How CGI in Commercials Changed the History of Film: A Creative Cow Magazine Extra

Click on the Abel icon at left to travel down memory lane and view an incredibly early Abel demo reel from around 1986.

These were the days when phong shading with texture maps was a major technological coup. CGI was so precious and primitive that even some of the early render tests of the new shaders written at Abel’s were included in the demo reel!

The demo reel was an artful edit of commercials, industrials, TV show openers, raster and vector projects, all synchronized to the throbbing beat of "The Art of Noise." A real show-stopper at Siggraph and NAB in 1986, this incredibly exciting piece is not to be missed!

The twisted wingtip shoe shown here is from a 1992 CGI commercial for Regal Shoe, a top quality shoe manufacturer in Japan.




The feature they wanted to illustrate is how their shoe was incredibly good at absorbing moisture. (I guess the Japanese have real sweaty feet). We modeled and texture mapped the shoe from a physical model (they gave us a real shoe!) then twisted it up with a simple deformation matrix - a big deal back then.

The water was not cgi – there were no fluid dynamic sims back then. I hired an animator (a real animator that could draw on paper) then scanned in his drawings and converted them all to simple black and white mattes. I then used the Pixar compositing computer to image process the animated mattes to look like water.

This spot actually won a “Denstu”, which is the Japanese Clio award.

Here is a very early (1989) example of live action in a CGI environment done for DreamQuest Films before they realized they were spending too much money at my studio and created their own CGI department.




They shot live action film of the two cars, the Mitsbishi Diamante and Emeraude, driving all around an insert stage. We then built a CGI environment and hand-tracked the 3D camera to match move with the cars.

The cars had to be roto’d because they didn't have a greenscreen stage large enough, and you just don’t shoot shiny green objects on a green screen anyway.

The speckles in the air were diamond (Diamante) and emerald (Emeraude) shards which rained down over the cars during the entire spot.

“The Addams Family Groove” was a very early music video (1991) for HBO featuring MC Hammer.




The gag was that the puckish Addams kids chopped off Hammer’s head with a guillotine and we had to show his still-rapping head bouncing along the floor.

This being years before the days of Cyberscan, I sat MC Hammer on a chair mounted to a turntable with a motor. He sat still while we filmed him turning 360 degrees, then I took thin strips from the center of each film frame and merged them together to make a Mercator projection of MC Hammer’s head. This was then spherically projected around a 3D head. The lips were animated with a deformation matrix to give the impression of him singing.

It worked well enough for video.

Click on the Fahrvergnugen icon to view another early (1990) commercial where a live action car was placed in an all 3D environment we did for DreamQuest Films.

The whole gag was to start the commercial as a simple 2D black and white Fahrvergnugen logo, then seamlessly transition into a 3D world with the car driving through it.

The live action car was shot first on film then delivered as video. Since this was before Boujou and MatchMover Pro, the 3D scene and camera had to be hand-tracked using the back-to-back arrangement of SGI machines described in the magazine article.

Ah, those were the days!