Al Fenaughty's thoughts on CGI challenges, production values, and Triple-I/Movie Group.
Channel: Tom McMahon
Date: 2020-10-30

Al Fenaughty's thoughts on the challenge, production value, and Triple-I/Movie Group ROI of digitizing Susan Dey for Looker.  Mal MacMillan's algorithms for dealing with the mutually orthogonal digitized 2D film data sets (painstakingly entered by Art Durinski) and mapping onto a real human form.  Grid lines on Susan hand painted (also painstakingly) by Larry Malone.  This versus just "light flashes on swords" for TRON.  [More than that, we know, but Al was being pissy.]

Al and some of the other BoD members sincerely wanted to push the state of the art in multiple dimensions, more intellectually stimulating.  At that point the Board members included John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Oliver Selfridge, Ed Fredkin.  Godfathers of Artificial Intelligence and computing.  Lots of polygons and plastic-looking teapots were boring.  Human form, virtual actors, compositing with real world imagery (later, the DFP), digital scene simulation, were not boring.  Fredkin had always wanted to be able to write a movie script, including actors, lighting, every thing, and just have the computer make the movie.

The company had funded the development of the Foonly F1 Supercomputer for OCR and AI-like applications (not for CGI use).  There was Board-level interest in seeing it repurposed (and sold as a Triple-I product line) for a variety of other interesting applications.

[The dots (left and right, 90 degrees) were projected onto Susan Dey and Malone painted the lines between them, as I recall.  That helped out Mal a great deal.]