Interesting Movie Facts

The first feature film to use digital image processing was Westworld, in 1973--the same year as the first SIGGRAPH conference. John Whitney Jr. and Gary Demos at Information International Inc. (III; aka "Triple I") provided digitally processed, pixellated versions of motion photography to portray an android point of view. The same group used digital compositing to materialize characters over a background in the 1976 sequel, Futureworld. These efforts were recognized with a Scientific & Engineering Academy Award in 1994.

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In 1977 Star Wars used what was probably the first example of 3D computer graphics in film, albeit in the form of vector or wireframe, rather than shaded, imagery. Larry Cuba, in what was then called the Circle Graphics Habitat (now the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, or EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, created a 3D wireframe view of the trench of the Death Star that was used to train rebel pilots. This film also featured a rare example of analog 3D computer graphics--a very brief, false color image of the Deathstar emerging from behind a planet--created using the Scanimate system.

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The first feature film to use shaded 3D computer graphics imagery, rendered in the style used today, was 1981's Looker. Polygonal models obtained by digitizing a human body were used to render the effects, which were again created at III. After working on the effects for Looker, John Whitney Jr. and Gary Demos were instrumental in the pitching and preproduction of the next big CGI film, Tron, but left III before its production to form Digital Productions.