{"id":685838,"date":"2026-05-22T06:45:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T06:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/685838\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T06:45:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T06:45:12","slug":"inside-the-works-a-lost-pre-pixar-cgi-feature-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/685838\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside ‘The Works,’ A Lost Pre-Pixar CGI Feature Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In its first five days on YouTube, the feature-length documentary Inside The Works, produced by Ziggy Cashmere<\/a>, touched a nerve with viewers and clocked up more than 12,000 views. The video is a poignant record of a unique episode in animation and computer graphics history: the creation of The Works, a long-lost, incomplete CG feature produced at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

Cashmere\u2019s other videos, listed on his \u201cOk So\u2026\u201d channel, include studies of arcade games, \u201980s aerobics videos, and a short history of the cymbal-playing monkey toy seen in Toy Story 3 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. \u201cZiggy Cashmere\u201d is the pseudonym of Jake Pruitt, author of the 2024 publication The Lost Media and Research Handbook: A Guide in Finding Obscure and Forgotten Information, which cataloged his interests in animation, software, and games. Pruitt\u2019s latest production is, by far, his most accomplished \u2013\u2013 initiated in 2020-2021 by Oliver Levine, then concluded over more than two years by Pruitt \u2013\u2013 and reveals a curio of the early digital era that has perhaps been overshadowed by the names of the computer graphics giants involved in its creation.<\/p>\n

In its 82-minute runtime, Inside The Works features a collage of Zoom-style videos and telephone audio comprising a who\u2019s who of CG animation legends. Featured speakers include Ed Catmull, Alvy Smith, Garland Stern, Gordon Moore (of \u201cMoore\u2019s Law\u201d fame), animators Tom Sito, Robert Stuhmer, Paul Heckbert, Chuck Jones, and Lance Williams (writer and director of The Works), as well as heartfelt testimony from Lance\u2019s widow, fine artist Amber Denker. Surprise guests include composer Carter Burwell, who recalls his days as a 3D modeler and director of digital audio at NYIT; archival appearances from filmmaker George Lucas (who was not a fan of the institution); Disney animation legend Shamus Culhane; animators Hank Grebe and David Lubell; musician Laurie Anderson; and an explanation of where \u201980s video mavens Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel likely found inspiration for their g-g-g-glitching video emcee Max Headroom.<\/p>\n

After an intro from a heavily toup\u00e9ed William Shatner from the Star Trek: The Motion Picture era, composited in front of Walt Disney World\u2019s EPCOT Spaceship Earth, The Works is hailed as \u201cthe world\u2019s first computer-animated feature,\u201d the brainchild of Alex Schure, fast-talking millionaire investor and founder of NYIT. As Ed Catmull recalls, Dr. Schure, who held NYU doctoral degrees in engineering and education, saw himself as a next-generation Walt Disney. In 1974, Schure first witnessed the University of Utah\u2019s now-famous 3D vector graphic animation of a human hand that Catmull and Fred Parke constructed from scans of a plaster cast of Catmull\u2019s left hand. Schure\u2019s vision of creating a feature film using the technology was, in the eyes of Tom Sito, \u201clike trying to draw with a missile.\u201d But Schure invited animators and CG artists to establish NYIT\u2019s sprawling campus amid the leafy gardens of Long Island\u2019s Glen Cove.<\/p>\n

The collegiate mix of computer graphics boffins and artistically inclined animators, seeded by Schure\u2019s financial resources, spawned innovations such as Alvy Smith\u2019s 24-bit digital paint system Paint3, Catmull\u2019s digital in-between tool Tween, Catmull and Smith\u2019s Fill coloring program, and Smith and Edward Emshwiller\u2019s eerie 3D short Sunstone. As resources blossomed, Smith recalls how Lance Williams\u2019s arrival led to new creative experimentation that pushed NYIT beyond its initial attempts to digitally animate Tubby the Tuba and led to Williams\u2019s proposal for a more ambitious science fiction feature, The Works, in which robots have overrun planet Earth.<\/p>\n

Vintage video of Lance\u2019s script, storyboards, and models is interspersed with archival clips of Dick Lundin\u2019s 3D giant mechanical walking ant, a wonder in its day, and Rebecca Allen<\/a>\u2019s early rotoscope experiments adapting the human performance of dancer Twyla Tharp into digital kinematics. A secret visit to the lab by George Lucas and visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund, who sported an oversized Star Wars belt buckle, later led Ed Catmull and Alvy Smith to depart for California, where they co-founded the Lucasfilm Computer Division in 1979 and, seven years later, Pixar Animation Studios. On camera, Smith expresses guilt at having jumped ship from NYIT, but history was made.<\/p>\n

By the 35-minute mark, the documentary reaches a full head of steam in the sad but fascinating tale of how Lance Williams saw The Works continue to grow, and how the undisciplined crucible of talent eventually spun out of control. We see unrealized robotic characters in sketch form, keyframe art, and wireframes, including Lundin\u2019s giant machine ant, the film\u2019s squat robotic hero Ipso Facto, Dick Lundin\u2019s proto-steampunk title graphics, and the creation of the film\u2019s only pseudo-human character, T-Square, which featured a woman\u2019s face video-mapped into a mechanical spacesuit.<\/p>\n

The decline and fall of NYIT is precipitated by artistic temperaments clashing with Alex Schure\u2019s vision, as well as fear-driven ambitions to monetize the campus by courting third-party interests, including an eyeball-imploding Life Savers candy commercial, digital motion graphics, and swirling CG title sequences that were hugely popular in their day.<\/p>\n

The NYIT swan song, an ill-advised feature film production, was heralded as a sequel to the Beatles\u2019 Yellow Submarine, produced by Al Brodax, who also produced George Dunning\u2019s 1968 animated Beatles classic. The NYIT project Strawberry Fields was started in 1984 and canceled eight years later, but is detailed with oddball clips from the hybrid CG\/2D-animated movie directed by Dave Lubell, who comments on his task of shaping an overblown 300-page script into a montage of Beatles cover songs by artists including Cheap Trick, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson, and Robert Palmer. Nobody was happy.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a heartbreaking end to this wannabe Camelot of digital ambition, which shuttered in May 1992, as seen in lackluster video footage in which surviving members share gooey slices of a sheet cake depicting their studio. The final words are given to a pair of chatty animated digital emcees hosting the Max Headroom-like \u201cDynaDigiDataVac\u201d show, and to Lance Williams, who, in an archival presentation of NYIT\u2019s achievements, noted that the studio was a magnet for talent celebrating \u201cthe genius of the human mind.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In its first five days on YouTube, the feature-length documentary Inside The Works, produced by Ziggy Cashmere, touched…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-685838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}