or an artist would create a puppet manned by an out-of-shot puppeteer (e.g. If a character aged through the course of the film, the age effect was achieved through makeup if a character were non-human, an actor would either wear some combination of costume, makeup, and prosthetics to give a non-human impression (e.g. Prior to CGI, all visual effects for live-action productions were “practical effects.” Practical effects consist of makeup, prosthetics, miniature modeling, or any other physical properties that the camera shoots in synchronicity with the actor’s performance. On a fundamental level, CGI is self-descriptive: it is any imagery rendered on screen through the aid of a digital generation system. Of these three, CGI is the most foundational technology for the current state of production. To understand how these technological advancements and their artistic applications in recent years are disrupting the industry, there are three key technologies that must be understood and disambiguated: computer-generated imagery (CGI), motion capture, and holograms. Though the fundamentals of these technologies have been in use for some time, the recent advancements in the technology and-perhaps even more importantly-their new applications have begun to disrupt the film industry. Not only can directors raise beloved actors from the dead, they can also have their lead actors age (or de-age) forty years, all with a degree of artistry and precision that retains audience believability. The use of CGI has reached a point in both cost and artistry that the computer-generated or digitally-altered character is for the first time being used outside of the science-fiction and animated genres with some regularity. This ubiquity is due to enhanced computing power and higher resolutions coupled with increasingly lower costs. Over the past twenty years, computer-generated imagery has become nearly ubiquitous in film and television productions. Continue reading here to learn about holograms and how the technology is being used in the arts.
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