Silicon Graphics: The Machines Behind the Impossible
Silicon Graphics made interactive 3D into a professional working environment. Its workstations helped define the graphics pipeline, OpenGL and the culture of visual computing.
Read storyStories from the render roomEst. 2025
History / craft / technology
The machines changed.
The obsession didn’t.
Long-form stories about the artists, engineers and studios that taught computers to make us believe.
Latest story · 11 September 2026
Why Jurassic Park Used Less CGI Than You Remember
Jurassic Park's digital dinosaurs occupied about six minutes of the film. Its effects teams made those minutes work alongside mechanical creatures, photographed shadows and carefully matched reflections.
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9 essays on animation, VFX and digital image-making.
Industrial Light & Magic: The Company That Built the Impossible
George Lucas wanted to make Star Wars. Hollywood did not have the machine to make Star Wars. So Lucas built the machine.
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Blue Sky Studios: The Company That Chased Light, Then an Acorn
A group of people who had learned to make computers trace rays – originally not movie rays, not beautiful rays, but radiation rays and light rays and mathematically useful rays – started…
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Pacific Data Images: The Studio That Taught Computers to Stop Looking Like Computers
A company starts in Silicon Valley in 1980 with a few people, some computers, a lot of ambition, and no obvious way to become a movie studio. It makes broadcast graphics. It makes commerc…
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Pixar: The Company That Turned Technical Failure Into Emotional Infrastructure
The story does not start with Woody and Buzz. It does not even start with Steve Jobs. It starts with a stranger ambition: a group of computer graphics researchers in the 1970s wanted to m…
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Platige Image: The Warsaw Studio That Made Polish 3D Believable
At night, after the client work was done, Tomek Bagiński went back to his computer and kept building a cathedral.
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Rhythm & Hues: The Studio That Taught Digital Animals to Act, Then Taught Hollywood How Broken VFX Economics Were
Rhythm & Hues was a visual effects company. It made animals. It made logos. It made aircraft, snow, skies, oceans, fur, muscles, daemons, talking pigs, polar bears that sold soda, lions t…
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Wētā FX: The Studio That Taught Digital Things to Have Inner Lives
A director in New Zealand wanted to make movies that were too large for New Zealand. He wanted murder fantasies, ghosts, hobbits, cave trolls, armies, giant apes, blue aliens, intelligent…
Read storyWhy Eric3D
Behind every impossible image is a very human story.
Eric3D follows the history of computer graphics through the people who built it: small teams, strange tools, stubborn experiments and the business decisions that changed what appeared on screen.
No feeds. No filler. Just researched, illustrated essays by Edwin Miller.
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