I doubt it as CGI wasn't even in it's infancy. See TRON or The Last Starfighter. Before CGI chaps like Rob Bottin, Rick Baker and the legendary Dick Smith were creating spfx make-up that still holds it's own today and physical fx were a stapel of sci-fi and horror films. What you see on-screen is all in-camera
shareAlot of the effects like the huge tetralink snake thing that doubled as the incubator was a puppet on wires. The laser effects used real lasers. The only CGI was when they showed Proteus' screen, the kind of visual flare type images that were also reused in Voyagers. Very primative by today's standards.
shareThe effects are gorgeous!!
sharePrimitive is beautiful.
Maybe they used a Scanimate... An analog video computer. Lots of Scanimate examples on YouTube if you want to see it. It was really popular in the 70's and 80's.
They used a little scanimate yes, from Image West. For the pyramid style objects that rush by and pulsate as Proteus talks mainly. I know that a Univeristy in Utah contributed graphics for some of the scenes. In other scenes and most likely the graphics in the end sequence were created by MAGI and their Synthavision system. I saw that Bo Gehring is listed in the credits as a Synthavision programmer or somesuch so it's likely that all the computer graphics work was done on MAGI's machines which I think consisted of alot of 70's mainfraimes, terminals and such.
Thousands die every day for no reason at all, where's your bleeding heart for them?
The psychedelic sequence is really poor, a major FX downturn from MGM's release "2001" seven years earlier. Although the scenes in which Christie and Garret Graham are terrorized by a geometric shape (apparently managed via sculpture-puppetry) are very good.
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