Who was John Whitney, Motion Graphics Pioneer
Today, motion graphics and CGI are used constantly in movies, TV shows, and commercials. But how did it start? Believe it or not, some of the first computer animations were created using a war machine. And it was built by a man named John Whitney.
John Whitney Early Work
John Whitney, Sr. was born in Pasadena, California in 1917. His filmmaking started with an 8mm recording of a solar eclipse using a homemade telescope. According to Bright Lights Film, Whitney went on to study music in Paris, and he was particularly interested in musical harmony. This would be seen later in his motion work where Whitney aligned morphing visuals to the changing melodies of songs.
John and James in the studio
John and his younger brother James created a piece called Five Film Exercises using a technique called slit-scan. This method involved slides with “slits” cut out of them placed between the camera and a photograph. Recording and moving the photo over time created a unique and colorful zooming effect. The technique was later “duplicated and refined by Douglas Trumbull for the ‘stargate’ sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).”
Douglas Trumbull’s Stargate Effect
The Cam Machine
During World War II, American and British forces created the first analog computers known as “Turing Machines.” They were called that because of Alan Turing famously using them to decipher Nazi codes.
Meanwhile, “young John Whitney worked in the Lockheed Aircraft Factory during the war” according to William Moritz. “And while he was working with high-speed missile photography”, he realized that the ability of bomb sites and anti-aircraft guns to calculate trajectories had the potential for graphing visuals.
Lissajous’ mathematical spirals
This came into play when Whitney was brought on to help designer Saul Bass create the title sequence for Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958). According to Rhizome, “A mechanism was needed that could plot the shapes that Bass wanted, which were based on graphs of parametric equations by 19th [century] mathematician Jules Lissajous.” However, mapping these shapes accurately required the use of a pendulum. No existing animation stand could do this without getting its insides twisted up.
Whitney realized the war computers from earlier could “rotate endlessly” and bought a surplus one to create his cam machine. A pen filled with paint was attached to a pendulum above animation cels, and its mechanical movement was able to create the spirals.
Motion Graphics, Inc.
In 1960, Whitney formed his own company called Motion Graphics, Inc. He used the cam machine to create a demo reel of different effects he could do and compiled them in a video called Catalog in 1961. He went on to create a variety of other works such as Permutations (1968), the Matrix trilogy (1971-1972), and the Persian inspired Arabesque (1975).
John Whitney’s innovative vision of what could be done with an analog computer allowed him to kickstart the idea of computer animation and motion graphics. His colorful, musical, psychedelic work inspired new filmmakers to build on Whitney’s ideas and advance the form of CGI to where it is today.
