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, fact-checked September 2026.
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