Tony de Peltrie (1985)

Tony de Peltrie (1985)

Longest CGI animated film with speech (at the time)

Video

Trivia:

1) Length - 6 minutes

2) Canadian computer-animated short film. The short shows the first animated human character to express emotion through speech (first time ever), facial expressions and body movements, which touched the feelings of the audience.

3) The face and body were sculpted by Langlois in clay and re-modeled according to the desired feeling of the expressions. 

4) For the software development and interactive creation, the team worked with the 3-D interactive graphics program Taarna and the mainframe computers CDC CYBER 835, 855. To calculate an image with the mainframe computers then, took five minutes. The computer monitor was a GRID TECHNOLOGIES ONE / 25S screen with a 24er card that had a range of 16 million colors. The image resolution of the monitor was 512 x 512 pixels. For conversion of the face and body from analog to digital, a GRADICON digitizer was used, and for the rehearsal and filming a Bolex 16 mm and an Animation Oxberry 35 mm camera.

5) John Lasseter, one of the siggrapg festival judges commented:

 "Years from now Tony de Peltrie will be looked upon as the landmark piece, where real, fleshy characters were first animated by computer."

6) Tony de Peltrie was created with mainframe computers. This was complicated because every change had to be reprogrammed. Philippe Bergeron told how tedious and frustrating this work was. He talked about the fact that Daniel Langlois also so saw it and had spoken of wanting to change that. They created company "Softimage" in Montreal. The program Softimage 3D and its further developments become an industry standard in 1990s.

7) George Borshukov, responsible for the special effects of the movie The Matrix, said: "Without Softimage 3D and mental ray, specifically, those phenomenal bullet time backgrounds just wouldn't have been possible." Special effects for other blockbusters such as Jurassic Park many others were produced with Softimage.