The documentary Inside The Works, produced by Ziggy Cashmere, surpasses 12,000 views on YouTube and has become a key record of early digital animation. With 82 minutes of footage, it tells the story of The Works, a lost and incomplete computer-animated film created at NYIT during the 1970s. The film brings together testimonies from pioneers such as Ed Catmull, Alvy Smith, and Gordon Moore, along with artists like Tom Sito and Lance Williams, offering a direct look at the origins of an industry.
The 70s hardware that dreamed of Toy Story 🖥️
The Works was developed at NYIT using the hardware of the era: computers with less power than a modern calculator and storage systems that occupied entire rooms. The documentary details how Catmull and his team developed rendering algorithms and keyframe animation techniques without graphical interfaces, working with assembly code and terminals without a mouse. Each frame required hours of computation, and the film was never completed due to technical limitations. This experiment laid the conceptual foundations that would later flourish at Pixar and in the CGI industry.
When rendering a cube was an epic odyssey 🎬
The documentary shows these geniuses explaining how animating a sphere took them longer than a Renaissance sculptor making a marble statue. Watching Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, talk about RAM in kilobytes evokes a mix of nostalgia and nervous laughter. The most ironic part is that The Works, a failed and forgotten project, now has more views on YouTube than many modern animated films on their first day. Technology advances, but the morbid fascination with glorious failures is eternal.