Catalog, 1961: John Whitney's Anti-Aircraft Animation Machine
In 1961 John Whitney gathered the effects of an analog computer built from a World War II gun director into a single film, Catalog, a founding moment for computer animation.
In 1961 John Whitney made a film that was, quite literally, a catalogue. Catalog gathered the visual effects he had perfected on a machine of his own invention: a mechanical analog computer converted from a World War II M5 antiaircraft gun director. Whitney is widely considered one of the pioneers of computer animation.
The machine came from the war. According to the film historian William Moritz, Whitney had worked at Lockheed during World War II on high speed missile technology, where he saw that the trajectories calculated by gun aiming equipment could also plot graphs and movements for art. He bought such devices in a surplus sale in 1956 and rebuilt them to drive cameras, later adding parts from an M7 director to create a machine about 12 feet high. Design templates sat on 3 layers of rotating tables and were photographed by cameras turning on several axes, with colour added during optical printing.
The results were spirals, rings and twisting forms moving with mechanical precision. One interviewer said Catalog looked like oscilloscope images, very carefully controlled and moving in a very precise fashion. Whitney agreed that he was calculating paths mechanically, where a true computer would draw a line on a screen. Unlike early digital systems, his input and output were wholly visual and worked in real time.
Catalog also grew out of a business. In 1960 Whitney had founded Motion Graphics Incorporated to make title sequences and commercials with the machine, after working on the animated titles of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with Saul Bass. In 1966 IBM named him its first artist in residence, and by the 1970s he had moved to digital processes, teaching the first computer graphics class at UCLA in 1972 and making Arabesque in 1975.
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