$5,000
A large pre-production illustration of Devils Tower from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Columbia, 1977). Created by Colin Cantwell for Steven Spielberg, the full-color illustration portrays the alien descent in front of Devils Tower, with two principal characters and the throngs of science and military observers that might appear on screen. From the collection of Cantwell, who worked on developing a new special effects technology on Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind . This large original illustration is a “side effect from a very expensive failure," according to artist and special effects pioneer Cantwell. During pre-production, Spielberg explored the possibility of using computer graphics for the scene with the alien spacecraft. Cantwell worked with a company that had done work for the military with ray tracing software. They needed a test of how the alien ships would appear with this experimental technology, using ray tracing software on IBM punch cards. They used the most powerful (non-military) computer available at the time; the cooling for this system employed two and a half blocks of water cooler towers working at maximum to prevent the computer from frying while it did the computations. This piece is a colored pencil illustration of Devils Tower in Wyoming that was used in this experiment, which was kept secret following production. The experiment resulted in one Polaroid image, and it did do what it was supposed to do, but the technology
Auctioneer:
Juliens Auctions
Date:
2014-12-05
