Tuesday 14 October 2014

Star Trek's early CGI

We're all familiar with computer generated imagery these days, and Star Trek has often been a pioneer of the art-form. The videos below are extracts from a 1987 Open University documentary on computer aided design, which used the earliest examples of CGI in Star Trek, and indeed in cinema history, to examine the use of computer design.

This first video looks at the dream sequence from The Voyager Home, including how the computer graphics team from at ILM, which would eventually become Pixar, digitised the faces of the HMS Bounty crew:



This second clip looks at the Genesis sequence from The Wrath of Khan, a significant moment in cinema history, as this was the first ever entirely CGI sequence in a film:



Both of these videos were uploaded by egregiousdave, who transferred them from cassette recordings he took when they were broadcast! I came across them thanks to Christopher Backa, who posted them on TrekFM's Facebook group, The Babel Conference.


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