Essay About Stone Age And Special Effects

Information Systems
Information Systems
IS 490
SPECIAL TOPICS
Computer Graphics
May 6, 1996
Table of Contents
Introduction
How It Was
How It All Began
Times Were Changing
Industrys First Attempts
The Second Wave
How the Magic is Made
Modeling
Animation
Rendering
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
Hollywood has gone digital, and the old ways of doing things are dying.
Animation and
special effects created with computers have been embraced by television
networks,
advertisers, and movie studios alike. Film editors, who for decades
worked by painstakingly
cutting and gluing film segments together, are now sitting in front of
computer screens.
There, they edit entire features while adding sound that is not only
stored digitally, but
also has been created and manipulated with computers. Viewers are
witnessing the results of
all this in the form of stories and experiences that they never dreamed
of before. Perhaps
the most surprising aspect of all this, however, is that the entire
digital effects and
animation industry is still in its infancy. The future looks bright.
How It Was
In the beginning, computer graphics were as cumbersome and as hard to
control as dinosaurs
must have been in their own time. Like dinosaurs, the hardware systems,
or muscles, of
early computer graphics were huge and ungainly. The machines often
filled entire buildings.
Also like dinosaurs, the software programs or brains of computer
graphics were hopelessly
underdeveloped. Fortunately for the visual arts, the evolution of both
brains and brawn of
computer graphics did not take eons to develop. It has, instead, taken
only three decades
to move from science fiction to current technological trends. With
computers out of the
stone age, we have moved into the leading edge of the silicon era.
Imagine sitting at a
computer without any visual feedback on a monitor. There would be no
spreadsheets, no word
processors, not even simple games like solitaire. This is what it was
like in the early
days of computers. The only way to interact with a computer at that
time was through toggle
switches, flashing lights, punchcards, and Teletype printouts. How It
All Began
In 1962, all this began to change. In that year, Ivan Sutherland, a
Ph.D.