Over the next few months we are going to be producing a series of videos on the history
of computer animation. To begin, we’re going to be looking at the medium’s infancy between
the years 1942 and 1963, but first we’re going to take a quick look at the history
of traditional animation up until that point.
The illusion of moving images dates back thousands of years. Cave paintings and the flicker of light from
fire produced the illusion of subtle movement and shadow puppetry shows the projection and
manipulation of figures silhouetted by a light source.
Now these are clearly distant ancestors to animation. A more recognizable antecedent
would come with Christiaan Huygens' invention of the magic lantern in 1659. This device
allowed painted glass slides to pass through light, creating moving scenes. This optical
trickery is the backbone of animation and several inventions throughout the 19th century
expanded upon the idea that multiple images could combine to make one in fluid motion.
The first of these was the Thaumatrope, a disc attached to two pieces of string. Each
of the disc’s sides had a picture and when the string was twirled they blended into one.
Next came the phénakisticope, a cardboard disc with a series of illustrations depicting
different phases of action. When spun a simple animation repeated on loop, similar to a modern GIF.
This paved way for the zoetrope, a cylinder with vertical cuts through which a similar animation could be viewed.
The zoetrope was further improved upon by Charles-Émile Reynaud and his invention the
praxinoscope, which replaced the cuts with several mirrors that reflected the images.
Reynaud’s contribution not only to animation but film as a whole cannot be understated.
His Théâtre Optique system was the first to use perforations to pull images through
a projection process, and was cinema’s first public performance.
Around this time other film pioneers were experimenting with different technologies.
Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Lumière brothers cinematograph changed not only how
motion pictures were projected but also the way they were produced. Early film artist
Georges Méliès used effects similar to animation as did the Edison film The Enchanted Drawing,
directed by J. Stuart Blackton. Produced in 1906, Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny
Faces is generally considered to be the first animated film.
All these experiments involved stop-motion techniques. The birth of traditional animation,
that is drawing each frame by hand, came two years later with French artist Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie.
The next major development came from cartoonist Winsor McCay, famous
for his comic strip Little Nemo. His first foray into animation was an adaption of the
comic, which introduced an expressiveness and smoothness not seen before. Like other
early animators he appeared on screen with his creations, most notably Gertie the Dinosaur
in 1914. Personally, I think his greatest animated achievement is The Sinking of the
Lusitania, a re-creation of Germany’s attack on a British passenger ship during World War One.
We’re going to jump ahead a little now though we will cover John Bray and the rise of animation
studios, Disney, Warner Bros. etc. extensively in a future video. For the purpose of this
video I think it’s important that we’ve covered the innovative spirt of early animation
as computer animation shares a lot of this though the initial efforts resemble the abstract
rather than the human or anthropomorphic characters that came to dominate the medium.
In the 1920s, a German art movement pushed animation more towards the realm of music and poetry.
Abstract film, or Absolute Film, explored motion and light rather than telling
a narrative. This work focussed on abstract drawings that occupied space and time with
rhythmic movement and composition. Notable artists include Hans Richter, director of
Rhythmus 21, 23 and 25, Oskar Fischinger, perhaps the best known and most accessible,
and Viking Eggeling, whose sketches are said to have started the movement. However, for
me, the stand out of the group is Walter Ruttmann as I believe his Lichtspiel series expanded
the language of film and showed the range of what the art form was capable of.
Inspired by these abstract films, brothers James and John Whitney began experimenting
with film and animation in 1942. Rather than photographing the light reflecting off an
image they used cut-outs to manipulate the light as the image, producing a glowing, aura
effect. This was coupled with a score composed by the brothers using a pendulum device and
written directly onto the film, similar to Norman McLaren. The result is otherworldly.
Following the Second World War, military control systems began showing up in surplus stores.
John purchased one intended to aid an anti-aircraft gun and connected the electrical outputs to
servos controlling small light bulbs. Reprogramming the system then allowed these lights to move
in a mathematically precise way. Exposing this to film created the first computer generated
animation.
John Whitney would continue to experiment throughout the 1950s. His work appeared before
a mainstream audience in 1958 during the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
He founded Motion Graphics Incorporated in 1960, using his homemade analogue computer to produce
animated sequences for television shows and commercials and in 1961 released a demo reel
of his experiments entitled Catalog.
The digital computers of the 1940s were large enough to fill entire rooms. They had the
processing power to calculate math equations and analyze up to 5000 characters of data
per second. Their programming, however, could take weeks and required the rearranging of
several switches and cables. With advancements in technology and innovation, processing power
increased and programming could be stored for quicker access.
The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer, or SEAC, was built by the U.S. National Bureau
of Standards in 1950. Seven years later NBS employee Russell Kirsch led a group of engineers
to the develop a drum scanner that would use SEAC to trace variations of intensity over
the surfaces of photographs. The computer would recognize patterns in the image and
display them on a screen, creating a digital reproduction. The first digital image scanned
was a photo of Kirsch’s three month old son, a mere 176x176 pixels in size.
One of the most important figures in computer animation and graphics is Ivan Sutherland.
While at MIT, Sutherland invented the computer program Sketchpad which allowed humans to
interact with a computer via light pen. By drawing on a screen the computer would render
a line or circle that could be manipulated and the created image saved and retrieved.
This revolutionized not only the way we communicate with computers but also the way we could create
with them.
Around this same time, Bell Labs was also experimenting with computer graphics.
In 1963 Edward Zajac sought to illustrate how a satellite could move through space in relation to the
Earth. He programmed the calculations and fed them into an IBM via punch cards. The
output was printed onto microfilm and the result was Simulation of a Two-Gyro Gravity-Gradient
Attitude Control System, the first digitally animated film.
In the next video we will follow the work of Sutherland and Bell Labs into the ‘70s
and ‘80s. We will also see how artists and Hollywood used this developing technology
for expression and entertainment. So subscribe if you haven’t and if you enjoyed this video,
we have others concerning animation like our introduction to the work of Dave and Max Fleischer.
Check that out. I will also post links to material relevant to this video in the description
if you want to research it further. Thank you so much for watching.