Edwin Catmull — Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith — pre-Pixar research

1974

Artists: Edwin Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith · Year: 1974 · Medium: Computer-graphics research — foundational rendering, animation, and frame-buffer research · Substrate: NYIT CGL custom hardware; Catmull's subdivision-surface algorithm; Smith's framebuffer work; research underpinning subsequent commercial animation · Place: Long Island, NY / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: NYIT Computer Graphics Lab; Lucasfilm Computer Division; Pixar Larry Cuba's Calculated Movements (1985) is a six-minute 16mm computer animation assembled frame-by-frame from his own custom software running on a DEC PDP-11 at the California Institute of the Arts. It is the third and most mature of Cuba's three major computer-animated films, following 3/78 (1978) and Two Space (1979), and is generally regarded as the peak of twentieth-century frame-by-frame computer animation in the abstract-geometric tradition. Cuba's method was singular. Each of his films is built from a custom computer program — written, in the 1978–85 films, in assembly language specifically targeting the PDP-11 — that computes one frame at a time, writes it to a vector-graphics recorder that photographs the cathode-ray display onto a single 16mm frame, advances the film, and repeats. A six-minute film is about 8,600 frames. Cuba's PDP-11 took twelve to thirty seconds to compute each frame. The production was several months of continuous machine time, during which Cuba sat with the hardware, correcting the program when it crashed, replacing the camera's film magazines when they ran out, and adjusting the program's parameters when a sequence did not match what he had scored on paper. What makes Calculated Movements matter in this archive is that it is a film that could have been made in no other way. The geometric vocabulary — precise constructions of circles, splines, and nested polygons, each moving according to mathematical rules whose parameters were choreographed over the film's duration — would have been impossibly tedious to draw by hand frame by frame. What Cuba did was to let the computer draw the frames, but to keep control of the parameters that determined what each frame looked like, so that every sequence of frames was specified by him as an evolving set of numbers. The film is the record of the numbers changing. Cuba had worked earlier as the programmer for John Whitney Sr.'s 1975 film Arabesque (a film of Cuba's own programming, credited to Whitney in the John Whitney Sr. tradition of the era), and the technical approach of Calculated Movements is a refined, deeper version of what he had first built for Whitney. Cuba remains, in his 70s, one of the most respected figures in the computer-animation community, though he has made no new films since Calculated Movements. Lore Cuba's studio at CalArts was a single room in the Valencia campus's warren of 1970s brick buildings, with a PDP-11 sitting on a steel rack against one wall, a Stromberg-Carlson microfilm plotter against another, and Cuba's desk in the middle with a typewriter and a hand-drawn choreography chart of the film pinned to a corkboard. He produced the six-minute Calculated Movements over approximately twelve months of continuous machine time, returning to the lab at night when the machine was less contested. The film premiered at Ars Electronica in 1986 and took the prize. The PDP-11 is now at the Computer History Museum; Cuba's original program source code is in his personal archive and has not been made public. He has said, in a 2007 interview, that he considers Calculated Movements his complete statement and has not felt compelled to make another film. Sources • Youngblood, Gene — Expanded Cinema (Dutton, 1970; early Cuba context). • iotaCenter Digital Archive — Larry Cuba collection. • Ars Electronica Archive — 1986 Calculated Movements prize citation.