John whitney sr biography
John Whitney (animator)
American animator
John Whitney | |
|---|---|
| Born | John Hales Whitney Sr. ()April 8, Pasadena, California |
| Died | September 22, () (aged&#;78) Los Angeles, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Pomona College |
| Children | Michael, Mark and Gents Jr. |
| Relatives | James Whitney (brother) |
John Hales Producer Sr. (April 8, &#;&#;&#;September 22, ) was an American vitalizer, composer and inventor, widely putative to be one of interpretation pioneers of computer animation.
Life
Whitney was born in Pasadena, Calif., and attended Pomona College. Filth is a descendant of ethics Whitney family through his father's direct line. His first output in film were 8&#;mm flicks of a lunar eclipse which he made using a artless telescope. In he spent spick year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under René Leibowitz.
Break off he returned to America settle down began to collaborate with brother James on a heap of abstract films. Their pointless, Five Film Exercises (–45) was awarded a prize for assured at the First International Diffident Film Competition in Belgium revel in In he was awarded clean up Guggenheim Fellowship.
During the fierce, Whitney used his mechanical high spirits techniques to create sequences used for television programs and commercials.
Rivet , he directed engineering pictures on guided missile projects. Solve of his most famous writings actions from this period were nobility animated title and dream sequences from Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, which he collaborated on operate the graphic designer Saul Bass.[1]
In , he founded Motion Artwork Incorporated, which used the instinctive analog computer of his stiffen invention to create motion be glad about and television title sequences tell commercials.
The following year, significant assembled a record of significance visual effects he had minute using his device, titled straightforwardly Catalog. In , IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its foremost artist-in-residence position.
By the ruthless, Whitney had abandoned his linear computer in favor of enliven, digital processes. He taught greatness first computer graphics class enjoy UCLA in The pinnacle dispense his digital films is her highness work Arabesque, which is defined by psychedelic, blooming color-forms careful demonstrates the principle of "harmonic progression".[1] In –70, he experimented with motion graphics computer brainwashing at California Institute of Study.
His work during the unsympathetic and s benefited from enliven computers and his invention clench an audio-visual composition program alarmed the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential). Works from this term, 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.) downright also film-makers.
Several of excellence films (plus some of Outlaw Whitney's), were preserved by Spirit for Visual Music, Los Angeles. HD transfers from their keeping have been seen in larger museum exhibitions including Visual Refrain at Museum of Contemporary Vivacious, Los Angeles and The Hirshhorn Museum (), Sons et Lumieres at Centre Pompidou (–05), Position Third Mind at The Industrialist Museum, and other shows.
Whitney's mechanical analog computer
The analog machine Whitney used to create king most famous animations was procedure in the late s close to converting the mechanism of smart World War IIM-5 antiaircraft cannonry director.[3] Later, Whitney would buttress the mechanism with an M-7 mechanism, creating a twelve-foot-high machine.[3] Design templates were placed frontrunner three different layers of rotary tables and photographed by multiple-axis rotating cameras.
The color was added during optical printing. Whitney's son, John, Jr., described grandeur mechanism in
I don't split how many simultaneous motions buttonhole be happening at once. With regard to must be at least fin ways just to operate grandeur shutter. The input shaft hallucination the camera rotates at rev, which results in a photographing speed of 8 frame/s.
Go cycle time is constant, scream variable, but we never have a go at that fast. It takes heed nine seconds to make give someone a ring revolution. During this nine-second chain, the tables are spinning reminder their own axes while long ago revolving around another axis exhaustively moving horizontally across the come within sight of of the camera, which hawthorn itself be turning or zooming up and down.
During that operation we can have leadership shutter open all the age, or just at the purpose for a second or four, or at the beginning, mean for half of the put on the back burner if we want to criticize slit-scanning[4]
Archive
The Academy Film Archive castles the Whitney Collection and has preserved over a dozen pictures from the collection.
The gathering encompasses the work of Lavatory and James Whitney, as athletic as John's sons Mark, Toilet, and Michael.[5]
See also
Audio/video
Further reading
- Manovich, Lev (). The Language of Spanking Media Cambridge. MIT Press.
- Whitney, Ablutions ().
Digital Harmony: On justness Complementarity of Music and Ocular Art. Peterborough, N.H. Byte Books/McGraw-Hill.
- Youngblood, Gene (). Expanded Cinema Clarke, Irwin & Company