Atari Connection cover, direct eye contact photo
In the spring of 1984, #AtariConnection published a story about the new #LucasfilmGames group... We all wore our silver #ComputerDivision bowling jackets and posed in front of some #StarWars models and creatures. From left to right in first photo: Dave Levine, Peter Langston, Gary Winnick, David Fox, and Charlie Kellner. My wife just found another photo from that shoot, must have been taken by a #Lucasfilm PR person. First time published!
Hard for me to believe this was 38 years ago!
"10 Tips" article, direct eye contact in photo
Here's a scan of the actual article, "Ten Tips from the Programming Pros" from this issue of #AtariConnection. I'm pretty sure this was NOT our title. They just asked for some pointers. I think this article may have done more to turn people off to Lucasfilm Games than anything, and maybe set the stage for people thinking we were full of ourselves. Still, a fun read, and some good points. #Atari #retrocomputing #LucasfilmGames
I still have my #Lucasfilm Computer Division bowling jacket. Mostly still fits. #LucasfilmGames was originally a group within this division.
@DavidBFox so cool.
Wasn't what later became Pixar a subdivision of Lucas Film either? If I'm not mistaken Lucas hired Ed Catmull to start it when he was aware of the potencial of computer graphics when the hardware started to allow it. The only previous mainstream CG film was Tron, and those CGs didn't have a UI to be created, so the numbers needed to be entered manually AFAIK. If I'm not mistaken either the 1st Luca's mainstream film with CG was Willow where the first Morph was created.
@yomismo @DavidBFox Willow was the first motion picture CG morph; Star Trek II was the first motion picture CGI sequence. Both were ILM.
@nicole @yomismo Yes, Steve Jobs bought the Lucasfilm Computer Division and the technology in 1986 to become Pixar. Star Trek II was released in June of 1982 and was done by the Computer Division (I'm sure with a lot of direction from ILM). After the Pixar people left, ILM built up its own CG department and did Willow in 1988.
There's a fantastic documentary on Disney+, "Light & Magic". Definitely worth watching. https://www.disneyplus.com/series/light-magic/3OtlwhtW6Z7E
@DavidBFox @yomismo Thank you for the clarification! That documentary is on my holiday to-do list. Super excited for it. 🥰
@DavidBFox @yomismo 😵💫 This is … amaze. No words. 😮
@DavidBFox @nicole it is, I bet it was amazing working there, I've always been curious about how the "magic" was done, and bought books, watched documentaries and subscribed to Cinefex, where FX where explained. These are some of my treasures, I have quite a lot Cinefex issues 😋.
@DavidBFox @nicole I didn't have a camera to experiment at that age, when T2 came out I started to realize what computers were able to do and started to play with 3D Studio. As soon as https://www.blender.org came out I started to play with it, right now it is an amazing free tool to do any kind of animation/FX. Anyone can now make a home video, do a tracking with Blender, create their own FX with it and impress friends.
The AI is the next:
https://imagen.research.google
https://imagen.research.google/video/
@DavidBFox @nicole you can see an example of text->video in the next link:
More videos and a link to the arxiv paper can be found on Google's phenaki project:
@nicole @yomismo Yes. And here's the photo that was in the ILM documentary, along with a cheatsheet of who's who.