The film that broke my brain.
I think it was the winter of '88-'89. I was a second year Physics student at the time with a brand new IBM PC clone with an Intel 8088 CPU running at a blistering 11MHz, with its own monochrome monitor and everything. Anyway, the pressures were getting to me so when the Usual Gang called to say they were going to the New Yorker repertory theatre for a film collection I cheerfully agreed to join them.
One particular short caught my attention. It seemed to be a stop-motion animation of a desk lamp and a toy ball, but I couldn't figure out how they got the models to stay in place so well and the motion was just so smooth... a technical tour de force, as well as a brilliant portrayal of narrative and emotion without a single line of dialog nor a single human face. Then in the credits I saw that it had been rendered on a Cray computer and the way I saw the world changed forever.
The film was Luxo Jr., by the now-prominent animation studio Pixar. I just watched it again over lunch.
-- Steve was a touch miffed that the Blu-Ray soundtrack was "only" in Dolby Digital; then he remembered that in the mid-80's Dolby Digital was state-of-the-art, so none of the soundtracks would've been recorded in anything else.
One particular short caught my attention. It seemed to be a stop-motion animation of a desk lamp and a toy ball, but I couldn't figure out how they got the models to stay in place so well and the motion was just so smooth... a technical tour de force, as well as a brilliant portrayal of narrative and emotion without a single line of dialog nor a single human face. Then in the credits I saw that it had been rendered on a Cray computer and the way I saw the world changed forever.
The film was Luxo Jr., by the now-prominent animation studio Pixar. I just watched it again over lunch.
-- Steve was a touch miffed that the Blu-Ray soundtrack was "only" in Dolby Digital; then he remembered that in the mid-80's Dolby Digital was state-of-the-art, so none of the soundtracks would've been recorded in anything else.