Also the HBO city flyover interstitial:

https://www.reddit.com/r/80s/comments/jy7d73/the_hbo_1983_ci...

That 1972 footage of the periscope driving through the city streets was impressive. As I was watching it I thought at first that this was the real street and they'd show the model after, but it was the model. The texture of the street looks so much better in this portion of the video than it looks when you see the model makers tweaking the street earlier in the video.

This was sort of a continuation of work he already did on 2001, but with the introduction of computer control. In 2001, it was all done with purely mechanical controls.

One problem with minatures, positioning the camera for each photo, then turning the result into special effects shot for a movie is that it can take days to record a scene, get the film developed, and view the result. Only when played back at full speed (24fps) the result might not be believable or lack the dramatic flare they were hoping for.

To fix this they looked for the fastest display they could find to do real time previews. They ended up with a vector display from three rivers computer corp (later renamed to PERQ Systems Corporation). This vector display could manage 50,000 vectors @ 60 Hz and allowed for wireframe to be displayed in real time, allowing MUCH quicker turn around times before they committed the result to film.

Made for interesting stories at the dinner table, doubly so after I saw star wars as a kid and my dad's vector display helped with the above.

I remember seeing a very similar system at wright-patterson afb in ohio that was used for a flight simulator. The model was mounted vertically on a wall and at a much smaller scale. This was in the early 80's and it was no longer in use. But the model detail was incredible. They had the camera hooked up to a monitor and seeing the camera "fly" through the scene at an appropriately scaled speed was amazing -- even on a tv screen. You could see the camera moving over the model...but on the monitor the view looked real.