In this post we discuss a very early use of computer animation in the mainstream, before the tsunami of computer animation we are all suffering from today, back when it was a novel and expensive choice. And we discuss how to appreciate the ancient motifs of those early days of animation. In other words, the particular piece we describe is filled with computer animation in jokes, as you will see.
It is part of the ancient history of
computer animation, back when it was an experimental and impractical
medium for entertainment and art, that the best way to see computer
animation was to attend the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference and see
the Electronic Theatre, which was originally shown on a few nights of
the conference only. Not only was this the best way, it was usually
the only way, as this is in the days before Youtube when computer animation was an acquired taste of eclectic
researchers and artists only.
Since the audience on those two or three nights of SIGGRAPH was essentially the entire audience for computer animation in
the world and everyone who attended, or almost everyone, was very
knowledgeable about computer animation, there had developed a
series of motifs that were either funny, or silly, or just mistakes,
that we all knew. For example, an early computer animation model
was a teapot that someone at the Univ of Utah cobbled together out of
patches to make a surface with a certain complexity. He modelled the
teapot by hand by typing in numbers into a text file, and that
teapot, that very same teapot, was used in a lot of papers and films.
So then, when some outsider from the
motion picture industry would slum with us and attend the Electronic Theatre, to find a way to exploit
the medium for their corrupt ends, they would walk away puzzled.
Why, they would ask, would a glass teapot dropping on a table and
shattering in slow motion be the cause of a standing ovation? "Why can't they do more films like the one with the lamp, you know, a funny film that doesn't have any ideas?"
But we were living in a fool's
paradise. Computer animation became more practical and more
accepted, and that led inevitably to the corruption and decay that
you see today.
The transition period between R&D
and mainstream production when 3D became both more practical and
controllable, as well as accepted by the motion picture and
television industries, and by the audience, was, arguably between
1991 and 1995. Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993)
established computer animation's respectability in visual effects and Toy
Story (1995) in animated features.
The piece we are going to discuss
premiered roughly three weeks before Toy Story, and thus was
produced before computer animation was considered to be real and
respectable in animation.
It was called "Homer 3",
where 3 is a superscript, which means Homer to the 3rd power. It was
for the seventh season of The Simpsons and their sixth episode of the
"Treehouse of Horror" Halloween special. In this episode,
Homer tries to escape from being subjected to his wife's relatives
and escapes behind a bookcase into a mysterious dimension, the 3rd
dimension. After being lost, and causing the destruction of that
universe, he is saved by Bart at the last minute and returned safely
to the 2nd dimension.
Homer notices his new 3D physique
Boy, this place looks expensive.
The computer animation was done at
Pacific Data Images (PDI) before they were acquired by Dreamworks
Feature Animation.
You can see a very bad dub of this
piece here:
Of the many homages to the SIGGRAPH
Electronics Theatre in this piece, here are the ones that stand out
to me:
1. The crazy, artificial, and
unrealistic camera move that goes nowhere.
2. The signpost that has an X, Y and Z
direction.
3. The use of the cone (and other
primitive objects, e.g. sphere and cube), a simple geometric object
used a lot in the early days of computer animation for all sorts of
things. The III logo (1) was a sphere, a cone, and a cube.
4. The emphasis on simple water and
fluid, fluid being a hard problem in computer animation and a lot of
various tests made it into the film show.
5. The implausible architecture and
Tron-like environment.
Professor Frink explains "The Third Dimension" and also demonstrates why translating 2D characters to 3D is a very tough problem. Imagine translating the Professor to 3D naively from this image, it would be grotesque.
6. Homer Simpson says "Boy, this place
looks expensive. I feel like I am spending a lot of money just
standing here". Which he was, computer animation used to charge
by the second (sometimes it still does), and it was both difficult
and expensive to just have a character on screen scratching his butt.
7. There are also some shading
artifacts on Homer's face that probably came from the simple shading
model. This may or may not have been intentional, and the artifacts
may or may not have been because Homer was modelled from polygons (I
am pretty sure he wasn't, but I am not positive). But it looked like
the artifacts we used to see all the time in the early days. If it
was intentional, it was a homage. But it was probably just
happenstance.
8. Homer asks if anyone back in the 2nd dimension saw the movie Tron. All but one say no, and he changes his story so as not to admit of seeing Tron.
I think PDI did an excellent job on something that was at the time a very prestigious piece indeed.
8. Homer asks if anyone back in the 2nd dimension saw the movie Tron. All but one say no, and he changes his story so as not to admit of seeing Tron.
I think PDI did an excellent job on something that was at the time a very prestigious piece indeed.
But the best thing that this piece has
going for it was not standard at the Electronic Theatre but is very common for the The Simpsons: it is very well written.
Treehouse of Horror VI on Wikipedia:
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1. III is Information International, Inc. This large company which is still in business and thriving, had an early computer animation group that used their film recorder technology, and worked on Tron. Many famous and important people either founded or worked at III. We will discuss III's adventure in "digital scene simulation" in another post.
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