Career Image

"The line between real and not real will become more and more blurred." - Pat Byrne.

In his description of the career discourse portion of the mystory in his work "Internet Invention", Gregory Ulmer writes "you are considering the material in terms of your identification with it" (22) and that "it consist of details, particulars (both textual and graphic) accessible to the senses and imagination" (23) rather than a traditional argument oriented research position. In that sense, I poked around in my memory for a significant moment in the history of my field that I identified with strongly. It was not long before I landed on the advent of the computer generated image in cinema to stand at the center of my personal career discourse, with the details I found significant as I was researching the topic included on this page. I was born in the mid 1980s, just in time to be brought up in a world that was becoming relatively saturated with computer generated images yet not old enough to see them come into being. Thus when I did see them they held their magic, woven into the very fabric of my childhood and identity.

Computer Generated images have been around since the 1950s, first used by Boeing (who coined the term 'CG') to create "high-resolution images for flight simulators". This idea was taken to its next iteration by Ivan Sutherland, a Ph.D student at MIT in 1962 who, for his dissertation, created a computer program called 'Sketchpad' that he then used to "animate three-dimensional images by drawing lines directly onto a cathode ray tube with a light pen". Sutherland would later found the company that created the first wireframes, "line-based polygonal drawings that provide the foundation of all three-dimensional computer animation".

However, these early wireframes required so much space from the computers at the time that the effects they generated were  not used for more than demonstrating high-resolution two dimensional images on a computer screen within the cinematic world. The first instance of three-dimensional computer animation in a film comes from Edwin Catmull. I was amazed to discover that it was Catmull who was one of these early CG pioneers because he would later become one of the founding members of Pixar Animation Studios, another major figure in my life as it is the work of this studio that was the focus of my Master's Thesis and a large part of my Ph.D work.  In the film  Futureworld (1976) Catmull helped design a CG hand. I found this particularly interesting because my first film appearance in college was as a hand, entering the frame to deliver a newspaper to one of the characters. Based on this work George Lucas would hire Catmull to head the computer component of Industrial Light and Magic. While working at ILM Catmull produced the "Genesis Effect" in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), using "the first digital matte painting and new computer-graphics algorithms to generate fire, mountains and shoreline from fractal equations."



While these details of early CG animation fascinated me, they were slightly before my time (being born in 1984). My experience with CG animation begins with Disney's Tron in 1982. While this came out before I was born the VHS version of this film was a regular staple in my home growing up and is now considered the single breakthrough film for CG animation. From here CG animation continued to expand, with The Last Starfighter (another childhood favorite) demonstrating that CG "could not only be used to create photorealistic simulations cost effectively, but that it could do so more efficiently and less expensively than the same scenes played out in real time".

At this point, James Cameron's Abyss (1989) provided a major leap forward in the development of the medium in the creation of the 'pseudopod' water creature for the film. The creature is meant to be made entirely of water, yet water that moves and is manipulated as if under the control of an intelligence. This film introduced the 'digital set', or "a completely malleable digital environment within which the animator can control such variables as lighting, camera position and movement..." (886). I distinctly remember watching the abyss as a boy, marveling at the way the pseudopod moved through the environment and mimicked the actor's faces. I would watch and re-watch the movie just for those scenes of the pseudopod moving through the underwater laboratory. The creature was so otherworldly yet looked so real, as if the water in my sink that night could just slither out of the bowl and mimic my face. I still remember the shock I felt at the end of the film when the ships rise to the surface and it is discovered that we, in fact, are more alien to the planet than they. 

Michael Allen has an interesting observation on The Abyss. He writes that at this early stage of CG development "the screen time for each CGI shot is enough to register each effect, but not usually long enough to scrutinize it fully" (826). According to Allen early filmmakers did not let these CG images linger because the audience might 'see through' to their artificial nature. It was not until a later film, and a link to my entertainment discourse, that the CG images were left on screen long enough for audiences to not only scrutinize them but marvel at their awesome photo reality. This, then, is my career image- the slithering pseudopod, my first real exposure to CG technologies, mimicking my own reaction as I stared at it's fleeting glimpses in wonder and hoped to see myself reflected in its surface.