The First Computer Graphics in Film (and Why it Mattered!)

Before Jurassic Park, before Tron, before Star Wars—there was Westworld (1973), the first film to ever use CGI. But it wasn’t NASA or Hollywood VFX wizards who made it happen. Instead, one man hacked together a groundbreaking technique inspired by NASA’s Mars imaging technology—because actual CGI was way too expensive.

In this video, we break down the insane story of how Westworld created the first-ever CGI effect, why it almost didn’t happen, and the crazy workarounds used to pull it off. From digitizing film frame by frame to working with a computer that took one minute per frame, this is a wild look at the origins of computer-generated imagery.

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