The Works (film)

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The Works is a shelved animated feature film, partially produced from 1979 to 1986. If it had been finished as intended, it would have been the first film that was entirely 3D

The story, written by Lance Williams, was never finalized but centered around "Ipso Facto", a charming elliptical robot, and the heroine, a young female pilot nicknamed "T-Square". The story was set at some time in the distant future when a malfunctioning computer, "The Works", triggered a devastating last World War but then, realizing what it had done, set out to repopulate the planet entirely with robots. T-Square, who worked and lived in a nearby asteroid belt, vowed to journey to Earth and fight to make it safe for the return of her fellow space-faring humanity. Many staff-members contributed designs and modeled characters and sets under the coordination of art director Bil Maher who created blueprint-style designs for T-Square and many of the 25 robots called for by the script. Dick Lundin, legendary for his exhaustive and elaborate creations, designed and animated a huge mining ship and the gigantic robot "Ant" which was to be one of the villains in control of the Earth.

Pre-production

The founder of NYIT, entrepreneur and eccentric millionaire

CGL was not working in a field without competition. George Lucas also realized the potential gains from computer animation, and in 1979, he created a new department of Lucasfilm which had the same goals as CGL, but ensured that movie industry professionals had a hand in the production. As Lucasfilm began headhunting for the best talent in the industry, many individuals struggling on "The Works" felt that Lucasfilm was a company more likely to succeed and abandoned NYIT. The Cornell University was another competitor, and NYIT lost some of its best people to them during the following years.

Losing interest

Another major problem was in the computers themselves. They were among the best and most powerful of their kind but, compared to the computers of today, were too slow and underpowered to generate the number of images required for a theatrical film. Attempting to pick up the pace, Dr. Schure recommitted himself to the project and the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab had more than 60 employees at its peak. Some were dedicated to The Works while others made animations for advertisers as a way to soften the financial toll the prolonged project exacted. Now not only did the computer team have to continue do ground-breaking animation and tool development, but as the quality of their output improved, they attracted outside clients wanting to commission title animations, commercials, and scenes for music videos, jobs which further sapped energy from the production. Scientist Ned Greene looked at the situation, analyzed all the elements needed to the film and crunched the numbers with devastating results: with the technology available, even if all the models and animations were calculated, it would take seven years to output the rendered frames needed to complete the film. The fact was, that in spite of all the resources brought to bear, CGL did not have the human or technical capacity to create film quality sequences on the hardware of the time.

Once it had been shown that the film could not be realized, The Works was officially abandoned. A less ambitious project, 3DV, was attempted. In a bid to circumvent the filmmaking bottleneck, 3DV was intended to be a TV special with a script that would include footage originally intended for The Works repurposed as programming for an imaginary all-computer generated cable TV service. 3DV incorporated some of its own innovations like 3D

• Lance Williams
• Paul Heckbert
• Dick Lundin
• Christie Barton
• Bil Maher

References

External links

• The Works
• Pictures from "The Works" Film Project
• Slide Show
• Short clip