The Works (film)

The Works is a shelved 3D computer animated film which was under development by the staff of the Computer Graphics Lab in association with the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, New York. Being worked on sporadically from 1979 to 1986, the films development and production had difficulties which finally prompted the film being abandoned before completion. The Works would have been the first entirely 3D CGI film in history had it been finished in the early 1980s as intended. This goal was later accomplished by Pixars Toy Story released in 1995, nearly a decade after The Works was attempted. The name was inspired by the original meaning of the word robot, from robota work in many Slavic languages. It was originally intended to be approximately 90minutes long although less thanminutes were known to be produced. Short in length and few in number, the completed film sequences were highly impressive considering the state of the technology and what was then the unique look of 3D computer animation. A trailer of the forthcoming film was screened at SIGGRAPH in 1982. The project also resulted in other groundbreaking computer animations such as 3DV, Sunstone, Inside a Quark and some segments of the short film The Magic Egg from 1984.

The founder of NYIT New York Institute of Technology, entrepreneur and eccentric millionaire Dr. Alexander Schure, had a long and ardent interest in animation. He was a great admirer of Walt Disney and dreamed of making animated features like those from the golden age of theatrical animation. He had already had created a traditional animation facility at NYIT. After visiting the University of Utah and seeing the potential of the computer technology in the form of the computer drawing program Sketchpad created by Ivan Sutherland, he told his people to pore over the Utah research center and get him one of everything they had. He then established the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, buying stateoftheart equipment and hiring major researchers from throughout the computer graphics field.At first, one of CGLs main goals was to use computers to produce 2D animation and invent tools to assist traditional animators in their work. Schure reasoned that it should be possible to develop computer technology that would make the animation process cheaper and faster. An early version of the CAPS system later used by Disney animators were among the tools they created there. ........

Source: Wikipedia