Any faculty member may now program, preview, and produce inexpensive computer-animated films in as little as two hours. He may use these one-to-three-minute (1000-to-3000 frame) films to supplement his lectures, present elaborate data in a compact way, or animate concepts that are hard to get across by talk or text. Alhough computer-aided film-making was first discussed some seven years ago by K. C. Knowlton of Bell Laboratories, and some costly computer-output-to-microfilm devices are now in use, only recently has film-making become inexpensive enough for classroom use. Under an initial seed grant from the University's Office of Research Administration and a subsequent grant from the National Science Foundation, Richard L. Phillips, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, developed a system for the production or computer-animated movies from a remote storage tube terminal.
To make the films, a camera photographs static displays one frame at a time. The displays appear on a bi-stable storage tube of the the Computek Model 400/20, located on North Campus. The tube has excellent resolution and can retain complex flicker-free frames up to half an hour. What appears on the screen are data programmed by the instructor, and calculated and relayed through the Computing Center to the terminal. When a complete frame is drawn on the tube, the last character transmitted triggers the camera to record the frame. After exposure, the frame is advanced, a screen-erase signal is sent to the display, and another frame begins. Although the storage tube does not employ a light pen as a mode of control, films can be added to or edited interactively through control buttons at the terminal, joystick operations, or a Grafacon.
A subroutine package called Polygraphics, developed at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1968 and adapted to Computek by Phillips, allows users to employ cinematic techniques such as zooming, panning, scaling, and merging of scenes. A user may also view a single frame to check for composition and errors, review a few frames, retrieve and display past frames, and preview the whole film.
The 16-mm film can be developed in the usual way and then shown through a 16-mm projector. One of Phillips's aims, however, is to encourage regular use of films in courses, and to do this he now produces films to be used in Technicolor Super-8 endless loop cartridges. This final step required that the film be sent away for optical printing from 16-mm to Super-8, then loaded in special lubricated cartridges. Approximately 60 feet of Super-8 can be accommodated in these cartridges, giving a viewing time of up to four minutes. The films are finally shown on a rear screen projector which has a bright 16 × 20 inch screen and looks like a classroom TV.
Costs are difficult to pin down, but assuming that the programming is not counted in the cost (students provide excellent programming service at little or no cost), expenses begin at the first terminal sign-on. Terminal hookup charges are $2.50, and Phillips has produced a 2000-frame film using less than $20 of computer time. On-site developing is $2.00 at most, so the finished 16-mm film costs about $25. Conversion to Super-8 brings the cost of a two-minute film to about $40.
Among the fascinating possibilities this process offers are color filming and Xerox copying. While it is impossible to make a color film directly from the storage tube, Phillips can transfer the screen image through a color program to a monitor screen that looks like a color TV set. Users can make a black and white copy of any frame for laboratory reports or other uses. At this time, Phillips and his associates are continuing to simplify the operation so that anyone can use the system with ease.
A film strip was produced by Dr. Henry Pollack and Michael Levy of the Geology Department to illustrate the general process of the erosion of the Grand Canyon. Built into the models were technical data on soil structure and rate of erosion in relation to layering of substrata. Pollack extrapolated a one-stream and a two-stream model for a few million years to see which result most nearly approximated the present Canyon.