I just came across this video by (Pixar’s Chief Scientist) Loren Carpenter, who describes his work as follows:
“I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world’s first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each.”
I was not even born at that time. There is a primitive teapot in the scene, may be the beginning of it as well. Click the image above to watch the video…