Customer Reviews

Odyssey: The Mind's Eye Presents - Computer Animation Classics

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While the spots featured in "Computer Animation Classics" are without any doubt classics and highly original, the picture quality is little better then VHS. This could have been a winner. But it's such low quality in execution that it's (almost) a loser.

This is an impressive collection of some of the best computer graphics work produced in the 80's, including amazing early works produced by Pacific Data Images, Symbolics, Whitney/Demos, Abel & Associates, and many others. Before powerful software like Softimage, 3D Studio Max, and Maya were available, animators and programmers often developed their own tools. It is arguable that some of the most creative computer animation work came out of this period.

A few personal favorites from this collection;

My favorite animation on here (and the sole reason I bought this DVD) is "Eurthythmy" by Susan Amkraut and Michael Girard of Ohio State University. Also included are two amazing early raytracing works by the Midnight Movie Group at Apollo Computer, "Balloon Guy" by Chris Wedge (who worked as an animator on TRON, and recently created the computer animated short "Bunny" which has won the 1999 Oscar for "Best Animated Short Film."), and Tony de Petrie, an amazing if slightly eery work from Canada (one of the animators later founded Softimage). "Dance of the Stumblers" is a very funny and entertaining stick-figure Fantasia by Steve Segal that was obviously created on a personal computer. The ending should appeal to Amiga fans.

On the downside, the video quality of the DVD was obviously transferred from magnetic tape. It would have been nice if some digital processing had been done to clean up and sharpen the image quality. Aside from that, it is still very enjoyable and I recommend this to anyone who is a fan of computer animation.

If you've ever wanted to see more of those computer animations that have been played at Siggraph or are played on cable in Canada then this series of DVD's is for you. Classic animations on this DVD include:

Stanley and Stella in "Breaking the Ice" Quest - A Long Ray's Journey Into Light Megacycles, High Fidelity, Glider, Peppy, Work's Ant, LBS, Pencil Test, Deja Vu, Adam Powers, Chromosaurus, The Gold Series (Benson and Hedges adverts), Botco, Eurhythmy, Brilliance, Max's Place, Opera Industriel, Speeder, Dance Of The Stumblers, Balloon Guy, A Comic Zoom, Fair Play, The Little Death, Hawaiian Punch, Tony de Peltrie, Hard Woman (Mick Jagger pop video) Metafable

Different styles of early character animation are presented, going all the way from 2D lines, primitive geometric shapes, smooth shaded polygon meshes to the first texture mapped characters. However, only five or so really tell a short story.

My only disappointment was that there wasn't

any coverage on how each animation was made (ie. behind the scenes like The Abyss DVD etc...) although the credits do mention the hardware and software used.