The first movie to use 2D CGI was 'West World' in 1973. Each frame of footage was color-separated and scanned so it could be converted into rectangular blocks, then colour was added to make a coarse pixel matrix that could be output back to film. Presto, infra-red androidvision. 

 

Westworld was not just influential, it also inspired a sequel. Futureworld (1976), in which more terror droids are unleashed, this time into a Crystal Maze-like future zone, gave Triple-I the chance to push the CG boundaries even further. This time they gave audiences a first glimpse of 3D. No whizzy glasses were required to see Peter Fonda’s head and hand rendered into three dimensions – only a few seconds of the Fonda bonce actually appeared in the film – but creating the images was a seriously painstaking process. Their hard work was recognised by the Oscars a decade later with a Scientific & Engineering Academy Award. 

 

3D vector graphics were first seen in Star Wars IV, and were born in Chicago. That was thanks largely to computer animator Larry Cuba who toiled away for months on the city’s University of Illinois campus to match George Lucas’ idea for the pre-Death Star attack briefing. What he came up with was a wireframe mock-up the Empire’s moon-shaped HQ.

 

Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi was seminal because it didn’t so much push back the boundaries of CGI as ramraid them with a light cycle, and it did it using a computer that boasted 2Mb of memory. To put into context, that’s about 1/2000th of the capacity of your average PC. Despite the constraints Lisberger and co. were working with, they conjured entire CG sequences in Tron World, more than a quarter of an hour’s worth of digital effects in total, including the 3D light cycle race. Both Tron and The Last Starfighter were the first two films to make heavy investments in CGI but were both commercial failures. 

 

Photorealistic CGI did not win over the motion picture industry until The Abyss, which won The Academy Award for Visual Effects in 1989. To create cinema’s first CG computer water effects, The Abyss’ worm-like subsea pseudopod, effects guru Phil Tippett pointed James Cameron towards George Lucas’ ILM. Work on the 75 second sequence was ultimately divvyed up between seven different FX houses, with ILM taking on the bulk of the work and designing a program that could simulate the watery beast-tube-thing with incredible realism. The whole process took more than six months – the set had to be photographed from every angle so the effects could be composited onto the live-action.

 

 

 

This film was the Academy Award winner for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, defeating Alien 3 (1992) and Batman Returns (1992). Computer generated imagery (CGI) by Industrial Light and Magic was used to create the skin effects, such as Madeline's twisted neck and stretching skin, and the shotgun hole through Helen's abdomen.

 

The Matrix, 1999,  is essentially a synthesis of several pre-existing techniques and effects, The Matrix’s use of bullet-time nevertheless stopped Hollywood in its tracks, as if its like had never been seen before. To all intents and purposes it hadn’t, although designer John Gaeta credits John Woo, Katsuhiro Otomo and Michel Gondry as important predecessors. The process drops the onscreen action into slow-motion as the camera rotates around the actors, combining mo-cap technology and multiple stationary cameras firing in sequence.

 

This 2001 film had the first use of AI for digital effects. This software package allowed thousands, and with enough processing power even millions, of individual agents in the programme to act independently, so that you can create huge orc armies, say, that will fight within set perameters. It means that you can be pretty sure that your soldiers will respond to their environment and each other in a realistic way, rather than running into one another and stopping like characters in a bad video game.

 

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) was the first feature film ever to place real actors entirely against virtual, blue-screen, digital “sets” (bar a single scene in an office, shot with actual props due to time constraints). Animatics of the whole film were shot with stand-in actors before principal photography took place. Shot in digital HD, it was churned through Macs running Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

 

http://www.empireonline.com/features/movie-special-effects-milestones/p10 [online] [Accessed: November 7th 2014]