About 40 physicists and 12 film makers attended fot 9 weeks, producing new material including an attempt at generating computer animation. Not all of the projects were completed at the Conference itself. The text below is that part of the Report related to computer animation.
An unusual activity was the preparation of computer-generated film, and a number of sequences suitable for short film loops were produced.
One aspect of the film efforts was in fact new to both physicists and film makers. This was computer-generated film - the computer calculating points or line segments and displaying them on a cathode ray tube, where they are photographed directly as animated line drawings.The results, some times visually spectacular, captured the imagination of the filmmakers. Participating physicists found the technique equally exciting. Instructors have long searched for effective methods of bypassing the technical aspects of mathematics when teaching students of limited mathematical competence. One common method is to convey graphically a solution that a student can appreciate without having to understand the difficult steps that led to it. For instructors the problem has always been to get adequate time-dependent graphs. As a source of such graphs, computer animation promises to be a very useful tool. The examples of computer animation made at Seattle are, to a film maker, fragments rather than films. Ten such fragments were carried to varying degrees of completion during the summer. Some of them represent ideas so complex, and so demanding of expensive computer time, that they will not be completed unless the computational time can be reduced. (Related work now in progress at Livermore may reveal some way of reducing it.)
Others are scheduled to be finished in time for use in the fall of 1966. The list on page 16 indicates the current status of each fragment. Two participants, George Michael and Robert Cralle, both of Lawrence Radiation Laboratories, Livermore, California, spent all of their time working on computer-generated films. Computer specialists with a background in physics, Michael and Cralle imported a skeleton of the code they regularly use at Livermore, and reconstructed the display generator part of the code to make it compatible with the IBM 7094/7044 DCF system at the University of Washington's Research Computation Center.
Ordinarily Michael and Cralle produce computer-generated films by means of on-line interaction with a display unit. At Seattle an additional step was required. Material was put on a tape at the University of Washington campus, then sent to the Boeing Company's SC 4020 installation, where the film was exposed. Such variables as the suitability of subject matter for programming, and the experience of individual physicists, dictated the way in which Michael and Cralle operated in any given instance, but normally the routine ran something like this: The physicist defined the problem and the teaching objective, and provided a mathematical description which Michael and Cralle transformed into a form suitable for short-term computation. After the mathematics of that version was checked by the physicists, Michael and Cralle did the programming.
These films can be made by a physicist alone if he has taken the time to learn something about programming. In fact it is not wholly clear what role (if any) directors, writers, designers and others traditionally associated with the creation of motion pictures will play in computer-generated film production. Maurice Constant, one of the Conference film makers, prepared a paper analyzing the computer's possibilities from a film maker's point of view. His paper pays particular attention to the problem of creating a movie language that would enable a film maker (and, by implication, anyone else) to use the computer as a production instrument by communicating with it very directly.
The absence of such a language at present inhibits the production of fully developed, major computer-animated motion pictures. In November an ad hoc committee was formed of members of the mathematics, engineering, and physics commissions, to help develop the art of computer animation. The Seattle contingent is represented on this committee.
In every case except the first film listed, George Michael and Robert Cralle, of Lawrence Radiation Laboratories, were collaborators with the author.
The four films (5 to 8) were carried almost to the point of filming at Seattle, but were held up because each would require hours of machine time.
The final two films are complete but not yet prepared for distribution.
Samples from Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey and from Lawrence Radiation Laboratories, Livermore, California.