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  • 2021-05-14 (xsd:date)
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  • What Was the First Full CGI Character? (en)
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  • On May 13, 2021, comedian Paul Scheer and movie critic Amy Nicholson dissected the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest on an episode of the podcast Unspooled. As the conversation bounced around between the importance of fandoms, Star Trek trivia, and acting abilities of the movie's star Tim Allen, Scheer dropped a piece of movie knowledge while talking about the computer generated images (CGI) in Galaxy Quest: The Unspooled host said: Scheer's hesitation when relaying this factoid about CGI — defined by Studio Binder as the use of computer graphics to augment or create images in art and media — was warranted. Although Jar Jar Binks, who was created by George Lucas and his company Industrial Light and Magic, was one of the first CGI characters to receive major screen time in a movie, the first full CGI character actually appeared years earlier in the 1985 movie The Young Sherlock Holmes. That character, a knight made out of a stained glass window, was also created by Lucas' company: Filmsite.org writes that this stained glass knight is regarded as the first fully 3-D digital (or CGI), or computer generated, photorealistic animated character in a full-length feature film. It was also the first computer-animated character to be scanned and painted directly onto film using a laser. According to SyFy, it took animator John Lasseter and the LucasFilm Graphics Group (which would later become Pixar) at ILM about 6 months to create this digital swordsman. Here's a video of Young Sherlock Holmes director Christopher Columbus and animator John Lasseter talking about this CGI knight during a 1986 episode of the BBC's movie review show Film... with critic Barry Norman: Honoring the first CGI character is a bit of a difficult task because it depends a bit on the definition used. In the 1981 movie Looker, for example, a CGI rendering of a human woman appeared. However, this person did not move or talk, only appeared on a screen inside the movie, and can't accurately be described as character. In 1982, the CGI character Bit appeared in the movie Tron, but Bit was merely a 3-dimensional shape, not a human-like figure. If you loosen this definition, you could trace for the first computer generated images back to the 1960s when Soviet mathematician created Kitty: If you tighten this definition, you could say that Jar Jar Binks was the first full CGI character with a major role in feature film. You can see some behind-the-scenes footage of the making of Jar Jar Binks in the following video. (One relevant section appears starts at the 40:10 mark): While there's some debate as to what constitutes a full CGI character in a movie, there's no argument that George Lucas and ILM helped pave the way for special FX in movies. Time Magazine wrote in 2010: While this episode of Unspooled gave us a nice excuse to dive into the history of CGI, the episode ended with another call for a fact check. When Nicholson relayed a story from actor Alan Rickman about how Tim Allen was a jerk on the set of Galaxy Quest, saying that he would kick in the doors of the makeup trailer to boast that he was number one on the call sheet, Scheer labeled the late actor Rickman a liar, since makeup trailer doors open outward, not inward. Rickman, however, is not a liar, and Nicholson is not entirely correct. This anecdote comes from the DVD commentary of Galaxy Quest. The story apparently originated with co-star Sam Rockwell, not Rickman, who was agreeing with Allen's assessment that he was purposefully being a jerk on the set. CheatSheet.com recounted the anecdote in a 2019 article: (en)
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