A time capsule of a time capsule from the dawn of computer animation

February 13, 2022 11:55 AM

Five years before Toy Story proved to the world that pure CGI -- a field long relegated to the role of special effects -- could be an art form in its own right, Odyssey Productions attempted to do the same on a slightly smaller scale. Drawing on the demo reels, commercials, music videos, and feature films of over 300 digital animators, the studio collated dozens of beautiful* and cutting-edge clips** into an ambitious 40-minute art film called The Mind's Eye. Backed by an eclectic mix of custom-written electronic, classical, oriental, and tribal music, the surreal, dreamlike imagery formed a rough narrative in eight short segments that illustrated the evolution of life, technology, and human society: Creation - Civilization Rising - Heart of the Machine - Technodance - Post Modern - Love Found - Leaving the Bonds of Earth - The Temple - End credits (including names and sources for all clips used). It was the beginning of a groundbreaking and influential audiovisual series -- all of which has been lovingly preserved by digital archivists decades after the fact.

*Fun fact: This clip, originally called Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice (and with a different soundtrack), was created by Symbolics, owners of the very first dotcom domain.

**For some context on the scope of the project, YouTuber SSystem Seven describes the astonishing effort and thought that went into just one segment, Quest: A Long Ray's Journey into Light:

This Film is Extraordinary and although you can generate such work on a standard PC these days, back in the 1980's, it was the cutting edge of CGI. It was rendered on a battalion of Apollo Computers, one single frame at a time.

100 systems linked together were used working tirelessly around the clock. The MCP (Master Control Program) would be fed a particular frame to render and then another when that one was finished.

The Entire concept, Ray Tracing and Networking was completely new and innovative and bears notability, given that it took Herculean efforts to see that the system operated smoothly and without error..

The film's title is a play on the title Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), and refers to the computer-graphics process of "ray-tracing", which was used to animate this film by Apollo Computer. It is the story of Apollo Computers metamorphosis from a digital black and white environment to one of color and 3 dimensions. It is a mirror of our own inner quest: "to seek, to find and not to yield".

After the success of the first Mind's Eye, whose VHS and Laserdisc releases saw multiplatinum sales in the U.S., Odyssey quickly produced a sequel: the more intense, abstract, and even more technically accomplished Beyond the Mind's Eye, which has been uploaded to YouTube in 720p by its composer Jan Hammer (of Miami Vice fame). Segments: Virtual Reality - Seeds of Life - Afternoon Adventure - Brave New World - Transformers - Too Far - Windows - Nothing But Love - The Pyramid - Theater of Magic

This was followed up a year later by a third film, The Gate to the Mind's Eye (with soundtrack by Thomas Dolby!), and later a fourth, Odyssey Into the Mind's Eye (music by Kansas frontman Kerry Livgren). Both films are available on YouTube in pristine 1080p 60 FPS Laserdisc transfers thanks to user DoctorDothraki (who makes the uncompressed files available via Archive.org).

The studio also produced a companion series for children called Imaginaria, which took on a more cartoony and lighthearted tone: Opening titles - Imaginaria - Anything is Possible - Locomotion - Andre and Wally B (the first CGI project worked on by former Pixar chief John Lasseter) - All Shapes and Sizes - Rubber Duckies - Gourmet Records - Night Magic - Down the Road - Lucy and Remo - Styro the Dog - More Bells and Whistles - Going Home - End credits

In later years, clips from these and other Mind's Eye productions were repackaged as Short Circutz, brief interstitials for Canadian youth network YTV. Their success would go on to inspire other all-CGI projects, including Animusic, VeggieTales, and ReBoot.

The Mind's Eye series on TVTropes

posted by Rhaomi (27 comments total)

[This updated and expanded FPP -- including the incredible Laserdisc transfers I'd never have noticed otherwise! -- brought to you by #DoublesJubilee]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:56 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've had a CD of Thomas Dolby's The Gate to the Mind's Eye since it came out. I haven't listened to it in decades, but I recall really liking at least a few of the tracks. Time for a re-listen, I guess. Thanks for the post!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 12:43 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I haven't seen this since I was 20yr old. The obligatory story is that when I was 19yr old at my first university IT job I got my account disabled for hijacking a whole (empty for the night) user lab full of big workstations to run raytracing jobs like 20x faster. Had to go talk to security the next day. They were amused but yeah nope don't do that.

About a decade later I'm working at the same university, get promoted, getting root but have to go around and ask all of the other root folk to dish on "The Root Speech" and get some wisdom an some updates. I get to security and they go "So Mr. zengargoyle let's see.... 1989 misappropriation of university computing resources". lol's were had.

Transferring into cinema school was yeah another path not taken.

I was so into this back then as a youngster. So thanks for the double.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:46 PM on February 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

Fascinating, but confusing to me -‌- I saw clips from many of these in an early VHS tape I'd rent from the videostore, called The State of the Art of Computer Animation (with Stanley and Stella on the cover), available at the Internet Archive (and it's from 1988, according to those pages). A particular favorite is the 'Hawaiian Punch' segment which begins at 26:20. Later, I remember seeing some of these clips in one of those Mind's Eye videos (and I wondered why the music had been replaced). So, which came first?
posted by Rash at 12:53 PM on February 13, 2022

I have really fond memories of the Short Circuitz interstitials on YTV, and since I'm a laserdisc collector, I would love to own any and all Mind's Eye discs, I hope I find them someday!
posted by signsofrain at 12:53 PM on February 13, 2022

Laserdiscs are such a weird digital / analog hybrid. You can see the frames on CAV format discs since every concentric ring contains the two interlaced fields of the PCM encoded analog NTSC video with all of its blanking intervals and sync pulses lining up on radials. CAV also allowed the video to be paused long before anyone could afford the memory for a full frame buffer.

Although they sound awful when you play them on a phonograph.
posted by autopilot at 1:30 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

When I was a kid, I absolutely adored renting The State of the Art of Computer Animation. If I want my fix now, I go to the VintageCG YouTube channel and look at things like Fabricated Rhythm and Don't Touch Me. Funny to think of hiring songwriters and musicians for what seem to us like very basic proofs of concept, but I'm glad they did.

The artier shorts (like The Little Death) had a big influence on the guys behind Cool 3D World, as seen in The Summoning of the Skylark.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:05 PM on February 13, 2022

I was a huge fan of these videos in general, but even back then I found some of the Minds Eye segments to be a bit too twee or cartoonish. It's just one of those things where the actual content, symbology or plot wasn't really the point as much as it was about the raytracing and having some substrate to use to show off 3D rendering technology. Looking right at you here, Techno Dance.

Also, something to note is that a whole lot of the videos in the Minds Eye series aren't purely 3D rendered.

A lot of the shorts are heavily processed in video editors like Avid or video FX editing suites like the Amiga based Video Toaster system that let you load in things like pre-rendered loops and then manipulate them with blitter processors and tools to do stuff like replicate that loop, move it around, make a stream of replicated loops look like a whole series of a figure marching in sequence with forced false perspective shifting and so on.

(Again, looking right at you Techno Dance, which contains neither any techno or what most people would charitably call dancing unless you happened to be Elaine Bene from Seinfeld.)

I have memories of a video series that I believe that was from Japan called Virtual Drug, but it was all more abstract colors and eye candy and a lot less structure and plot, and each video in the series was named after various kinds of hallucinogens, psychedelics or other rave friendly party favors.

I think the series was originally intended for laser disc or other early analog HD video like Japan's MUSE system, but then was also released on standard VHS or SVHS for distribution in the US.

The videos were really cool, abstract and colorful and a lot more like video feedback experiments, but with digital/hybrid productions. I remember the video that was named after MDMA or Ecstasy was mostly like a textured stream of bright pastel rainbow colors streaming, like animated watercolor washes mapped to a continuous explosion or textured tunnel kind of effect.
posted by loquacious at 2:06 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I remember The Mind’s Eye!
posted by Going To Maine at 2:24 PM on February 13, 2022

All those Lawnmower man sex scenes.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:25 PM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

I worked on projected lightshows for raves in the SF area in the second half of the 1990s. Bits of Mind’s Eye were a regular staple all over our stuff. It was already looking pretty dated by the middle of the decade and in 1996 you could effectively entertain a dance floor full of people just playing Mario 64 on a big screen interspersed with variations on the wormhole theme. Mind’s Eye occupies space somewhere between op art and black light posters, with groundbreaking technique and lazy aesthetics. Pixar’s big early shorts from the era (Tin Toy, Luxo Jr., and the rest) were genre-defining because they told stories instead of just showing off algorithms.

Here’s an approximate 1993 equivalent, X-MIX 1 by Paul Van Dyk.
posted by migurski at 2:28 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

This was also made during the period when individually rendered frames were transferred from the computer to film or video tape using a camera attached to a frame-accurate recording device, i.e. a telecine. The camera would be aimed at computer display and the computer, which also controlled the recorder, would present frames one at a time to be captured on the target media. After each frame was captured, the computer would advance the recorder by one frame. I recall the transfers taking hours and hours.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:38 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I still have all these on VHS. Along with some other animation showcases from around the same time. Such a creative use of things that were never intended to go together, or indeed be seen outside of executive boardroom presentations, really.

The Thomas Dolby soundtrack for The Gate To.. is pretty good. Probably the only one of the soundtracks that can be listened to as a stand-alone album.

This is a great post, and thanks for the really good transfer links. I've been looking for something like that for ages!
posted by hippybear at 3:58 PM on February 13, 2022

All those Lawnmower man sex scenes.

Now there is a sentence one should never have had expected to read.
posted by y2karl at 4:20 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

A close friend of mine went to work c. 1990 at Pacific Data Images, which was a cutting edge CGI company at the time. This compilation video has some of their early work, although unfortunately, mostly the clips aren't dated.
posted by neuron at 4:25 PM on February 13, 2022

We used to get stoned while working the evening shift at Radio Shack and watch this at max volume. Good times.
posted by goatdog at 4:26 PM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Apple made a video, back in 1988 when the Macintosh II was released as the first color Mac, to show off its properties. Pencil Test was produced on the Mac II. (Mind you, that was in 1988 - there was NO Quicktime for video playback.) The whole movie was output frame-by-frame to an imagesetter and then recorded to film.

(Don't try to watch the video from the URL above, use archive.org instead.)
posted by blob at 4:54 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I watched all the Toy Story movies recently. The first one is clearly early CGI, but 2-4 all basically look the same as each other with just a bit more detailed lighting as time progresses. The technology has advanced quite quickly but also maybe plateaued? We've reached the point in the medium (as with other media) where style, not realism, is the goal.
posted by one for the books at 5:35 PM on February 13, 2022

In the mid 90s a lot of mind altering substances were consumed watching these. If you saw another kid in the Gainesville Blockbusters with this tape, you knew they were cool. Good times.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:16 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s like re-living every Siggraph from the 80s and 90s.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:42 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hmm. I mean look at the fur in Monsters Inc. or the wet hair in The Incredibles. There's likely a lot of improvement in workflow, i.e. cheaper and faster. And in Toy Story 4 they created AI spiders to weave their cobwebs.
posted by credulous at 9:04 PM on February 13, 2022

I was unaware of the Dolby soundtrack. It’s the middle of the might so it would be injudicious to play it at this moment, but I am excited about hearing it in the morning.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:12 AM on February 14, 2022

I remember seeing Seeds of Life and asking my father "how many bits" were those graphics. This was in the middle of the console wars, and my understanding of computer graphics was limited to more bits == better. I don't think quite understood my lack of understanding because he said something like "probably 128-bit computers" and from that I as consoles pushed on to 32bit (processors) I thought 128-bit graphics was a thing.

I think Seeds of Life was featured in an episode of Scientific American Frontiers?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:12 AM on February 14, 2022

We used to get stoned while working the evening shift at Radio Shack and watch this at max volume. Good times.

While playing Red Storm Rising on a Tandy 1000. (My Radio Shack was in a little-used strip mall, and nighttime customers were rare.)
posted by mikelieman at 7:29 AM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

The technology has advanced quite quickly but also maybe plateaued?

I dunno - I rewatched Funding Nemo recently and it felt like it was showing its age a bit. Fish that had so recently blown my mind seemed primitive and in need of a remaster. And both The Mitchells vs. The Machines and Lucca felt like they were doing some amazing things with color palettes and textures - subtle stuff that would be hard to think about. (Also, fast cuts for dream sequences and other surreal moments. I would imagine part of the reason we’re only starting to see 3D animated musicals is because of the scope required for dance numbers.) Toy Story as a self-contained yardstick for progress might be a bad idea simply because plastic is one of the easier things to render thanks to its hard and shiny texture. Those films might have plateaued, but until we can see as many kinds of 3D animation as we do 2D animation, I doubt the field has.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:18 AM on February 14, 2022

The Sony Pictures Animation folks who did Mitchells and Spider-Verse are doing some really astonishing work bringing 2D elements back into 3D films and opening up new creative space there. Pixar seems stuck on a full generative/modeled/rendered approach to everything in the Mind’s Eye vein.
posted by migurski at 9:27 AM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Man, I rented that so many times on VHS! Always great when for a Saturday when nothing else sounded good.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 7:03 PM on February 14, 2022