Exactly when does vfx become animation? Rotoscopy? Mocap? Virtual reality? Has it already happened with Polar Express? © 2004 by Warner Bros. Ent. Inc.

Animation has become more like live action and live action has become more like animation. Anyone said that to you lately? Haven’t noticed? Seen any comicbook movies lately? How about documentaries? How about Koyaanisqatsi? Powaqqatsi? Oh, right… that was a while ago. In any event, more than 50% of live action these days comprises vfx/animation.

Just exactly when does vfx become animation? Rotoscopy? Mocap? Virtual reality? Has it already happened with Polar Express? What about rides? Holography? How blurred have the lines become?

Is physics the line in the sand (parallel universes, superpowers, gravity, etc.) between the real and the imaginary? Or is it psychological — magic vs. science?

Do programmers ask themselves these kinds of questions?

Princess Leia’s Hologram
As recently as last year, a significant little news blurb announced that a Japanese company, Optware Corp., had developed the Collinear Holographic Data Storage System, the world’s first recording and play back of digital movies on a holographic recording disc with a reflective layer. Do you realize research scientists are talking about projecting holograms to large audiences through crystals? It’s reportedly going to be, ahem, difficult, but it’s presently in the realm of the… discussable…?

Are these guys a card shy of a holodeck?

Don’t tell that to the guys at IMAX 3D.

And do I need to get my chapka blocked or are animation and visual effects merging into a hybrid 3D form? Evolving as they have for hundreds of years, now, from early trompe l’oeil paintings to the stereoscopic photography fad of the mid 1850s (when more than a million homes owned a device to view the more than 100,000 “clichés” commercially available) to 1895’s The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots to French magician George Méliès’ films to the first rides at the 1900 Paris Fair (a 45-minute simulated 14-day rail journey between Moscow and Peking on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a simulated cruise from Nice to Constantinople and a simulated hot air balloon ride that featured a filmed panorama of Paris) to 1925’s stop-motion The Lost World to the Acme-Dunn Special Effects Optical Printer to Scopitone, the Experience Theater, the Sensorama Simulator and the Telesphere Mask of the 1950s to The 1964 World’s Fair and The G.E. Carousel Of Progress at Disneyland and now Disney World in Florida and, and, and… films like The Ten Commandments, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the disaster films of the 1970s and the dawn of the Modern Age with Star Wars, Close Encounters, the first full-CGI character, a medieval knight in 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes, then Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Toy Story, the first entirely 3D movie, the 450 vfx shots extravaganza Titanic, Bullet Time, The Super Burly Brawl, The Freeway Chase, Neo flying.

Is The Matrix part of the merging of animation and vfx into a hybrid 3D form? © 2003 Warner Bros. Ent. — U.S., Canada, Bahamas & Bermuda. © 2003 Village Roadshow Films (BVI) Ltd. — all other territories (all rights reserved

Once more, this time without feeling and not necessarily in order: Muybridge’s (trivia — Muybridge murdered his wife’s lover in 1874… judged justifiable homicide) zoopraxiscope, make-up, substitution shots, pyrotechnics, flying with wires, hanging miniatures, mattes, animatronics, rear projection, stop-motion, mocap, mocon, virtual theme park rides, VR, simulators, thrill rides, augmented reality, non-immersive (desktop) systems and semi-immersive projection systems, bots, automated self representations. Ted Kaczynski. Cyber — “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The Virtual Workplace. Nanocomputing, holocomputing, biological and quantum computing.