Michael Noll's 1967 paper Computers and the visual arts showed a stick figure computer animation of a choreography that would be possible in the future. It was produced on the Bell Labs SC4020 from a Fortran program that he had written.
A film Computer-Generated Ballet by A. Michael Noll (1965) shows the animation.
Another 1965 film First computer animation of human describes how the film was produced.
These demonstrated that a serious attempt to animate a dance notation might be of value. His 1967 paper in Dance Magazine Choreography and Computers gives his ideas as to what might be possible.
Dance notations are used to keep a record of a choreography. Quite often, a choreographist will keep a record of the dance as it is being defined using a notation. Leading notations at the birth of computer animation included Labanotation (Austria, 1928), Benesh (UK, 1955), and Eshkol Wachmann (Israel, 1958). All define the view of movement of a human figure over time that is constrained by the movements available to the human body parts (finger, lower/upper arm, torso etc) and the chosen viewpoint. Both defining and generating a computer animation of a choreography is challenging. The notations are quite visual giving in some detail the movements of the various limbs and quite difficult to animate as the various parts are often dependent on the position of another part that it is attached to.
Rudolp Benesh's notation looks rather like a 5-line music stave defining head, shoulder, waist, knee, foot from top to bottom as imagined by the dancer and time going from left to right.
Labanotation consists of the body parts from the centre to left and right and time going from bottom to top.
Eshkol Wachmann also defines the body parts as a set of line segments (limbs) where one end is the centre of a spherical coordinate system and the other end is on the spheres surface. Movements are defined as a change in the position on the spherical surface so all movements are curved.
John Harries visited the Atlas Computer Laboratory (ACL) in 1969. He had just written a book, Shapes of Movement, and wondered whether it would be possible to take the Eshkol Wachman notation itself and generate the equivalent movement shape, which was effectively the path of the dance over a time interval. It was decided that this would be a significant piece of work and was not feasible at that time.
John Harries Book on Eshkol Wachman Notation
John Lansdown looked at computer-supported Benesh notation at about the same time and decided that it might be possible to produce a computer animation system to support 80% of Benesh but doing 100% would be difficult.
John Lansdown and Benesh Notation
Labanotation probably turned out to be the notation first chosen for an attempt to produce a computer animation. Two of the earliest attempts were by Carol Withrow (1970, University of Utah) and Zella Wolofsky (1974, Simon Fraser University). Withrow's A Dynamic Model for Computer-Aided Choreography was an interactive system for producing a dance using the basis of labanotation for its model. Wolofsky's Computer Interpretation of Selected Labanotation Commands took an example of Labanotation and developed a Fortran system that could generate a stick figure animation of a Labanotation dance. The longer aim was to produce an interactive system to generate the Labanotation description of the dance and an animation of that dance.
Simon Fraser Ballet Class, 23 June 1973
Tom Calvert at Simon Fraser carried on developing Wolofsky's early attempt and Life Forms, and Credo Interactive both grew out of Zella Wolofsky's early work.