i didn't think TRON was that great =(. even if i saw it in the 80's. the conept is interesting, but the execution (even given limitations of technology). i'd rather it not be done then. yesh, i realize that it needed to start SOMEWHERE and progress to a point that we're in today... but still, didn't like that film much.

meanwhile, re: matrix, i loved matrix revolution. the rain fx are amazing

the thing about tron is that it's the porcess that blows me away. I like the movie and luckly saw it in the thearters.

Now I can honestly say The last star fighter reallly takes the cake. I know that i has ega graphics (just joking). What it is about that movie is that all the space stuff is kept the same. So theres no real mix and match od real life to computer.

Also Dragonslayer which as far as I can tell is the movie which gets dragons right

The original: Dawn of the Dead.... need I say more?

Ha ha, you're right! I just looked up the movie poster online, and sure enough, here come the Apaches...

Only problem is, there are no Apache copters in the entire movie.

Oh well, great dragon effects nonethless.

You know, when I picked up The Last Starfighter DVD on a whim from our library I had no idea it was the first movie to ever attempt photo realistic CGI (Tron takes the honors for the first CGI, but it was used to simulate computer innards from what I understand. In other words, pretty much simple geometric shapes, which were much easier than the complex imagery required for The Last Starfighter).

I tell you, seeing the The Last Starfighter really makes one appreciate how far CGI has come. If you can believe it, the relatively simple (by today's standards) The Last Starfighter CGI effects brought a CRAY supercomputer to its knees.

actually westworld had the first cg, well soem of the shots were altered a bit by a computer. But Tron is the first big screen full blown cg sequencies I know of.

Actually now that I think of it i'm not to sure if last star fighter was the way it was because of technoligy. If we look at the movie and think about it, I think we can say it looked the way it did because it was spose to be a video game. Thats how the starfighters were recurited. SOi the space sequences were a representation of the game in look and feel. Looking back on it i think it is all stylistic, which makes it all the more cooler. (Hollywood certainly had the skills to do the movie with models)

Interesting. I didn't know that.

That's not what I understood about the effects. It's been a little while since I watched the behind the scenes featurette, but I understood they were trying to be realistic (of course I could have misunderstood.) It sounded like they had the choice to use either traditional models or CGI for the effects. There was doubt it could be pulled off with CGI. Nobody had attempted to do it realistically before. But they ultimately received the go ahead for CGI. If you notice, a few CGI scenes come off almost realistic looking (the Starfighters parked underground, for instance). I believe the fact that many of the CGI shots had the look of video games was the simple reason that they lacked the computer power and time for more complex (and thus realistic) renderings.

A good many rendering technologies were invented for that movie. So it was pioneering for the field of computer grahics. I don't think there was any hope at the time that it could be called photorealistic, only before that movie they didn't even have the math available to approach the task of matching realistic lighting. It was also innovative in animation, laying the groundwork in flocking large numbers of ships.

How true. When someone figured out how to, say, insert two lights in a scene (something that could never be done before then) there would quite a lot of excitement. That kept happening over and over again as they progressively figured out how to do more and more. It was indeed a movie that pioneered many of the basics of CGI that we now take for granted.

They told a story about how they showed a space ship animation of a maneuver that was impossible with traditional effects to some Hollywood big shots, and nobody seemed the least bit excited. They failed to grasp how pioneering it was.