Animation, Art, and Other Shiny Things
This video, Transformers, is a good example of how far computer animation had advanced in the two short years between The Mind’s Eye videos (1990) and this compilation.
Brave New World is the fourth installment of Beyond the Mind’s Eye and, besides showing off some good video processing power with the geometric transformations, gives us a bit of a virtual tour through a computer. This is 1992, remember, and the Pentium CPU wasn’t released until the following year, so it’s likely patterned on a 486 mainboard – and well patterned I might say, the board is quite recognizable to an old hardware geek like me.
Part two, Panspermia, is based on a 5th century BC Greek idea that life exists throughout the universe and is spread by meteors, comets, asteroids, and the like. (not to be confused with exogenesis which says life on earth was transferred from somewhere else and could care less whether there’s life elsewhere. geocentric snobbery.)
Beyond the Mind’s Eye is the 1992 follow up to The Mind’s Eye and, true to Moore’s Law, the animation has improved in step with the increase in computing power. The music is done by Jan Hammer (yes, he did miami vice too, but don’t hold it against him) and tracks better than parts of the first series.
So, let’s start at the beginning with Virtual Reality…
The Temple is the final installment in The Mind’s Eye and it’s the part of the tape I would wear out every time. Between the bleeding-edge animation (for 1990) and the (well-synchronized and most excellent) soundtrack, this track marks when I believed that 3D computer animation had finally matured past a nerdly diversion and into a mainstream entertainment medium.
You may recognize the surroundings and birds from the second installment, Civilization Rising, (or 03 per the video itself) as the animation between about the 50 second mark to a minute-twenty looks to be from just before this video.
I’ve collected the links to the videos from Beyond the Mind’s Eye and will begin posting them next week.
Love can transcend the most formidable of barriers – and it can show off some impressive computing power for 1990. (note how many things are moving independently)
[Thanks to Craig Reynolds for the link to the original version! Stanley & Stella in Breaking the Ice]
The fifth installment from The Mind’s Eye: A Computer Animation Odyssey
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The Ruffled Crow 