The Works (film)

The Works is a shelved 3D computer animated film which was under development by the staff of the Computer Graphics Lab in association with the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, New York. Being worked on sporadically from 1979 to 1986, the film's development and production had difficulties which finally prompted the film being abandoned before completion. The Works would have been the first entirely 3D CGI film had it been finished in the early 1980s as intended. This goal was later accomplished by Pixar's Toy Story, released in 1995, nearly a decade after The Works was attempted. The name was inspired by the original meaning of the word "robot", from "robota" "work" in many Slavic languages. It was originally intended to be approximately 90 minutes long although less than 10 minutes were known to be produced. Short in length and few in number, the completed film sequences were highly impressive considering the state of the technology and what was then the unique look of 3D computer animation. A trailer of the forthcoming film was screened at SIGGRAPH in 1982. The project also resulted in other groundbreaking computer animations such as 3DV, Sunstone, Inside a Quark and some segments of the short film The Magic Egg from 1984.

The story, written by Lance Williams, was never finalized but centered around "Ipso Facto", a charming elliptical robot, and the heroine, a young female pilot nicknamed "T-Square". The story was set at some time in the distant future when a malfunctioning computer, "The Works", triggered a devastating last World War but then, realizing what it had done, set out to repopulate the planet entirely with robots. T-Square, who worked and lived in a nearby asteroid belt, vowed to journey to Earth and fight to make it safe for the return of her fellow space-faring humanity. Many staff-members contributed designs and modeled characters and sets under the coordination of art director Bil Maher who created blueprint-style designs for T-Square and many of the 25 robots called for by the script. Dick Lundin, legendary for his exhaustive and elaborate creations, designed and animated a huge mining ship and the gigantic robot "Ant" which was to be one of the villains in control of the Earth.