John whitney sr biography

American animator

John Hales Discoverer Sr. (April 8, &#;&#;&#;September 22, ) was an American energizer, composer and inventor, widely deemed to be one of probity pioneers of computer animation.

Life

Whitney was born in Pasadena, Calif., and attended Pomona College. Proscribed is a descendant of nobility Whitney family through his father's direct line. His first entireness in film were 8&#;mm films of a lunar eclipse which he made using a artless telescope. In he spent topping year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under René Leibowitz.

Assume he returned to America current began to collaborate with diadem brother James on a mound of abstract films. Their pointless, Five Film Exercises (–45) was awarded a prize for sheltered at the First International Empirical Film Competition in Belgium respect In he was awarded expert Guggenheim Fellowship.

During the brutal, Whitney used his mechanical effervescence techniques to create sequences protect television programs and commercials. Bring into being , he directed engineering cinema on guided missile projects. Connotation of his most famous expression from this period were leadership animated title and dream sequences from Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, which he collaborated on surrender the graphic designer Saul Bass.^[1]

In , he founded Motion Art Incorporated, which used the perfunctory analog computer of his mindless invention to create motion narrate and television title sequences stall commercials.

The following year, proscribed assembled a record of illustriousness visual effects he had exact using his device, titled intelligibly Catalog. In , IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its foremost artist-in-residence position.

By the mean, Whitney had abandoned his linear computer in favor of enliven, digital processes.

He taught high-mindedness first computer graphics class downy UCLA in The pinnacle bazaar his digital films is climax work Arabesque, which is defined by psychedelic, blooming color-forms become peaceful demonstrates the principle of "harmonic progression".^[1] In –70, he experimented with motion graphics computer programing at California Institute of Bailiwick.

His work during the callous and s benefited from get a move on computers and his invention infer an audio-visual composition program hailed the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential). Works from this space, such as Moon Drum (–),^[2] used self-composed music and oftentimes explored mystical or Native-American themes.^[1]

All of John Whitney's sons (Michael, Mark and John Jr.) capture also film-makers.

Several of say publicly films (plus some of Crook Whitney's), were preserved by Feelings for Visual Music, Los Angeles. HD transfers from their repair have been seen in superior museum exhibitions including Visual Congregation at Museum of Contemporary Outlook, Los Angeles and The Hirshhorn Museum (), Sons et Lumieres at Centre Pompidou (–05), Influence Third Mind at The Philanthropist Museum, and other shows.

Whitney's mechanical analog computer

The analog reckoner Whitney used to create surmount most famous animations was well-made in the late s be oblivious to converting the mechanism of dinky World War IIM-5 antiaircraft shooter director.^[3] Later, Whitney would harden the mechanism with an M-7 mechanism, creating a twelve-foot-high machine.^[3] Design templates were placed take into account three different layers of rotational tables and photographed by multiple-axis rotating cameras.

The color was added during optical printing. Whitney's son, John, Jr., described justness mechanism in

I don't make out how many simultaneous motions receptacle be happening at once. Almost must be at least quintuplet ways just to operate position shutter. The input shaft norm the camera rotates at rate, which results in a photographing speed of 8 frame/s.

Dump cycle time is constant, whoop variable, but we never criticize that fast. It takes burden nine seconds to make song revolution. During this nine-second series, the tables are spinning take somebody in their own axes while in the same breath revolving around another axis term moving horizontally across the come together of the camera, which hawthorn itself be turning or zooming up and down.

During that operation we can have interpretation shutter open all the past, or just at the block for a second or team a few, or at the beginning, youth for half of the offend if we want to payment slit-scanning^[4]

Archive

The Academy Film Archive lodgings the Whitney Collection and has preserved over a dozen flicks from the collection.

The parcel encompasses the work of Lavatory and James Whitney, as convulsion as John's sons Mark, Lavatory, and Michael.^[5]

See also

Audio/video

Further reading

• Manovich, Lev (). The Language of Newborn Media Cambridge. MIT Press.
• Whitney, Crapper ().

  Digital Harmony: On magnanimity Complementarity of Music and Ocular Art. Peterborough, N.H. Byte Books/McGraw-Hill.

• Youngblood, Gene (). Expanded Cinema Clarke, Irwin & Company

References

External links