Post your favorite 80s/90s/maybe-2000s crude computer graphics music videos. The keyword here is “apex,” so let's go all out on fully computer generated renderings, and not just green screen trickery to place the band in a room tiled with photos of their own faces. (If you must, you can break this rule at your own discretion).
Go West
https://youtu.be/LNBjMRvOB5M
Green Eyed Monster
https://youtu.be/dA_iULjsa4U
Happy 2000 (only maybe a quarter of this is computer generated, but it's my personal favorite genre of computer generated... weird geometry floating in the sky, so it gets a pass)
https://youtu.be/n4hxXHmMLKI
(this thread is probably going to be filled with "Video Unavailable" black boxes, but who cares)
The fundamental problem of this thread is that it opens the door to someone posting that awful Crazy Frog song and I am not sure we want that to happen… Sweet Like Chocolate would be my Go To example.
https://youtu.be/OQCQnARnKbc
I was also thinking of Waterfalls by TLC but the "girls turned into water" shtick is a surprisingly short part of the video compared to how it was in my memory.
The Mind’s Eye series were 40min+ videos which edited existing CGI demos into a pseudo-narrative film with a dedicated score. Seminal work for the spread of CG in the mainstream via Laserdisc and VHS. Also a good testimony of the speed at which 3DCG has evolved in the 90s.
Discounting the green-screen stuff (for the purposes of this thread) my kneejerk answer has to be TRON, especially anything involving the tanks or recognizers. Really great example of how leaning into a very specific aesthetic can ensure that this will remain the apex of human technological achievement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQwKV7lCzEI
Also have to call out Colin's Bear Animation (mostly because I nearly fell out of my chair playing Mother 3 and hearing this song, which I previously only knew from this)
@“chazumaru”#p80225 these got a sequel, “Beyond the Mind's Eye.” Both they and Imaginaria (or only some from all three?) aired on YTV here under “Short Circuitz.”
Anyway, here's probably my favourite from BTME. I get the tune stuck in my head all the time and until I rewatched it this morning I'd never been able to make out what the woman was saying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipt5GHWHsw0
>!*We are of the butterfly.*!<
Also I'm glad the criteria allows for 2000s stuff, cause crude CG animation definitely did not die after the nineties. I once got a DVD of a 3D anime series called *Mr. Stain on Junk Alley* included free with one of my FMA 03 discs. But it's been a while since I watched the show, so I wouldn't know which episode to post.
Each ep is only about 7 minutes long, [so why not just watch them all](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtABcpnRh2OxEIz5dNpuNyrH2CnABQduJ)?
This one from 2008 (which I guess is maybe beyond the cut off) fascinates me for looking both cool and really cheap in alternating moments. But its definitely timeline wise on the edge of chintsty CGI being relegated to only the Tim and Eric domain
@“NoJoTo”#p80226 Yeah you‘re almost certainly right. That tiling is just such a my-first-opengl-project-looking effect! Their video for Rydeen has (what I think is) a computer-generated piano keyboard swirling around, and it’s clear that they were trying to get as much mileage as possible out of that 10 second loop. So I liked to imagine that for the Kimi ni mune kyun video they had access to a computer, but only the budget for a single effect, and decided the best possible use of the computer was to fill a room with tiles of their faces. Of course it makes much more sense that they literally just printed out the pictures and pasted them all over the floor, which I suppose is also fun to imagine.
Does anyone have some rough estimate for how much it would have cost at the time to do that swirling piano effect in the Rydeen video, if it was in fact computer generated? This was pre-Tron! So I feel even such a simple effect had to have been crazy expensive.
Also NoJoTo, the source of your profile picture is an example of some fantastic early 2000s computer animation done by one guy who (presumably) had limited computing power. (I still continue to think about it almost every day.)
The costume designs and Tim Burton-esque claymation bits are all very good, which makes the crude 3D animation feel much more natural and intentional than some of these other videos that mix 3D with real humans.
It's cool to see all the stuff I associate with Kyary Pamyu Pamyu done much better almost decade earlier!
They finally made a Transformers movie based on Beast Wars, aka Beasties in Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peJd2Xyy73s
Also I had a hard time finding this thread again, I couldn't remember if the title was about the peak or pinnacle or apex of human technological achievement lol.