Do you remember the elaborate HBO title card that ran before their movies in the 1980s? They built an entire city, and some surrounding backroads and suburbs, in miniature to dolly the camera through before the HBO logo (itself built of wood and covered with sheet metal) spun at you -- even going so far as to place tiny model prostitutes on the street corners.

The only computer directly involved in production was used to control the sliding of two pieces of film to produce a "flare" effect late in the sequence.

CGI was expensive back then. Escape from New York (1981) had a "wireframe" city scene, which was actually a model city with fluorescent tape applied to the edges of the buildings. Cheaper than doing it with real computer graphics, and looked just as good.

>Cheaper than doing it with real computer graphics, and looked just as good.

My kids were poking fun at the rendering glitches in the titles of Star Trek: Next Gen. They explored Netflix a little further to find the original Star Trek, and agreed that it had much better CGI with their starship. No glitches at all! It never occurred to them that they were models.

I'm 80% sure (can't check right now) that Netflix actually has the remastered version that subbed in CGI for the original effects...

They do. It's the Blu-ray version, which redid the effects in CG because they didn't have the original film stock for those.

Funnily enough, TNG used models as well, I don't think it was until Deep Space 9 that they actually started using CGI starships. The versions of the first two Star Treks on Netflix are the remastered versions, so they might be pointing out CGI issues that came up years after the original airing.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Remaster

DS9 also used models! CGI came with Voyager, notably using Amigas with Video Toaster.

They had been extremely reluctant to use CGI up to that point, despite many efforts to persuade.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/CGI

Babylon 5, which (somewhat infamously) ran at roughly the same time as DS9, was much more aggressive in adopting CGI (also courtesy of Amiga and Video Toaster, I believe) for space stuff, but still used a lot of practical effects for interior shots as well. The CGI ultimately had a negative impact on the DVD and LaserDisc releases. Live action was shot for widescreen, but CGI was only rendered for 4:3 standard-def broadcast. The plan was that if they ever did a widescreen release, they'd re-render the CGI for whatever the target resolution ended up being. But when production ended the assets were lost, and they ended up having to manipulate the standard-def video into a widescreen aspect ratio. This isn't too bad for the pure CGI space stuff, but there are a few composite shots that look awful on the LaserDisc and DVD releases because of it.

I guess sometimes no matter which tech you choose, it ends up being a double-edged sword in one way or another. Especially in the early '90s.

Yes, B5 was an aggressive adopter of digital technology. The driver was costs. Models were expensive, and if they could be replaced by CGI, the cost of making the show could be dramatically reduced. B5 was being produced for the syndication market, which was a different animal than the usual networks, and doing it cheaper while retaining quality was a major goal. Short lived competitor "Space: Above and Beyond (which lasted one season) used models, with production costs over $1,000,000 per episode, and that was a major reason they only lasted a season. B5 did use Amiga and Video Toaster in the beginning, though I believe they transitioned to other equipment later. J. Michael Straczynski's partner Doug Netter had a company called Netter Digital that did the work. JMS commented that when he did pitch meetings with possible networks that would air the show, it was him and a 5 minute clip of their CGI renderings. When I saw the first episode opening, with the Vorlon craft emerging from hyperspace to dock at Babylon 5, I sat back open mouthed going "Whoa". I'm a computer guy, and had some notion of what it took to do that

The Crystalline Entity from 'Datalore' in the first season of TNG was CGI, and was recreated from scratch for the remaster:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Crystalline_Entity#Back...

These models were at MoPoP in Seattle a while ago, big StarTrek exhibit there.

I loved that intro when I was growing up! There's a documentary about how they made it that can be found on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng&t=408s

Then there is this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn9nw2OIeZU

That was fun to watch. The NG warnings at the end are pure gold.

Interesting that John Dykstra who was pioneering motion control cameras in Star Wars actually got some of the idea from working on a late sixties / early seventies Berkely traffic simulation that used a tiny city and a camera moving around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QJr2FvQlqY&feature=youtu.be... This technique was actually used much earlier for flight simulators as well.

have you ever seen the one the BBC did for People's Century where they had a street going along as it go forward, it also goes forward in time, along with shots of people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUwDSd1tSiI here it is

Computers were also used to control the physical camera.

Captain Disallusionment does a video on Back to the Future special effects when he talks about how this was the era before CGI but that used computer controlled cameras to achieve certain special effects.

https://youtu.be/AtPA6nIBs5g

I like the Game of Thrones intro with the elaborate mechanical world. They should have filmed and episode in that world :-)

Love it! When I was a kid, my dad my brother Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys out of PVC-pipe. It started with a turtle headquarters, and then he made a car and airplane out of pipes. I didn't realize they were custom built until I was at least 5 years old.

Depending on the scale this can be repurposed for wargames, there's many that could use this terrain, and it's a fun hobby

Is that a miniature B-24 Liberator?

I was lucky enough to help hand-crank one of its props[1] once, and subsequently watch it take off. The rumble and the noise of the engines were majestic.

[1]A part of the take-off procedure, see https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/29561/why-do-gr...

This is awesome. I wish I could take the time out of my daily routine to start building something like this. I liked these since I was a little boy. But there's already too many unfinished after-work and weekend projects around the house so that I just can't justify starting yet another thing.

But I watch Luke Towan on YouTube every now an then to compensate. :-)

That was the whole room for me and my brother when we were growing up. Put there a bed and a closet.

He migtht ignore that object for many years, decades even, but keep it around and he'll be very grateful in the future for sure :)

That's lovely. Thank you for posting this.

Same for me, but with a Lego city ;)

Very cool! -