Animation History: Evolution of CGI

It's a new school year and I have moved out of E9 and into Exploring Animation. This week we looked into the history of animation and how we got to where we are today. We viewed some old animations and identified what kind of animation it was: Cel Animation, 3D Animation, stop motion, 2D animation, etc. Then we got to research anything about the history of animation, I looked into the evolution of CGI.

I viewed this video, A History of CGI Characters - DOCUMENTARY:

It talks about how crazy creatures in movies used to be done with stop motion and puppets like in King Kong (1933). Then, in 1985, the first photo real computer generated character was created as the Stained Glass Knight in Young Sherlock Holmes. In 1989 Photoshop was used for the first time in a full length film to help create the water tentacle in The Abyss. It took six months to finish, but the movie won an academy award for the visual effects. Jurassic Park in 1993 broke new ground with the photo real dinosaurs including bones and textures, they used a dinosaur input device that would convert the movements they made into keyframes. In 1995, Casper the Friendly Ghost became the first computer animated character. In the same year, Toy Story came out becoming the first fully computer animated feature length film. Overall, the video is a timeline that effectively shows the progression we have made in film technology in the last 76 years, it is truly incredible. The video ends with Avatar from 2009 which is 60% computer-animated and 40% live action according to the director, James Cameron. This video is really interesting because it shows that hard work does pay off.