The rebels' briefing screen in Star Wars is the film's one scene of digital computer animation: a flight down the trench in wire lines, made by Larry Cuba at the University of Illinois at Chicago on a Vector General line-drawing screen and a PDP-11/45, programmed in Tom DeFanti's GRASS. George Lucas asked for wire cages "with all lines and vertices visible", for "a very mechanical look". Cuba photographed the six trench modules, traced them with the tablet's electronic pen, punched in each corner's depth and built "about fifty of these U-shaped sections". To move live, a screen has to redraw about thirty times a second, and his true-perspective trench went "way beyond that limit": "it took about two minutes to complete each frame." So a Mitchell 35mm camera stood in front of the screen and the program fired it each time a frame was complete. "I managed to get about thirty frames an hour into the camera." In his words: "Since the Star Wars sequence was being filmed it didn't need to exist in real time anyway."

Every line of our trench, lab and camera was drawn the same way, by our own code; no frames from any film.

What's the slowest thing you've watched at full speed?

Sources: David Hutchison, "An Interview With Star Wars Animator Larry Cuba", Starlog 12, March 1978, reprinted in Creative Computing, May/June 1978.
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).