Contributions from you "old timers"

Starting with the latest first here:

===========================================

From: Craig Zerouni 

Proud to be old...

I'm not sure exactly what you want/need, so let me start with a little
family tree of the UK computer animation scene, with a digression into
just how primitive it all was in 1981.

In 1981 I turned up at The Moving Picture Company (MPC), which was then
(and arguably is still now) the UK's leading video post house. They also
had a reputation as technology junkies, and they had built a motion
control rig under the direction (and I use that term loosely) of Andrew
Berend, a London Film School graduate and hyper-active chain smoker. The
computer that controlled the rig was built by Interactive Motion Control
(IMC) (one of the partners at IMC was Bud Elam, who later won an Academy
Award for Technical Achievement for motion control technology - his
co-winner was Ray Feeney, who started RFX. I now work for RFX. But I'm
getting ahead of the story).

Anyway, I stumbled in there one day and said I wanted to do computer
animation. At the time, they had just installed a computer animation
system, which consisted of a Hewlett Packard desktop machine, programmed
in Basic, which drove a plotter. The plotter had no pens - instead, it
had a fibre-optic light source where the pen went - this was pointed at
the camera film plane. The lens would open, a colored gel would rotate
in front of the lens, and the plotter would draw a wire-frame layer
directly onto the film emulsion. Then the color would change, and more
lines would be drawn. Of course, this all took place in a black box.
This multi-layered approach could take minutes to do a single frame.
There was no way of knowing what you had until you unloaded it, took it
to the labs, waited overnight, went back to the labs, brought it back,
laced it up and viewed it on the Movieola.

The quality of the light was uneven, and the guy who helped build it
spent a lot of time trying to control light intensity down fibre-optic
cable. He was an Australian named was Mike Boudry.

Meanwhile, Ian Chisholm was at the BBC, getting patents for building
bluescreen keying hardware which predates Ultimatte. Ian was hired by
MPC, and, to compress the story somewhat, Ian, Andrew and I went off to
set up Computer FX Ltd, later called CFX Ltd, and today called CFX
Associates.

CFX was set up by buying an IMI (Interactive Machines Inc) vector
display device. This was a real-time, monochrome, vector device which
competed with E&S products. I think PDI bought the first one (for
animation use) and we bought the second, or possibly it was the other
way round. Anyway, we had the first real-time animation system in
Europe. I think this may be our only real claim to fame in terms of
historic markers - we did a lot of work after that, and some of it was
interesting in its time, but I don't think we ever did anything that
constitutes a landmark in the craft. Though I did write some code to
generate realistic water and reflections before anyone else in the UK.

And we did build a frame buffer and render engine based on the Texas DSP
chip. It did all render arithmetic in fixed point, and so was very fast
for what it cost. But ultimately, it was pointless.

Anyway, CFX officially started in, I think, March 1983, though we were
writing software and building hardware during 1982.

We output directly to film, by filming off the monitor through different
colored gels. The camera and the gels were controlled by the IMI itself,
so our original animation package had a scripting system that involved
animation files, passes over the film, and colors. Since the number of
colors in the wheel was limited (to 6, I think), sometimes a person
would have to stand there in the dark and change filters between shoots.

Some of this oddball hardware was also built by Mike Boudry.

I was once animating with a client, who said something like "this is
amazing, how fast you can do this stuff.  This must help you get it
right very easily" to which I replied "We don't make any fewer mistakes
than anybody else. We just compress the time between mistakes."

Eventually, Andrew Berend left to join Mike Boudry and set up The
Computer Film Company (CFC). Later Andrew would leave there to help set
up Cambridge Animation.

One of the companies that set up around the time we did was Digital
Pictures, which really did break a lot of technical barriers in the UK.
Their 2 founders were Chris Briscoe and Peter Florence. Eventually, they
sold the company and left it. When Andrew Berend set up Cambridge
Animation, his partner was Peter Florence. When Andrew went off to set
up CFX, Ian and I bought out Andrew's share and, several years later,
sold it to Chris Briscoe.

London is a very small pond indeed.


Terrence -

Here's something else that may help tie the UK to the US a little (via
Canada).

Just as CFX was realizing that the wireframe business was evaporating,
and that our own home-grown raster hardware/software wasn't going to get
good enough fast enough (we were always small), two guys called John
Penney and Greg Hermanovic phoned us up.

They said they were from Omnibus Computer Graphics, the world's first
publicly listed computer animation company, and they were looking to
franchise their software around the world. They wanted to start with
England because they could speak the language and because it was
arguably the next most advanced market after North America.

After a lot of talking and thinking and listening to total lies ("we
have a million dollar inventory of already built objects at Omnibus" -
in other words, instead of writing off the cost of building a 3D
football as the cost of doing a job, they were capitalizing it as an
asset) we decided ok, we'll buy the stuff. Terms were arranged (I think
the number was in the region of $CAN100,000), and a reel of software
(just like you seen in those 50s science fiction films) arrived. We
installed it.

As franchisees, we were entitled to the source code, so that's what we
got. We installed it and got to understanding it.

Meanwhile, Omnibus, belching after having eaten Robert Able and Digital
Productions back-to-back, fell over. Kaput. Out of business. The world's
first shareholders in computer animation found out what a great business
this is. But we had never paid for the software we had, which we were
now happily using in production.

Eventually, the receivers called us up and demanded payment. We refused,
on the grounds that,without support, it wasn't worth nearly as much.
Eventually, we settled for about $CAN20,000 I believe. But we still had
source.

Greg surfaced from under the wreckage of Omnibus, with his partner Kim
Davidson, and called us up, offering to support PRISMS, which is what
the software had been called at Omnibus. We agreed.

So not only was CFX the world's first customer for Side Effects
Software, but we had source for a few years, until we agreed to give up
getting updates (we were always fair and reasonable!). And we used the
source - I once ported the command line and channel manipulation portion
of PRISMS to an Atari Amiga, which we used to control our own motion
control rig.

By the way, I said that Digital Pictures was started by Chris Briscoe
and Peter Florence. Also present were Steve Lowe and Paul Brown. Paul is
now a professor of CG somewhere, and Steve is a very successful
commercials director in London.

-Craig
Craig Zerouni 

===========================================

Biography: John Whitney (1917-1995) A Los Angeles native, Whitney was a pioneer in many forms of experimental art before turning to computers to aid in his graphic creations. He attended Pomona College in California in the 1940's and made a series of abstract films with his brother James Whitney. From his experience working in the aircraft industry during World War II, Whitney realized that a bomb site containing primitive computer elements could be modified to calculate abstract shapes, and change them over time to create crude animation of a sort. In the 1950Õs Whitney worked in Hollywood as an animation director at UPA, most notably creating the opening credits to HitchcockÕs "Vertigo". Whitney founded "Motion Graphics Inc." in 1960 and produced animation for both television and film, devising the now famous "slit scan" technique used by Doug Trumbull in "2001: A Space Odyssey". In 1966 with the help of a grant from IBM, Whitney made a short film called "Permutations" using an early digital computer. Through the 1970's and 80's, Whitney continued to create abstract computer animation.

===========================================

Triple-I was primarily in the business of making film scanning and printing equipment for the newspaper industry. In the early 80's, John Whitney Jr. and Gary Demos convinced Triple-I to convert one of their film recorders for use in motion pictures. They marketed their services as "Digital Scene Simulation", and did several spots for Mercedes, KCET, as well as much of the work in the film "TRON".
-Dave Sieg

===========================================

About Digital Productions:
Okay so I show up at this place and what do I find. Well, "The Last Starfighter" was in mid-production. Some guy was sitting in a trailer outside the main office, drawing storyboards faster than I could cover the paper even if I was allowed to just spill paint from a bucket. In another room is Ron Cobb, master of detail, carefully designing every last square inch of those spaceships. There was not one grommet on any of those ships that didn't have a purpose that Ron could describe. Ron totally spoiled me, because he was the first Art Director I ever worked with and he always new exactly what he wanted. I remember one time I was animating the scene where Alex had just blown away the Rylon cargo ship, deep in the tunnels of the asteroid. The shot begins with the Gunstar facing away from the camera, pointed into the dead-end of the tunnel. Alex has just made his first real-life kill. The storyboard called for the Gunstar to "turn around sadly." So at this point I'm not exactly a seasoned animator, just a couple of semesters of hand-drawn dancing fishes and some computer generated T-bone steaks under my belt. I show Ron the motion test for the sad, turning Gunstar, which is sort of slow and has a little kind of "Aw, shucks" kick to it. Ron's response was to turn to me, look me in the eye, and say very sweetly and kindly, "Well, Paul, I think maybe that's a little bit _too_ sad, don't you?"

One more fun fact. You know the graphics for the video game in "The Last Starfighter?" These were video-game quality and not movie-image quality, displayed on the monitors in the movie whenever the kids played the video game. Well, all those video game shots were created at Digital Productions first, in a sort of boot-strapping strategy whereby the high-quality rendering software was being completed at the same time. The "real" shots of the spaceships weren't possible until the project was nearly a year underway. (Warning: these facts could be slightly off, I invite others to make corrections)

Paul Isaacs

===========================================

Biography: Dave C. Evans (1924-1998)

One of a very few who could be called a true "founding father" of computer graphics, Dave Evans passed away on Oct.3rd, 1998. Perhaps best know for being the Co-founder of "Evans&Sutherland Computer Corp." in 1968, Mr. Evans was at one time chairman of the computer science departments at both the University of California Berkeley and University of Utah. Evans first associated with Ivan Sutherland at both Berkeley and the Pentagon's "Advanced Reseaarch Project Agency" (ARPA). Mr. Evans made many contributions to a wide range of computer technologies, and a great many of his students went on to florish in the brand new field of computer graphics, becoming true pioneers themselves. Students of Mr. Evans include Alan Kay(Head of Xerox PARC), Jim Clark(founder of both Silicon Graphics and Netscape Communications), John Warnock(Co-founder of Adobe Systems), Edwin Catmull(Co-founder of the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division, and also co-founder of Pixar).

===========================================

In September of 1987, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future went on the air in North America via syndication. The series was the first to include characters that were done entirely in computer animation. Soaron and Blastarr were two cgi robots. At least one of them appeared in each of the 22 episodes produced. Computer animation was done by Arcca Animation in Toronto. The producer was Bob Robbins. The art director was Earl Huddleston. Animators included Paul Griffin, Andy Varty, Sylvia Wong, Mark Mayerson and Les Major. Paintbox work by Rob Smith and Mike Huffman. Jenniffer Julich was in charge of storyboards.
Mark Mayerson
Catapult Productions Toronto, Ontario, Canada
mayerson@monsterbymistake.com

===========================================

It was such an exciting place to be in the first couple of years -- where else would geeky programmers ever have had the chance ot meet the likes of Jim Henson, Mick Jagger, DEVO, The Tubes, etc. etc.? I remember sending my parents a copy of an article about the company that appeared in TIME magazine, written about our first-ever use of a Cray supercomputer to product special effects instead of military/defense applications. Eventually I stopped sending those stories along since hundreds like it were eventually written. I thought I was working at the world's most interesting company. That feeling was usually borne out when I wore my black DP jacket around Los Angeles and people would stop me in the grocery store to ask me about the company. Cooler than cool.

I wouldn't know where to start to volunteer stories. Trying to imagine what would be most relevant for your book, I'm thinking about how much of the software functionality we developed was less a proactive vision on our part, and more of a one-shot, "this client needs to see flames between the toes of the statue" kind of ad-hoc thing. Lots of last-minute brillianc-- we have to find a way to make an explosion! -- which ended up being more valuable longer term than people had imagined. Lots of daytime meetings, arguing about software architecture, that never mattered since we were hacking our way through it every night at 2 am instead.

Emily Nagle Green (Married to another ex-DPer, Jack Green) Forrester Research Amsterdam, Netherlands egreen@forrester.com

===========================================

(Spoken in your best Monty Python accent)...but of course we 'ad it tough. We 'ad to render 26 hours a day, 9 days a week and paint textures onto the screen wit' paintbroosh- in real-time - and when t'job were finished our producer would slice us in two wit' bread-knife.

Tell young animators today and they won't believe you...:)

Porl. The Mill Porl@mill.co.uk

===========================================

"Money For Nothing" MTV video by Dire Straits.(Steve Barron director) David Throssell, Gavin Blair and Ian Pearson's created the animation at Rushes Post production in London, done on the Bosch FGS-4000. The Quantel effects were done by Viv Scott. Ian and Gavin now own and run a company in Vancouver called Mainframe, out of which they produced Reboot.

Steve Sauers - Technical Director Mainframe Entertainment IMAX Division

===========================================

DP (Digital Productions) was way early, formed in about 1982 they used a CRAY-1 and a pair of VAXen to put out some very cool effects. DP was one of those experiences like going away to college or to be in the military which stands out in your memory and establishes relationships in a short period of time that continue for many years after the 'main' experience. Imagine the setting. You start from say the LA airport and drive a short distance and find yourself in a 'bad' part of town, project housing and low-rent industrial warehouses. You turn into a dirty alley that runs beside a plastic products factory and come to a chainlink access control gate with contratina razor wire along the top. Once you are buzzed through the gate you are in a parking lot in front of a somewhat rundown warehouse. You enter the wharehouse and suddenly it's a different world. Like a high tech artist's loft filled with digitizing tables, Technical Director Workstations and as you turn a cornor and look to your left a glassed in rasied floor computer room like something out of a supersecret government lab. The transition was amazing.

Frank Chism (SGI/Cray Guy and MPP Dude)

===========================================

hmmmm...........do you mean stories like borrowing kevin tureski's dad's wire-metal-comb-device to do 2d profile slices of 3d models, to transfer to paper for graph points, for digital re-keying and remodeling? (or, on another issue, kevin patiently, quietly, but with some frustration, explaining to everyone that UNIX was the way?)

.....or greg hermanovic working into the very wee late hours in the old omnibus fishbowl, making Canadian maple leaves hit a virtual 3d water surface, for a commercial client logo job, in a way that made him say things like, "what we need is the ability to relate our modeling and animation dynamically!" ( although he probably used different words....and without an exclamation point i'm sure ).....?

....or floyd gillis drawing complex geometrical shape transforms and camera moves by hand on paper back in vancouver, before Vertigo or anything else remotely cg-ish entered his life?

......or kim davidson storyboarding Marilyn Monrobot walking across the old Omnibus logoball to demo "all the possibilities" (because "there are no limits"..."you are only limited by your imagination") ...all the possibilities of 3d cgi animation, to clients in Toronto?

....or mark mayerson keeping us all honest by writing (or speaking) volumes about how this new fangled stuff was just a PART of an animation and film making tradition, and should be improved by....(....well, by so many things, in so many ways, that we STILL aren't there yet ) ?

...or steve goldberg suffering the slings and arrows of executive Mouse criticism whilst animating a 3d sand-tiger-head-in-the-desert (for ALADDIN) because people just couldn't get the hang of a visually detailed background element not only animating in 3d, but actually TALKING ! ....?

.....or MOUSE execs asking me during the very first TOY STORY discussions, "you mean you could actually have these characters in the computer TALKING ?.....LIP SYNCHING?......REALLY?"

....or having to explain to the MOUSE execs what the acronym CGI stood for (we ended up having a contest to guess and the best one was by the producer of ALADDIN, and now of FANTASIA...who said it was for Costly Gems Indeed!)

....or way back when Ominbus execs bought ed catmul's "Paint & Tween" from NYIT and thought they had purchased 3d software....and sold the idea of doing a REAL 3d animation for the new HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA opening.....and then the poor animators (mostly robert marinic) having to FAKE 3d camera moves by interping like hell between flat graphic keyframes ?

....or doug macmillan being asked to "generate" a chrome effect for a client job....and in the end using.....well, doug, YOU should retell the T.P. story.

....or bill pong riding in on a motorcycle five times larger than him...and working barefoot in the canadian winter?

....and i can't remember if it was rod paul or sonya haferkorn in new york, but someone gave us a really swell demo piece over the net (before the net was THE NET ) to explain the powers of displacement mapping to our commercial clients by animating spiky, grotesque, whites of eyeballs right out of the head of a human face......we always seemed to be trying to explain what could be possible in this blackart form ( still are this very week in fact ).

"Philips, Dan" dphilips@dreamworks.com

====================================

When I first started, 15-16 years ago, we were working on Data General Eclipse 3300s, two of them. Each machine was about 7 feet high, 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep, had 32 Kb main memory and a 300Mb disk drive which was about twice the size of a domestic washing machine. I'd say they were maybe 4 or 5 times more powerfull than an Amiga 500. We rendered tests direct to a frame buffer, usually 1-2 days for a 5-10 second test and rendered directly to a Matrix film plotter - there was no disk space to store rendered images as files. Each frame would take 30-90 minutes to render and 10 minutes to plot. Colour consistency isn't guaranteed across film baths so if we missed or gashed a frame, we started over after we'd got the film back from the labs. Our renderer, which was a fine one, was written in house, did no ray tracing or texture mapping, had no reflection maps but did have shadows as long as we didn't use re-entrant polygons in our models. Intersecting surfaces were a no-no. We modeled and animated by writing Fortran 5 code. The last job done on the Eclipses was at a stage when they were so knackered that I was entirely losing disk data about 3 times a day and was archiving my code every 20 minutes or so I could recover it after I'd reformatted the disk every time it went down. One of the disk drives bust so I was booting one machine, starting a render, removing the drive and plugging it back into the other machine so I could start a render on that one. My 8 second sting took a week to render. The air conditioner was being overworked so much it would freeze up every couple of hours, melt and dump gallons of water into the machine room. We had buckets all over the disk drives and mainframes. I didn't get to go home for 10 days.

Pass the martyr a Zimmer frame ;)

Kim Aldis Creative Director The Aldis Animation Co. Ltd. Kim@Aldis.co.uk

====================================

When I first started in Australia in 1988 we had in-house code running on an Elexsi (an Indian supercomputer) - all modelling was done with make files (invoking a series of modelling programs - extrude, clean curve, boolean etc) - all animation was done on an E&S PS300 - then we went to a rendering program to produce rendered images (the render was shade tree based and writing shaders in it similar to writing a renderman shader) Ð after rendering an image you had to call out to everyone else demanding/begging for access to the frame buffer - there was one screen in the middle of the room connected to it (we worked off dumb text only terminals hanging off the elexsi) to view rendered sequences -we had to shoot each frame on to film and then wait for the film to be processed and returned ...ah the good old days when you could set a final render off and be told to stay home for the next 3 days ...ah the bad old days of coming in at 4 in the morning to lay files to 1/4 inch tape before deleting and freeing up space for the next lot of rendered images ...still miss that renderer though ...and the kind of support you can get when your in-house programmer can whip up a lattice program (in 1989!) in 4 days - but then he was god-like ... (still is! - hi Bruno - got anything to add?)

Kit Devine Senior Animator Garner MacLennan Design

====================================

I was at Digital Productions when we produced the Stones' "Hard Woman" video. I didn't produce it, John Lugar did, but I bid and spec'd out the project and was involved throughout the production. It was funny... That was only a few years away from vector graphics as the dominant method of cg production. They wanted the characters to be "cg", which meant they had to look vector graphic, but at Digital, we were working on proprietary 3D software running on a Cray X-MP Supercomputer. The E&S vector displays we used for developing and approving motion tests were hooked up through another system, so we couldn't just composite 3D backgrounds with vector graphic characters, so we had to "fake" vector graphics for the characters by rendering skinny "tubes" in 3D.

Jagger's people had said they only wanted to spend $250,000, and John Whitney, Jr., felt it could be done for that amount, so he accepted their price. Our internal team (I think it was Brad DeGraf - now at Protozoa?, Steve Skinner - now at Viewpoint?, me, perhaps Kevin Bjorke - now at Square?) bid the project at something like $1.5 to $2 million, which was almost exactly what it took to finish the project. Not the first time John didn't listen to his staff....

It was one of the best pieces Digital Productions ever did. But it didn't keep the creditors away.... :(

Another story you might find amusing:

Brad DeGraf was lead TD on a 3D (stereo, using polarized lenses with an over/under image configuration) film I produced at DP for the '84 Expo at Tsukuba, Japan, for the Hitachi Pavillion. It was to be a "child's view of a trip through space". Brad later re-edited it and showed it (I think at SIGGRAPH and some festivals) as "Plan-3D From Outer Space". This, too, was a project bid by Whitney for under a million ($750k), but internally bid (by Brad, Steve Skinner, et al.) at well over $2 million - of course, John was overly optimistic, and the project came in very close to the initial bid from the staff.... (You sense a theme here?) It was my first CG project, and, to make matters worse, I am almost blind in one eye, so I cannot see 3D effects on film or video. Sherry McKenna, Exec. Prod. of DP, now at Oddworld, said I shouldn't tell the clients that I couldn't see 3D, so over the course of a year's worth of production meetings, screenings, etc., I never told them. When we got to the point where we were doing final tweaks and needed to look at everything on film in 3D we would have these screenings at the Directors Guild Theatre on Sunset. The clients would turn to me and say things like, "Gee, David, I don't know if the intraocular distance is adjusted quite right on that scene, I can't fuse the images..." or "It doesn't seem to come off the screen far enough, what do you think?" I would always turn to Brad, who always sat next to me during the screenings, and say, "Hmm, Brad, what do you think?" And whatever Brad would say, I would echo... As far as I know, our clients, who included Jinko Gotoh, who, last I heard, was working at Disney Feature Animation in some capacity, never knew that I couldn't see the 3D effects... If they had ever asked me if I could see 3D, I would have told the truth, but they never did...Funny, what we do to make a living, isn't it?

David M. Ginsberg, Director of Business Affairs tel - (323) 932-0400 - fax - (323) 932-8440 MetroLight Studios, Inc. - www.metrolight.com davidg@metrolight.com or davidg@wgn.net (home)

=================================================

I was indeed involved on Hard Woman. I was in transition at the time, moving from the head of the modeling department (we called them designer/encoder's) into the land of the TD. TD's at DP did everything else besides modelling...animation, lighting, compositing. All proprietary. I laid out the Adobe town for the video, and handed the layout work over to my successor, Stephen Skinner, and I moved on to TD'ing my first project (I believe it was an HBO "behind the scenes" bumper. It was during that time that a bunch of us late-nighters met Mick Jagger. Fun time.

Kevin Rafferty kraff@lucasdigital.com

==================================================