A Brief History of Movie Special Effects

Toy Story — Animated CGI
Since Disney's first major movies in the late 1930s, its animators had gone on to perfect the hand-drawn film. Then came 1995, when the company released Toy Story, the first feature-length animated film to be created with CGI. A joint project with animation studio Pixar, the film took four years to create, generated 1,000 gigabytes of data (the average computer only holds between 80 and 160 gigabytes) and required 800,000 machine hours of editing. Since the success of Toy Story, Pixar has gone on to produce 10 more critically acclaimed feature films, which have garnered the company 24 Academy Awards and more than $6 billion.

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