Computer Animation In The Movies Essay Research

Computer Animation In The Movies Essay, Research Paper

The purpose of this report is to explorer the evolution of computer animation and how far it has come by representing its beginning and what has been done to create the animations we see on a daily basis. The computer graphic industry is still being developed and there is much more to come as technology advances.

Hollywood has gone digital, and the old ways of doing computer animation are dying. Television networks, advertisers, and movie studios have embraced animation and special effects created with computers. Film editors, who for decades worked by carefully cutting and gluing film segments together, now sit in front of computer screens. There, they edit features while adding sound created and manipulated with computers (Baker 2). Moviegoers are experiencing sights and sounds they never dreamed of. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of all this, the digital effects and animation industry is still in its infancy.

Background

In the beginning, computer graphics were cumbersome and hard to control. The huge and awkward hardware systems, (or muscles,) of early computer graphics often filled entire buildings. Software programs, (or brains of computer graphics), were hopelessly underdeveloped (Baker 2). Fortunately the evolution of brains and brawn were pumped up in only three decades. (Hirsch 5)

Imagine sitting at a computer without visual feedback on a monitor. The only way to interact with a computer at that time was through toggle switches, flashing lights, punchcards, and tele-type printouts (Hirsch 5).

In 1962, this began to change. Ivan Sutherland, a Ph.D. student at MIT, created the science of computer graphics (Hirsch 5). For his dissertation, he wrote a program called Sketchpad that allowed him to draw lines of light directly on a cathode ray tube (CRT), which is shown in figure1.

Figure 1: Ivan Sutherland at the console of the TX-2 Sketchpad

Source: http://www.sun.com/960710/feature3/sketchpad.html

The results were simple and primitive: a cube, a series of lines, and groups of geometric shapes, but his simple results offered an entirely new vision on how computers could be used.

In 1964, Sutherland teamed up with Dr. David Evans at the University of Utah to develop the world’s first academic computer graphics department (Hirsch 6). Their goal was to attract only the most gifted students by creating a unique department that combined hard science with the creative arts. They knew they were starting a brand new industry and wanted people who would be able to lead that industry out of its infancy.

Out of this unique department, a basic understanding of computer graphics began to grow. Algorithms for the creation of solid objects, their modeling, lighting, and shading were developed. Everything from desktop publishing to virtual reality find their beginnings in the basic research that came out of the University of Utah in the 60’s and 70’s.

In 1968 Evans and Sutherland also launched the first computer graphics company, Evans & Sutherland (E&S). It rolled out its first computer graphics systems in 1969 (Sloss 2). Up until this time, the only computers available that could create pictures were custom-designed for the military and prohibitively expensive. E&S’s computer system could draw wireframe images extremely rapidly, making it the first commercial “workstation” created for computer-aided design (CAD). It found its earliest customers in both the automotive and aerospace industries (Sloss 3).

In its early years, the University of Utah’s Computer Science Department received a series of research grants from the Department of Defense. The 1970’s, with its anti-war and anti-military protests, brought increasing restriction on the flows of academic grants, which had a direct impact on the Utah department’s ability to carry out research (Baker 6). Fortunately, as the program wound down, Dr. Alexander Schure stepped forward with his dream of creating computer-animated feature films. (Hirsch 6)

Schure created New York Institute of Technology and hired Edwin Catmull, a University of Utah Ph.D., to head the NYIT computer graphics lab and then equipped the lab with the best computer graphics hardware available at that time. When completed, the lab boasted over $2 million worth of equipment. Many of the staff came from the University of Utah and were given free reign to develop both two- and three-dimensional computer graphics tools. Their goal was to produce a full-length computer animated feature film. The effort, which began in 1973, produced dozens of research papers and hundreds of new discoveries. In the end, it was far too early for such a complex undertaking. The computers of that time were simply too expensive and too underpowered, and the software not nearly developed enough. (In fact, the first full-length computer generated feature film was not to be completed until as recently as 1995.) By 1978, Schure could no longer justify funding such an expensive effort, and the lab’s funding was cut back. The ironic thing is that had the Institute decided to patent many more of its researcher’s discoveries than it did, it would control much of the technology in use today. Fortunately for the computer industry as a whole, however, this did not happen. Instead, research was made available to whoever