The first movie with CGI

Key Takeaways

both of these images are groundbreaking and they're connected on the Left you've got the world through Yul Brynner's eyes in West world be 1973 movie where he plays a robot cowboy this is not a spoiler I mean he's a robot on the poster and if you've seen the HBO series you know that everything is a robot it's this pixelated robots eye view that gave birth to CGI computer-generated imagery but the technique and idea did not come from Hollywood it came from a bit further away this is a picture of Mars the CGI in the original Westworld was groundbreaking so now we're going to see if we can get our computer graphics team to replicate it oh yeah I'm done takes like two clicks but in the early 1970s computers this powerful were non-existent and digital images were rare these title swirls in 1958 vertigo were sort of computer-generated imagery the designer repurposed in m5 anti-aircraft guns mechanical computer to help draw these intricate patterns other experiments were digital but they were basically art films after all non CGI effects could generate stunning results [Music] still Westworld creator michael crichton wanted to create a robots point of view hollywood hadn't done it yet but nasa had NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Mariner 4 it was the first flyby of Mars and it transmitted back the first up-close photographs of the planet the method it used to get those images back to earth was important for two reasons it shaped what a digital picture should look like and it gave technical guidance for the west-world CGI the pictures were sent back as numbers 240,000 bits of binary code representing the shading the forty thousand dots that will finally make up the first picture a complex system of computers is required to convert these numbers into pictures some workers decide to hand make their own picture of Mars by hating the numbers yes our first up-close picture of Mars it was a paint-by-numbers ultimately the computer generated images ended up looking like these in the 1973 cover story of American cinematographer Westworld designer john whitney jr wrote that the scanning digitizing methods employed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory on their Mariner Mars flybys could be used here but using the rare computer at the lab would have cost 100 grand they found a private company to basically copy the Jet Propulsion labs methods to scan production footage frame by frame and convert it to numerical information which would then be played back on a special machine INRI recording to make the perfect robot vision the designers use data that created an image with 3,600 squares and they had to get creative to make sure the cgi action came through clearly actors wore clothing to contrast with the background here's one wearing white clothing and makeup they also increased the contrast in post-production and though it took a full minute to scan each frame or about eight hours for a 10 second sequence the CGI worked Hollywood couldn't have sorry can you just stop Hollywood couldn't have come up with this idea alone it took the Rd from the five hundred fifty million dollar Mariner program to inspire something as fanciful as CGI especially when practical effects could have gotten the job done but it was the future Whitney finished that article for American cinematographer by saying my work on Westworld suggested many more possibilities than we were able to explore and there are certainly many others yet to be imagined a so this edition of almanacs all about big changes to the movies that came from outside of Hollywood so if you know of any other sciency type innovations like what you just saw that changed movies let me know in the comments there's a lot out there however I cannot in this video without letting you know about future world it is the sort of Forgotten sequel to West's world but the CGI is actually still influential and that's because it's likely this source of the first 3d CGI face