
Westworld (1973): the first film with CGI, and its source code (2017) [video] - jgrahamc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzvbAm0y8YQ
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NelsonMinar
Fun rabbit hole here about the III FR80, the computer used to make the
effects. 1970s computer that could scan and print to film stock. There's a
great website that's preserved a lot of info on this computer here:
[http://www.chilton-
computing.org.uk/acl/technology/fr80/over...](http://www.chilton-
computing.org.uk/acl/technology/fr80/overview.htm)

III (or Triple-I) was a computer company founded by Edward Fredkin. He's a
fascinating early computer scientist, doing pioneering work in cellular
automata, reversible computing, as well as more mundane things like the trie
data structure.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin)

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MarkMMullin
ZOMG - a brain neuron from decades ago woke up - worked on some weird stuff in
reversible computing in the '80s (think of assignment always preserving
functional state at assignment) - my boss used to talk about his gates,
usually referring to them by a more profane name . :-)

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NelsonMinar
I've wondered if reversible computing research has had any real world impact.
The theory is it would reduce heat since you're not increasing entropy, but I
wonder in practice if that has ever been useful.

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MarkMMullin
All the experience I had was theorem proving for crypto apps - that said, I
think there is only the appearance of reversibility at the symbolic level,
underneath its the same old mess - I vaguely recall that at full tilt, the
room with all the Suns would get quite toasty . :-)

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Causality1
The first film with computer generated imagery would be 1958's Vertigo, and
the computer in question an M5 gun director mechanical computer.

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ttctciyf
The title sequence, created by John Whitney, right?

His brother James' 1966 abstract piece 'Lapis' is a favourite of mine, created
using John Whitney's analog computer tech. There's a version on youtube[1]
sadly only 480p, which gives you an idea, but if you see it projected it's
just amazing..

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzniaKxMr2g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzniaKxMr2g)

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anfractuosity
Very interesting!

I'd always thought Tron was the film with the first CGI, I've just been
reading [https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/history-
cgi/](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/history-cgi/) apparently it
wasn't the first film to use 3D CGI either. Although Tron did make extensive
use of 3D CGI.

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vidarh
Tron was noteworthy for the sheer amount of CGI mostly.

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phire
Also noteworthy for being the first film to market itself as a "CGI film"

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Zod666
Aslo noteworthy that Tron was not nominated for special effects because they
'cheated' by using computers.

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zxcvbn4038
Anyone remember Max Headroom? I did not realize until a few years ago how much
of that was done with fiberglass prosthetics and makeup.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(character)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_\(character\))
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2015/4/2/8322327/max-
headroom-photo-gallery-makeup-design)

~~~
goto11
I love the era of people making practical effects to look like computer
graphics. The Hitchhikers Guide tv-show also had hand-drawn animation which
was supposed to look like computer graphics.

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KineticLensman
Also the 1979 orbital insertion graphics display [0] in Alien.

[0]
[https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/](https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/)

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notaplumber
That's interesting! But by golly, was 1973's Westworld a chore to sit through.
The remake has the technology and a compelling story.

~~~
zxcvbn4038
I wasn’t as impressed by the remake, thought it was pretty obvious the writers
ran out of source material after the first season. It’s one of those stories
that would have worked as an episode of Black Mirror, and you could stretch it
out to a movie format, but don’t think it lends itself multiple seasons of
hour long episodes. Remember the 70s tv spinoff Beyond Westworld? Don’t feel
bad if you don’t.

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WorldMaker
The second season was directly teased from the first season. (I called a lot
of the reveals of the second season assuming they'd be twists in the first
season.) The problem with the writing in the second season was assuming enough
people had read at least the Wikipedia summaries of the primary references
they had cited directly and indirectly in the first season. Which is a tricky
problem with "mystery box" writing in that you assume at least some of the
audience will do the research, but you have to keep the show accessible enough
for the people following the show but not the mystery solving / ancillary
materials.

So far the promos for S3 make it sound a lot more straightforward with less
"required reading", but we'll see.

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nonfamous
Surely this would have been easier to recreate with practical effects? You can
get the same pixelated effect looking through translucent privacy door
screens.

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simonh
Westworld wasn't just a fantasy, they were doing 'real' science fiction in
that they were saying look, this is happening. Here's what computers can do
right now.

There are plenty of examples of faked CGI back in the day. As has been pointed
out, alongside some CGI TRON had a lot of hand drawn cell animation. The 'wire
frame' of the skyscrapers in Escape From New York was done by building it with
black painted models, edged with neon strips. In both cases it is possible to
tell.

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peter303
My lab purchased a digital color frame buffer in 1980 for 30K. That would be
around 150K in current prices. It had a screen buffer of 512 by 512 of one
byte, i.e. quarter megabyte memory. It was dual port- write to memory, read
onto display. Memory price was the bottle neck then. Four years after that the
Apple Mac came out with 1/8 megabyte B/W memory for $3K, e.g. arguably the
first consumer graphics computer. Again its price was memory bound.

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close04
One comment from 2 years ago is "Awesome.. I posted this video on Hacker news
today!".

~~~
metaphor
Sure enough:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14348085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14348085)

Posted by John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare CTO.

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glandium
This channel is full of interesting content. It's sad it didn't last very long
(something like 4 months between the channel creation and the last video).

~~~
jgrahamc
I just didn't have that time to keep making these videos. The research alone
took a huge amount of work and then there was writing the script, recording,
editing and finally fighting YouTube's copyright mechanism that won't
recognize what I'm doing as fair use.

Also, being Cloudflare's CTO is time consuming.

~~~
technofiend
Thank you for doing what you did!

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WalterBright
Ironically, not 2001. 2001 animated the computer displays onto film, and then
pasted the film into the scene.

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Isamu
The computer displays were showing films, yes. It is unclear to me that the
wireframe animations were not computer generated, I always thought they were.

That is, for the wireframe animations when a ship is docking, I always thought
that the animation was in fact a film of a series of discrete computer
generated vector images, maybe displayed on a CRT and frame-by-frame stop-
motion animated. It looks like that to me, and the tech was clearly available
at the time.

Maybe they were drawn by hand and not CRT vector images, but if so they went
out of their way to simulate it. I guess I wouldn't put it past Stanley.

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phire
For Escape from New York (1981), it was cheaper to build a New York skyline
set, paint it black and then paint all the edges white and film it, than
create CGI wireframe graphics.

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dhritzkiv
Yep. Here's an article with several photos of the artists constructing the
physical set:
[http://www.theefnylapage.com/pressexclusiveinterviewsjohncwa...](http://www.theefnylapage.com/pressexclusiveinterviewsjohncwash.htm)

