Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 6: Personal Computer Era (1980s)
1984
Robert Abel and Associates Produce the First Computer-Generated Commercial, Brilliance
Abel did early film work with John Whitney Sr. and Saul Bass for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. This famous ad, “Brilliance,” was produced in 1984 and premiered a year after the Macintosh commercial, during Super Bowl XIX in January 1985. This thirty-second ad for, of all things, the Canned Food Information Council featured a risqué robot based on motion capture. It was an important example of raster graphics developed with software.
Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random.
People
Alfred Hitchcock, John Whitney, Robert Abel, Saul Bass
Movements
computer animation, digital art, video art, Motion Graphics
Filed under
- Ideas
- advertising, digital art, video art
- Technologies
- computer animation, computer graphics, Macintosh, motion capture, raster graphics
- People
- Alfred Hitchcock, John Whitney, Robert Abel, Saul Bass
- Works
- Brilliance, Vertigo
- Exhibitions
- Information
- Organisations
- Apple, Canned Food Information Council, Robert Abel and Associates
Related moments
Echoes across time
- 1960 · John Whitney Sr. Founds Motion Graphics Incorporated
- 1958 · John Whitney Sr. Makes the Vertigo Titles with an Analog Computing Device
- 1968 · Lee Harrison III Builds Scanimate