Dr Sally
Pryor

STORIES

In the late 70's I was working in Melbourne as a computer analyst/programmer, a male-dominated, relatively rare and deeply unfashionable occupation at the time. I was desperate to make pictures with computers but this was before the availability of personal computers, GUI interfaces, pointing devices, paint programs and affordable colour printers. Computer graphics and animation systems were just starting to emerge and in 1979 the Australasian Computer Graphics Society was formed. The field was very much dominated by computer science and engineering and the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” began to be heard ad nauseam at AUSGRAPH conferences.

Then in 1982 John Bird at the Swinburne Film and TV school organised for animation students to use a wireframe CAD/CAM system in the Engineering Faculty. My friend, Andrew Quinn, and I displayed the essential combination of creative and computing skills and were accepted as the new 3D computer animation students.

First impressions of the new system did make my pulse race! Looking at the screen was hardly a sensual experience and it was extremely challenging to develop a visual aesthetic for these cold green lines. I also found it difficult to express myself via 3D wireframe objects moving around in space. To see anything at all on the screen, we had to first draw a shape onto graph paper, then work out a set of linked coordinate points from this diagram and type them into the CAD/CAM (computer aided drafting/computer-aided manufacturing) program, movie.BYU, via its cryptic interface (fig 1).

Fig 1 Traces of the production process of Dream House

To create an animation sequence, we entered numerical movements and rotations of the camera and objects relative to the X, Y and Z-axes. To actually view the animation, expensive output to black and white 16mm film at a commercial printer was required, so this was reserved as a once-only event at the end of production, with support from Film Victoria to pay for it.

In the meantime, John arranged for us to preview animations with a specialised contraption rigged up in front of the screen, involving a black and white video surveillance camera draped in black cloth – reminiscent of earliest photographers – filming one image at a time. This process took several hours to record a few seconds of animation and displayed a low-resolution video sequence with a prominent scan line running constantly down the tiny screen.

Any colour had to be added at the very end: the final precious black and white 16mm film was put through an optical printer by David Atkinson, coloured gels and filters were applied and the film was re-shot. This placed a painful burden on the imagination, as everything had to be previewed mentally up to this point. For example, in order to combine differently coloured objects in the same scene, the animated objects needed to be rendered separately to the final film and then layered using the coloured gels and filters, rewinding and re-exposing the same piece of film several times. The possibilities for disaster were enormous. Fortunately, David had the coolness of a surgeon! Yet pain persisted, because, naturally, all the edits that linked the different pieces of animation had only been previewed mentally right up until the very end, as well as the important relationships between sound design and vision.

Andrew and I received a great deal of technical support from John and David, as well as from Brian Curtis, who had encountered the system in the previous year. However, developing a unique creative aesthetic for artwork produced with this piece of engineering equipment was something we had to do alone. At the time, computer graphics/animation technology was so new that much of the existing imagery had a cool, flashy, high-tech aesthetic. In contrast, I wanted to make something hot and personal. The result was Dream House (1983), a short film about a dreamer who tours her head as if it were a house; different rooms correlating with different aspects of personality and experience. The film was ultimately very successful, being, to the best of my knowledge, the first Australian work selected for the prestigious SIGGRAPH screenings in the USA.

Despite the successes of both our films, Andrew and I had to go offshore to actually find employment as 3D computer animators. Fortunately we made contact in Australia with the director of one of the world’s leading 3D production houses, Cranston-Csuri productions, based in the USA. Even after seeing our primitive facilities (his company was state-of-the-art 3D: digitising tablets, full colour rendering, motion previews, recording to frame-addressible video disc and so on), he offered us jobs on the spot, based on our creative expression, that is, what we had done with so little. Later in 1984, and linked with the success of our innovative work and the lack of local job opportunities, the Swinburne facilities were upgraded to create the Computer Animation Development Centre, ultimately laying the foundations for the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media at RMIT.