10 Movies That Pushed The Boundaries Of Visual Effects
4. Toy Story (1995)
The release of Toy Story saw a new dawn in filmmaking: it was the first feature-length movie made entirely with CGI. After the Lion King's acclaimed wildebeest stampede scene, Disney clearly saw potential in 3D computer animation and went all-out with Toy Story, delivering the warmth and humour of traditional Disney movies along with cutting edge technology to create an entirely new strand of filmmaking. To create the movie, each character was first made in clay form or drawn on a computer before the animated design process could begin. After creating a model, the animators could add unique articulation and motion controls to allow each character to move and talk in their own way. As the central character, Woody was the most complex with 723 different motion controls, 212 of these for his face and 58 for his mouth alone. To sync the models' mouths with the actors' voices, Pixar animators spent a full week working on just an eight-second frame. Once the characters were ready for a scene, animators added shading, lighting, texture and visual effects before 117 computers running 24 hours a day rendered the final scene. Completed animations were produced at a rate of about three minutes per week, with a single frame taking anywhere between 45 minutes and 30 hours to render depending on its complexity. The entire movie needed over 800,000 machine hours to render 114,240 frames of animation to create the 77-minute feature. It was an enormous effort, but one that would change the future of filmmaking immeasurably.
