Ed Emshwiller — Sunstone

1979

Artists: Ed Emshwiller, Alvy Ray Smith (technical collaborator), Louise Etra (technical collaborator) · Year: 1979 · Medium: Computer-animated 16mm film, color · Substrate: NYIT CGL's custom rendering pipeline; frame-buffer hardware developed in-house · Place: Long Island, New York, USA · Institution: New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab (NYIT CGL) Sunstone is a three-minute computer-animated short film by Ed Emshwiller, produced at the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab in 1979 and widely considered one of the first computer-animated films with real cinematic syntax — not a demo, not a technical showcase, but a short film. It opens with an image of a face, the face rotates in three-dimensional space, its features shift and reassemble through a series of transformations, and the film resolves on an image that rereads the opening in a different register. Emshwiller was a painter and experimental filmmaker before he became, in his late fifties, a computer animator. He had been making hand-crafted experimental film since the 1950s. NYIT's CGL — founded by Alexander Schure and staffed by Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and others who would later form the Pixar team — had been developing computer-animation tools for years before Emshwiller arrived as artist-in-residence. Sunstone was his first production there. He worked closely with Alvy Ray Smith and Louise Etra on technical implementation. The film is now held at MoMA and is screened periodically. Its historical importance is twofold. It is the moment computer animation achieved sufficient technical maturity to support an artist's compositional intent at film length, and it is a direct antecedent of everything Pixar would later produce. The technical team at NYIT CGL left to form Lucasfilm's computer-graphics division, which spun off as Pixar in 1986. Sunstone is the bridge work. Lore Emshwiller came to NYIT CGL through Alexander Schure's invitation — Schure was an eccentric educational entrepreneur who had bankrolled the most advanced computer-animation research in the world almost entirely from his own pocket. Emshwiller was given full access to the lab and a small team. Alvy Ray Smith later wrote that Emshwiller taught the technical staff about composition; the technical staff taught him about rendering. Sunstone was completed in ten months and premiered at the 1979 SIGGRAPH conference. It won the SIGGRAPH animation award that year. Sources • Smith, Alvy Ray — A Biography of the Pixel (MIT Press, 2021) • Museum of Modern Art — Sunstone collection record • SIGGRAPH 1979 — conference proceedings