Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!ut-sally!utah-cs!thomson
From: thomson@utah-cs.UUCP (Richard A Thomson)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: the Computer Animation show
Message-ID: <5264@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: 14 Feb 88 20:46:21 GMT
References: <457@mv03.ecf.toronto.edu> <1676@desint.UUCP> <5242@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: thomson@cs.utah.edu.UUCP (Richard A Thomson)
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 27

In article <5242@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) writes:
>In article <1676@desint.UUCP> geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) writes:
>>To me, plot and humor are much more important than ray-tracing.
>>
>	Well said.  I'm getting tired of seeing steel spheres and metallic
>Monday Night Football logos myself, too.

Here, here!  This is exactly what I was saying to my friend as we left the
theatre after seeing the Computer Animation Festival by Expanded Entertainment.
(I think this is probably what you saw).  In addition to Dance of the Stumblers
there was a film on the old prince charming turned into frog fairy tale.  This
was obviously done on a low-resolution computer, with very primitive animation
capabilities, but the use of the graphics was only PART of the film.  The
dialogue, voices and humor were what made the film great.  A professor here
seemed stunned when I told him that Dance of the Stumblers was shown in the
animation collection at the Park City Film Festival and that it was down
on an Amiga.  His reaction was "On an Amiga?!?!?", as if you needed a cray
ray-tracing 72 spheres with transparency to be able to express yourself.

I'm getting the impression that computer graphics for film-making is just in
its infancy, and we really haven't figured out how to use it yet.  Remember
it took them 20 years to figure out that with motion pictures, you could
MOVE the camera.  All the original movies just shot from 5th row, center.

We need to figure out how to ``move the camera'' in computer graphics or
people will soon tire of all the ray-traced spheres and chrome people.
						Rich Thomson