The First International Computer Film Festival was held in early March of this year at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The Festival solicited for public viewing any film containing footage animated or generated by computer, including images made by computer manipulation or graphic material. The Festival also brought together some of the major computer filmmakers in the country to give presentations on their work. The technical speakers were Dr. Kenneth Knowlton of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Ron Resch of the University of Utah, and William Fetter, now chairman of the Design Department at Southern Illinois University. Two other persons spoke as artists active in the field. They were John Whitney, Sr., a pioneer computer-film artist and Lillian Schwartz, currently artist-in-residence at Bell Labs.
The event was free and open to the public due to generous sponsorship from Evergreen's Computer Services Center, the Computer Arts Society of the United States and the Washington State Arts Commission. More than 100 films were entered and shown and an estimated 800 persons attended.
Besides separate presentations, the speakers came together for a panel discussion of the future of the field. From this discussion and from the major evening film showings, some of the latest trends in computer graphics emerged. Much discussion also centered around the unique problems of working in this field.
One of the first problems mentioned was by Ron Resch, that of a high initiation fee necessary to participating in computer graphics, both in hardware and software. This obstacle contributed to another problem raised by the panel, of little access by professional artists to the equipment. But even if institutions are willing to give access, achieving anything usually requires a collaboration of the artist with a programmer or computer scientist. Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton have worked in this way for the last five years. A few years earlier, John Whitney and Dr. Jack Citron worked together for three years at IBM's Los Angeles Scientific Center.
Once at the computer, the artist can be thoroughly intimidated by all the equipment. At this point I am still in awe, but I now know what can be done and what kinds of things to ask for.
A fourth problem mentioned by the panel was the lack of acceptance of computer graphics and art by the public. William Fetter told a sad story of how he once submitted some of his famous human figure drawings to a magazine which printed them without giving him credit. When he called and asked the reason, they replied, We were told a computer did this.
Lillian Schwartz agreed and thought the problem had historic roots. After World War II, she said, you had tremendous fear of all this technology because it was so devastating. She feels that progress in the field has been greatly inhibited by these attitudes and believes there must be a shift to one that is not so anti-computer.
But in spite of all the problems, all the speakers felt excited to be participating in the development of a new communications medium. William Fetter commented that as scientists and programmers discover unexpected patterns in technical research, computer graphics becomes a highly democratizing kind of thing when we find more of the esthetic and technical in all of us.
Ken Knowlton carried this further, foreseeing the combination of the necessary skills in one person. I used to think getting art from computers meant collaboration between someone who was very technically oriented in terms of logic and computer programming and an artist who has a strong sense of color and of design .... But with the next generation where school children are already using computers at an early age, perhaps we will find those who have the artistic flair and intuition as well as the precise ability to use very logical environments.
The most heralding note was sounded by John Whitney, who has been working with the computer artistically the longest of the five. He has been using a computer or other automated mechanisms to create synthetic sound as well as images. Although he feels that the computer is both a superb new musical as well as visual instrument, he sees its influence becoming much more pervasive than that. He admits that we have some profound design problems before we really begin to make an art but when we do, there is going to be the video disc to use it and we will have a sort of meaningful cultural revolution.
Several other encouraging signs were noted - the increasing number of computer art courses and the decreasing price of graphics terminals [1]. Also the problem of public acceptance promised to be partially overcome by the tour of films from the Festival. The speakers selected representative films after watching them all, and these will be sent on a non-profit tour of universities, research centers, and museums.
Several other trends were observable from watching the many films entered in the Festival. Probably the most immediate fact was the increasing sophistication of computer films. It seemed that computer people were either becoming more skilled filmmakers of getting better collaborators. The use of color and hidden-line suppression was more common as well as reduction in filmmaking errors (wrong exposure, edge-flashing, etc).
The computer itself seemed to be becoming more invisible in the films, too. In both artistic and technical films, the focus seemed to center more now than before on content instead of process. Both artistic speakers wanted their films to be seen as art first, computer films second. And some of the more recent technical films seemed to take the computer more for granted.
A second trend apparent from the films was the increasing variety of techniques being used to make them. The microfilm plotter was still the major method but storage tubes were getting more use [2]. Raster halftone displays rapidly seemed to be maturing as a production method. Some very watchable examples were submitted by both Computer Image Corporation in Denver and the University of Utah. Of the four possible production methods, the last, graphic manipulation (movement of graphic material by computer control) seems to be of the least general use. The only significant use of it was by John Whitney and Doug Trumbull (who used it to make the special-effects for 2001).
The fascinating possibility of computer-aided cartoon animation emerged at the Festival, too. While no film examples were entered, the prospect of this technique becoming commonplace was near [3].
A few generalizations are possible after seeing the first Festival. It is apparent that the production of computer-animated films is increasing but still growing very slowly. Some of the films shown could not have been made by any other method, but a high level of foreknowledge is necessary to begin production. It was also apparent that computer films are becoming more connnon in, technical curriculum. A series of computer-generated astronomy films by M. L. Meeks of Haystack Observatory and a topology film by Dr. Nelson Max of Carnegie-Mellon demonstrated this trend.
Finally it was clear that storage-tube animation provided the easiest and least costly entry for newcomers into the field. The film Tainted Sky by Kent Wilson of the University of California, San Diego showed that these displays are usually satisfactory for simple to fairly complex problems.
[1] See also Computer Graphics Terminals-A Backward Look by C. Machover in AFIPS SJCC 1972, p. 439.
[2] E. G. Production of Computer-Animated Films from A Remote Storage Tube Terminal by R. Philips in Advanced Computer Graphics. Plenum Press, 1971, p. 723.
[3]
a) National Research Council's New Computer Animation System by N. Burtnyk and M. Wein in Canadian Information Processing Society Magazine for May 1973, p. 4.
b) Computer Animation-Some New ANTICS by A. Kitching in British Kinematography, Sound and Television Society Journal, December 1973, p. 372.
For more information concerning having the tour of films brought to your institution, contact Richard Speer at Computer Services, The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington 98505. (206-866-6232) (Editors note - The cost of the tour is about $100. The exact price is, as yet, undetermined.)
Richard Speer is on the staff of Computer Services at The Evergreen State College. He organized and directed the First International Computer Film Festival.