The first ever film to create 3D shading with a computer that produced the first ever CGI human character was the model Cindy (Susan Dey). This movie achieved this feat before Disney's more famous Tron (1982) hit the screens. The Web site Filmsite said of Cindy: "Her digitization was visualized by a computer-generated simulation of her body being scanned--notably the first use of shaded 3D CGI in a feature film. Polygonal models obtained by digitizing a human body were used to render the effects."
Michael Crichton managed to predict a future technology, CGI, with this film but put to more sinister applications. Crichton was always a skeptic about new technologies. CGI would later bring dinosaurs to life in one of his most successful stories, Jurassic Park (1993).
Crichton started thinking about the subject of the film in 1975. He says he went to a Los Angeles computer company to find out how they could create copies in commercials without looking too ridiculous and discovered a company in Texas was already doing it, called tomography.
In the early 1980s Albert Finney was in such high demand that he made nine movies in three years. In fact, he ended his work on this movie on a Friday and went to work on the movie Shoot the Moon (1982) on the following Monday.
Writer-director Michael Crichton once said of this film: "Television commercials are already manipulative. That's exactly what they're supposed to do. I don't consider that kind of manipulation evil, but what would happen if someone with a bit more scientific knowledge began tampering with commercials?"