Well that’s a bit haunting. 1974 was apparently a time of strange floating heads reciting poetry, but back then this was groundbreaking CGI. “Faces & Body Parts” by Fred Parke, then a graduate student at the University of Utah, is one of the earliest experiments in 3D facial modeling and animation. It’s weird, for sure, but does it hit the uncanny valley? I think it’s just generally creepy to see disembodied heads shapeshifting within a black void.
Only a couple years later in 1976, the film Futureworld became the first to use CGI for a human face. But even later tries weren’t always pretty. Just look at Pixar’s Tin Toy from 1988. Somehow these 1974 faces made it out better than the beak baby from that one.
This video also gives a quick speech synchronization demo at the end, with one of the disembodied heads reciting Emily Dickinson’s poem, “How happy is the little stone.” It’s like one of the Haunted Mansion headstones decided to go solo!
