This film does appear to have been used in courses and conferences in the early days of computer animation by ACM SIGGRAPH, for its development of “physical simulation.”Īccording to a Prix ARS Electronica ’87 program, the tech specs for both Tuber’s Two Step and Balloon Guy are as follows: “The works were realized on a VAX 11/780 computer, a Mark 1I 32-bit frame buffer, Symbolics 3670 and/or Evans and Sutherland PS 300 and in-house software.” The minute-and-a-half-long film seems to have been another experimental exercise in advancing techniques while he continued his study and work at OSU, where he was an artist in residence and taught animation history. There’s a lot less written about this second computer-animated short by Wedge, at least as far as I can find easily available. That may have been his final student project for SUNY Purchase. Technically, while listed as Wedge’s directorial debut on IMDb, he apparently made something earlier called The Daymaker in 1982, though I can’t find much info on it other than the year and length (7:23). This is his graduate thesis project, and according to animation veteran and historian Tom Sito, Tuber’s Two Step “was one of the first CG shorts to employ a full range of squash-and-stretch techniques, the kind of organic plasticity seen only in hand-drawn animated cartoons.” Indeed Wedge has noted that his approach was just to apply the principles of animation to computer graphics as opposed to the other way around. The animator had already been working in the business, having graduated from film school (where he was interested in stop-motion and puppet animation) and gone right into working on TRON, inputing data for that live-action feature’s computer-animated bits as part of a process he considered “tedious.”Īfterward he met computer animation pioneer Charles Csuri, who encouraged him to join him at Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design and get a master’s degree in computer graphics. The baby, for instance, is just like a white diaper blob surrounded by fleshy extremity blobs. A baby what is the question, as this is such an early effort that the characters are mostly comprised of disconnected blobs. Tuber’s Two Step (1985)īefore even Pixar produced its first animated short (though after John Lasseter’s first for Lucasfilm’s The Graphics Group, which would become Pixar), Wedge made this one-minute (excluding credits) computer-generated film depicting a baby’s first steps. Join us in watching and learning about all three films after the jump. Both are true of Wedge’s early animated films, two of which are very crude, very short, very early examples of computer animation from the 1980s – Tuber’s Two Step and Balloon Guy – and then a later longer piece that won the Academy Award in 1999, titled Bunny. More than most kinds of filmmakers, they tend to have begun with short subjects, and these shorts tend to be available to watch online. And director Chris Wedge, a founding member of Blue Sky who hasn’t taken the helm of a movie since 2005’s Robots, is a name you should know in the world of animation.Įven if Wedge wasn’t such a big wig, though (and even if we didn’t share a birthday, which I take very seriously), I always like devoting a Short Starts post to directors of animated works. While Fox’s Blue Sky Studios may only be the third most significant company making animated features in the U.S., that’s still very lucrative business (mostly for the Ice Age series). The new animated feature Epic doesn’t seem to be high on a lot of lists of anticipated summer movies, but it is sure to draw in the kids. This is another edition of Short Starts, where we present a weekly short film(s) from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career.
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