III.

The History of Computer Animation

A.

Origins

One of the first applications of “interactive” computer graphics was the US government’s SAGE air defence system of the mid-1950s; missiles and aircraft were detected by radar with their positions displayed on screen. Operators then selected targets by pointing at them with a light pen. The resulting tracking/interception calculations were relayed to command stations elsewhere.

B.

Early Computer Games

By the end of the 1960s, computer graphics had influenced some areas of the scientific community, but had not reached the general public. There were no commercially available video games; nor was there any CGI (computer-generated imagery) on television, or awareness of computer animation. The first interactive arcade game, Pong (simulated ping-pong), was introduced in the United States by Atari in November 1972. However, it was only in 1974 that Atari managed to bring down the retail price to a reasonable level and attract the home market worldwide. This was achieved by integrating features such as on-screen scoring and sound into a single computer chip (a microprocessor built from wafer-thin layers of silicon, chemicals, gases, and metals etched with a three-dimensional circuit that conducted electricity to execute a set of programmed instructions). The on-screen graphics consisted of a dotted vertical line representing the ping-pong net and simple geometric shapes representing bats and balls. Another early game, developed by Taito and published in the West by Midway, was Space Invaders, which became so popular that the word for video game machine in Japan and France became “space invader”.

C.

Growth of CGI

In 1981, Quantel’s introduction of its Paintbox machine (the first computer system dedicated to graphics for television) sparked a revolution in the television industry, causing the demand for TV graphics to grow exponentially so that by the early years of the 2000s practically every commercial or TV programme had some sort of graphic incorporated. The cult film, Tron (1982), produced by Disney and directed by Steven Lisberger, told the story of a programmer (Jeff Bridges) who is digitized and finds himself inside a computer, forced to play the computer games he, himself, has programmed. The film was a milestone in the use of CGI and an inspiration not only for those in the visual effects industry but for future artists and animators. Similarly, demand for computer animation and special effects grew in the film industry after the release of the 1993 film, Jurassic Park, by Steven Spielberg, in which life-like computer-generated dinosaurs roamed around on screen. The first full-length feature film created entirely using computer animation was Toy Story (1995), produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The 3-D toy characters were constructed from computer wireframe “meshes” and an in-house computer program called RenderMan put the surface drawings (“texture maps”) onto the wireframes. Animation “control points” were used to move/re-form sections of the wireframe—there were more than two hundred such points on the cowboy doll Woody’s face alone.