Potrzebie
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Peter Foldes' Hunger (1974)
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Here is a still from Peter Foldes' Metadata (1971), one of the earliest computer animated films, made a full decade before Steven Lisberger's Tron (1982) and the Cray computer sequences in The Last Starfighter (1984).
Peter Foldes (1924-1977) was a pioneer in computer animation, which he introduced in Metadata, using the National Research Council of Canada's computer. The film was made in collaboration with NRCC scientists Nestor Burtnyk and Marceli Wein, regarded in Canada as the fathers of computer animation technology. To tackle the themes of poverty and world hunger, Foldes again used computer animation in his Oscar-nominated Hunger (1974), doing line drawings of key frames and letting the computer create the transformations from one scene to another. Note similarity of man morphing into auto in Hunger with the Tron riders merging into their light cycles. Made for the National Film Board of Canada, Hunger won the Jury Prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.
Born in Budapest, Foldes moved to England in 1946 and studied at the Slade School of Art. Later, he lived and worked in Paris. His other films include Animated Genesis (1952), A Short Vision (1956), Plus Vite (1965), Visages des femmes (1968), Je. Tu. Elles./I. You. They. (1972), Réve (1977) and Envisage (1977). He also worked on the computer graphics for the 1973 BBC-TV mini-series The Ascent of Man (1973). A Short Vision, his collaboration with Joan Foldes about a nuclear holocaust, was shown on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956.
Foldes explained his approach to Giannalberto Bendazzi (Cartoon: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, 1994):
1976 interview with Marceli Wein about Hunger:
What kind of computer and hardware were used?
The computer was an SEL 840A - SEL later became Gould. It had wordlength of 24 bits, because it was a realtime computer for command and control and data acquisition. The 24 bits were well suited for 2 analog quantities such as 12 bit coordinates. Memory was 8K words or 24K bytes with 1.75 microsecond cycle time. The computer's realtime strength was in its interrupt system. There was no command line interpreter and all control was from the display, an IDI point plotting display (Carl Machover was VP of IDI). The graphics controller was home grown design and built in the lab at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).
Were there parts where inbetweening was manual and not computer done -- this seemed the case where the woman was dancing?
All in-betweening was by software. The dancer was rotoscoped (traced from actual film) every 12th frame and then software interpolated. They actually filmed a gogo dancer in their building for the occasion.
When exactly was the system and the film done?
The project was started in 1969 and Nestor Burtnyk was the senior person reponsible for much of the software. Because he changed career directions he disappeared from the scene in the graphics community. The paper describing computer assised key frame animation was presented at the Fall 1970 SMPTE conference and appeared in the SMPTE Journal in March 1971. They made an experimental film with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Peter Foldes in 1971 - Metadata - then started working on Hunger. The work was completed in 1973 but the optical work at NFB continued until the release in 1974. Peter Foldes commuted from Paris for three-week stints leaving the technical people to work on software enhancements between visits.
What were the prizes that it won and were any related to the technology as opposed to for the film in general?
The major prizes included: Cannes Prix du Jury, Academy Oscar Nomination, a prize at the Berlin Festival and five others. All were for artistic achievement. The Ontario Science Centre and the Film Institute gave them an award just last fall for the technical side of the work.
Here is a still from Peter Foldes' Metadata (1971), one of the earliest computer animated films, made a full decade before Steven Lisberger's Tron (1982) and the Cray computer sequences in The Last Starfighter (1984).
Peter Foldes (1924-1977) was a pioneer in computer animation, which he introduced in Metadata, using the National Research Council of Canada's computer. The film was made in collaboration with NRCC scientists Nestor Burtnyk and Marceli Wein, regarded in Canada as the fathers of computer animation technology. To tackle the themes of poverty and world hunger, Foldes again used computer animation in his Oscar-nominated Hunger (1974), doing line drawings of key frames and letting the computer create the transformations from one scene to another. Note similarity of man morphing into auto in Hunger with the Tron riders merging into their light cycles. Made for the National Film Board of Canada, Hunger won the Jury Prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.
Born in Budapest, Foldes moved to England in 1946 and studied at the Slade School of Art. Later, he lived and worked in Paris. His other films include Animated Genesis (1952), A Short Vision (1956), Plus Vite (1965), Visages des femmes (1968), Je. Tu. Elles./I. You. They. (1972), Réve (1977) and Envisage (1977). He also worked on the computer graphics for the 1973 BBC-TV mini-series The Ascent of Man (1973). A Short Vision, his collaboration with Joan Foldes about a nuclear holocaust, was shown on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956.
Below: part one and part two of Hunger:
Foldes explained his approach to Giannalberto Bendazzi (Cartoon: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, 1994):
The art of the 20th Century is cinema. The language of the 20th Century is technology. In my films, I made metamorphosis. Visages des femmes was a perpetual metamorphosis, created by handmade drawings. With a computer, I can still make metamorphoses, but with greater control over each line of the drawing, which I can move as I please. And I work faster, because the machine frees the artist from the fatigue of labor. A miniaturist can work for seven years on a single work; nobody says that Rembrandt’s paintings are less beautiful only because he spent less time on them.
1976 interview with Marceli Wein about Hunger:
What kind of computer and hardware were used?
The computer was an SEL 840A - SEL later became Gould. It had wordlength of 24 bits, because it was a realtime computer for command and control and data acquisition. The 24 bits were well suited for 2 analog quantities such as 12 bit coordinates. Memory was 8K words or 24K bytes with 1.75 microsecond cycle time. The computer's realtime strength was in its interrupt system. There was no command line interpreter and all control was from the display, an IDI point plotting display (Carl Machover was VP of IDI). The graphics controller was home grown design and built in the lab at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).
Were there parts where inbetweening was manual and not computer done -- this seemed the case where the woman was dancing?
All in-betweening was by software. The dancer was rotoscoped (traced from actual film) every 12th frame and then software interpolated. They actually filmed a gogo dancer in their building for the occasion.
When exactly was the system and the film done?
The project was started in 1969 and Nestor Burtnyk was the senior person reponsible for much of the software. Because he changed career directions he disappeared from the scene in the graphics community. The paper describing computer assised key frame animation was presented at the Fall 1970 SMPTE conference and appeared in the SMPTE Journal in March 1971. They made an experimental film with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Peter Foldes in 1971 - Metadata - then started working on Hunger. The work was completed in 1973 but the optical work at NFB continued until the release in 1974. Peter Foldes commuted from Paris for three-week stints leaving the technical people to work on software enhancements between visits.
What were the prizes that it won and were any related to the technology as opposed to for the film in general?
The major prizes included: Cannes Prix du Jury, Academy Oscar Nomination, a prize at the Berlin Festival and five others. All were for artistic achievement. The Ontario Science Centre and the Film Institute gave them an award just last fall for the technical side of the work.
Labels: animation, BBC, computer, drawing, foldes, hungary, hunger, lisberger, metadata, national film board of canada, tech, tron
¶ 6:28 PM 2 comments
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Franklin Booth
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Growing up on a remote farm in Carmel, Indiana, Booth developed his unique pen-and-ink style as the result of a misunderstanding. Living in a rural area and having no knowledge of printing technology, Booth used pen and ink to copy the images he saw in 19th-century magazines, yet he was unaware that he was looking at wood engravings. He thought he was duplicating the look of the originals, as noted by Jim Vadeboncoeur:
Booth's New York studio was on 57th Street from 1910 until his death in 1948, but for many years he returned to his hometown each summer. In 1914, Theodore Dreiser and Booth made an automotive road trip from New York to Indiana, which they documented in A Hoosier Holiday (1916), written by Dreiser with illustrations by Booth. When Booth proposed the trip, Dreiser said, "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". With full chapters on the idyllic way of life in Carmel, this book is regarded today as a forerunner to the American road novel and a possible influence on Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
In addition to Scribner's and Harper's, Booth's art was published in Century, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Good Housekeeping, House & Garden, Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, Redbook and more. His work was collected in Franklin Booth: 60 Drawings (1925), reprinted in 1978 by Woody Gelman's Nostalgia Press as The Art of Franklin Booth. The illustration at top was used on the cover of John Fleskes' Franklin Booth: Painter with a Pen (2002), the first title from Fleskes' Flesk Publications five years ago. The book features an introduction by Roy Krenkel (1918-1983), who was greatly influenced by Booth and Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The paperback edition was issued by Flesk this past summer. Manuel Auad included a 16-page color section in his Franklin Booth: American Illustrator (Auad Publishing, 2006).
I previously posted in August a rare Franklin Booth (1874-1948) drawing which I scanned from the book Mimeograph Illustration Inset Portfolio: Drawings by Foremost Artists on Stencils Ready For Printing, published by the A.B. Dick Company (Chicago) in 1940. I say "rare" because how many copies of that catalog were ever saved by the schools and churches that used it? The newsprint paper quality prevented a full appreciation of Booth's line work, so here's another by Booth, a magnificent fantasy scene. When you enlarge, notice how the tiny figures in the distance provide a sense of scale amid the towering trees.
Growing up on a remote farm in Carmel, Indiana, Booth developed his unique pen-and-ink style as the result of a misunderstanding. Living in a rural area and having no knowledge of printing technology, Booth used pen and ink to copy the images he saw in 19th-century magazines, yet he was unaware that he was looking at wood engravings. He thought he was duplicating the look of the originals, as noted by Jim Vadeboncoeur:
Isolated on an Indiana farm and determined to be an artist, he studied what he saw on the pages of Scribner's, Harpers and the other illustrated magazines of the day. What he saw, and what there was to see, were wood-engraved images. Photographic reproduction was in its infancy and was used primarily for halftones of paintings. After all, everyone knew how to reproduce pen & ink work: you engraved it on wood. Booth, not knowing that the line and even the "feel" of the image was a product of the engraver, copied what he saw using pen on paper. By the turn of the century, when Booth was embarking on his incredible career, the technology had advanced enough so that his pen work could be reproduced as he crafted it. His style was an amazing amalgam of antique appeal and awesome artistry. Soaring, majestic scenes were crafted with thousands of lines, each placed in the precise position with respect to its neighbor to provide just the right density and shade...
The "old-time" feeling that hearkens back to the wood-engraved images of the 19th century really doesn't explain why modern art students are so taken with the approach. I think that what attracted interest then and now is the talent and compositional skills that were conspicuously absent in his contemporary mimics. These compositional abilities are even more amazing when one learns that Booth crafted his images a section at a time, painstakingly detailing a portion in ink that he had carefully penciled. He would complete a section in ink before applying the pencil to another part of the drawing. The innumerable strokes of the pen were prone to cause smudging if he were to have fully penciled the entire piece, so this piecemeal approach was his norm. To create and maintain a consistent and regular pattern and density of lines using this method must have been exceedingly difficult, yet he seems to have carried it off with aplomb.
Booth's New York studio was on 57th Street from 1910 until his death in 1948, but for many years he returned to his hometown each summer. In 1914, Theodore Dreiser and Booth made an automotive road trip from New York to Indiana, which they documented in A Hoosier Holiday (1916), written by Dreiser with illustrations by Booth. When Booth proposed the trip, Dreiser said, "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". With full chapters on the idyllic way of life in Carmel, this book is regarded today as a forerunner to the American road novel and a possible influence on Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The Carmel paean by Dreiser and Booth put the town on the map, so to speak, and their book has been reprinted several times, most recently in 1997 by the Indiana University Press and last July by Kessinger Publishing. Yet curiously, not even a single sentence about Carmel's famous native can be found in the town's official online histories. Although Carmel has invested more than $10 million in the development of the Carmel Arts & Design District and the recreation of "historic" Old Town Carmel where "fresh new facades... create a Main Street of old," one can search in vain for any online mention there of Booth. Instead, the favorite son is Leslie Haines, an electrical engineer who designed and installed an early traffic light in 1923 when the population of Carmel was still only a few hundred people.
In addition to Scribner's and Harper's, Booth's art was published in Century, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, Good Housekeeping, House & Garden, Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, Redbook and more. His work was collected in Franklin Booth: 60 Drawings (1925), reprinted in 1978 by Woody Gelman's Nostalgia Press as The Art of Franklin Booth. The illustration at top was used on the cover of John Fleskes' Franklin Booth: Painter with a Pen (2002), the first title from Fleskes' Flesk Publications five years ago. The book features an introduction by Roy Krenkel (1918-1983), who was greatly influenced by Booth and Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The paperback edition was issued by Flesk this past summer. Manuel Auad included a 16-page color section in his Franklin Booth: American Illustrator (Auad Publishing, 2006).
Labels: booth, drawing, krenkel, mimeograph
¶ 8:02 AM 4 comments
