I went to several Siggraphs in this timeframe. It was so exciting watching a new technology that grew quickly every year and enabled graphics like this that were like nothing we had seen before and that improved massively year by year.
There was always a big presentation in a theater in the evening where they would debut dozens of animations like this, many with “behind the scenes” looks at how they were constructed and rendered and notes about the new techniques developed to generate them.
Whitney/Demos was the Lisp-based 3D production company that never was.
After their company Digital Productions (based around the Cray) failed, John Whitney Jr and Gary Demos started a new venture formed around the Connection Machine as the compute hardware and Symbolics workstations as the front end. The Connection Machine software was written in Star Lisp.
Unfortunately this short was all they produced before their funding fell through and the company closed down.
I first saw this animation on a VHS tape as a kid - ever since I learned about Lisp and Symbolics and all that history, I've thought it would be cool to redo this animation rendered in real-time. Hardly a challenge for modern computers - or probably even computers from 20 years ago.
What would really be amazing if we could find the source files for all of the 3d files and load them up into S-Graphics on a refurbed 3600 workstation.
The film wasn't the point. The point was to show off the 3D geometry capabilities of the lisp machine, as well as the boids flocking algorithm which was quite innovative at that time.
It impressed the hell out of everybody in the audience when they showed it for the first time.
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There was always a big presentation in a theater in the evening where they would debut dozens of animations like this, many with “behind the scenes” looks at how they were constructed and rendered and notes about the new techniques developed to generate them.
After their company Digital Productions (based around the Cray) failed, John Whitney Jr and Gary Demos started a new venture formed around the Connection Machine as the compute hardware and Symbolics workstations as the front end. The Connection Machine software was written in Star Lisp.
Unfortunately this short was all they produced before their funding fell through and the company closed down.
The original source code for the boids program described in "Behavioral animation": http://www.red3d.com/cwr/code/boids.lisp
The accompanying paper: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/papers/1987/boids.html
It impressed the hell out of everybody in the audience when they showed it for the first time.