The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
The earliest pioneers: 1940s to mid-1960s
John Whitney John Whitney Sr. (1917–1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. In the 1940s and 1950s, he and his brother James created a series of experimental films made with a custom-built device based on old anti-aircraft analog computers (Kerrison Predictors) connected by servomechanisms to control the motion of lights and lit objects – the first example of motion control photography. One of Whitney's best known works from this early period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with graphic designer Saul Bass. In 1960, Whitney established his company Motion Graphics Inc., which largely focused on producing titles for film and television, while continuing further experimental works. In 1968, his pioneering motion control model photography was used on Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and also for the slit-scan photography technique used in the film's "Star Gate" finale.
The first digital image
One of the first programmable digital computers was SEAC (the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer), which entered service in 1950 at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Maryland, USA. In 1957, computer pioneer Russell Kirsch and his team unveiled a drum scanner for SEAC, to "trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs", and so doing made the first digital image by scanning a photograph. The image, picturing Kirsch's three-month-old son, consisted of just 176×176 pixels. They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize types of characters and display digital images on an oscilloscope screen. This breakthrough can be seen as the forerunner of all subsequent computer imaging, and recognising the importance of this first digital photograph, Life magazine in 2003 credited this image as one of the "100 Photographs That Changed the World".
From the late 1950s and early 1960s, mainframe digital computers were becoming commonplace within large organisations and universities, and increasingly these would be equipped with graphic plotting and graphics screen devices. Consequently, a new field of experimentation began to open up.
The first computer-drawn film In 1960, a 49-second vector animation of a car traveling down a planned highway was created at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology on the BESK computer. The consulting firm Nordisk ADB, which was a provider of software for the Royal Swedish Road and Water Construction Agency realized that they had all the coordinates to be able to draw perspective from the driver's seat for a motorway from Stockholm towards Nacka. In front of a specially designed digital oscilloscope with a resolution of about 1 megapixel a 35 mm camera with an extended magazine was mounted on a specially made stand. The camera was automatically controlled by the computer, which sent a signal to the camera when a new image was fed on the oscilloscope. It took an image every twenty meters (yards) of the virtual path. The result of this was a fictional journey on the virtual highway at a speed of 110 km/h (70 mph). The short animation was broadcast on November 9, 1961, at primetime in the national television newscast Aktuellt.
Bell Labs Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was a leading research contributor in computer graphics, computer animation and electronic music from its beginnings in the early 1960s. Initially, researchers were interested in what the computer could be made to do, but the results of the visual work produced by the computer during this period established people like Edward Zajac, Michael Noll and Ken Knowlton as pioneering computer artists. Edward Zajac produced one of the first computer generated films at Bell Labs in 1963, titled A Two Gyro Gravity Gradient attitude control System, which demonstrated that a satellite could be stabilized to always have a side facing the Earth as it orbited. Ken Knowlton developed the Beflix (Bell Flicks) animation system in 1963, which was used to produce dozens of artistic films by artists Stan VanDerBeek, Knowlton and Lillian Schwartz. Instead of raw programming, Beflix worked using simple "graphic primitives", like draw a line, copy a region, fill an area, zoom an area, and the like. In 1965, Michael Noll created computer-generated stereographic 3-D movies, including a ballet of stick figures moving on a stage. Some movies also showed four-dimensional hyper-objects projected to three dimensions. Around 1967, Noll used the 4-D animation technique to produce computer-animated title sequences for the commercial film short Incredible Machine (produced by Bell Labs) and the TV special The Unexplained (produced by Walt DeFaria). Many projects in other fields were also undertaken at this time.
Boeing-Wichita In the 1960s, William Fetter was a graphic designer for Boeing at Wichita, and was credited with coining the phrase "Computer Graphics" to describe what he was doing at Boeing at the time (though Fetter himself credited this to colleague Verne Hudson). Fetter's work included the 1964 development of ergonomic descriptions of the human body that are both accurate and adaptable to different environments, and this resulted in the first 3-D animated wire-frame figures. Such human figures became one of the most iconic images of the early history of computer graphics, and often were referred to as the "Boeing Man". Fetter died in 2002.
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