Look how far we've come...
Midnight Jugglers "Memorium" is actually a short film, Wireframe Memories, tracing the history of CGI from seemingly simple lines and squiggles, to the full-on 3D structures now possible with tools that are essentially toys, like the Xbox Kinect camera.
The Creators Project has an interview with band member and video director Vincenzi Vandella, who describes the process:
I did a lot of research and contacted a few of the programmers online, plus read some books such as Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation by Tom Sito. It was quite difficult choosing which excerpts made the cut. Paramount was choosing pioneering technological advancements, such as ray tracing or the first use of fractals or morphing, or the first attempts to reproduce human likeness. However, there were different streams of work around the same time such as Scanimate and John Whitney's amazing films from the '50s and '60s, though these were more analogue computer constructs so I kept it more in the digital realm.
Having excerpts from significant camps such as NYIT, University of Utah, and Bell Labs was important as well. Plus I thought it important to show some defining moments where the technology began to merge with artistic experimentation. I guess in the end I wanted it to tell a story purely through the evolving visuals, starting from simple line animations to the first appearance of human likeness and emotion a few decades later. Also from that point on the story crosses over from hidden computer lab trials into the mainstream, of which the significant films are then well known.
