Saw this on slashdot and figured it was worthy of a post here. It's a 10 minute documentary on how the computer graphics were created for the briefing scene in the original star wars.

It took 2 minutes to render a wireframe-frame, lol.

I can't believe I watched all of that. Still, it was really neat to see that being done considering the technology they had available to them at the time.

Interesting.

On a random note, its anyone else having trouble with 50% of the youtube videos? Half of them seem to load terribly. I've read that its because some of them get loaded onto google servers which have poor upload speeds. Its driving me nuts because it literally needs to load every 5 seconds for some videos such as this.

Cool. I wasn't aware that they built models first to use before entering the data in, but I guess that makes the most sense.

Also, if there ever is going to be another new Star Wars film, I hope the computer terminals show graphics as if they were made in the earlier 70/80s. They kinda.. did that at the end of Revenge of the Sith in certain scenes with a late 70's vibe.

oh god what are they doing to r2?!

Awesome, I love those 'globes' on the computers and the way he's bragging how everything is rendered in real-time

The best part is how in order to get it on film, they had to point a video camera at the computer monitor!