A friend's father was involved with making these early computer animations. The soundtrack alone is a study in mid 1970's culture, the images are iconic to those of us who grew up with them, but the contribution to the history of both computers and advertising are unparalleled. Ont this, the day of his passing, may these images be shared and enjoyed forever.
My Dad, Francis Honey, was VP and lead engineer of CI through 1972. Who was your friend? If from the early days of CI, I probably knew him and his father.
fun fact. many of the uncanny "early 90s cgi" computer animations are actually from the late 70s and early 80s as tech demos for systems that were the size of rooms
You could achieve similar effects with some clever shader works. Might be one of the easier effects to write GLSL shaders from. Its basic is modern shader's 2D Texcoord manipulation.
These days the entire scanimate machine, fully analog and running at 1080p (150MHz pixel clock) from an SDI HD source would fit into a briefcase - and that’s still full analog built out of discrete chips. Op amps are tiny and fast. There are even ways of getting rid of the CRT screen used for rendering and instead use addressable low dispersion recirculating delay lines (admittedly a few hundred of them, and they’d need to be waveguides so not cheap, but still). The user interface with all the knobs and buttons would be bigger than the “guts” of it. So if someone wanted to pay for it, it could be recreated in a form usable in a modern studio, with larger dynamic range, and with more powerful effects such as texture and bump mapping - shaders can be analog, after all, and doing 3D graphics with analog fragment shading is not a big deal. With a few more briefcases of stuff you could have an analog machine that could render Doom, in an entirely analog fashion, with procedural textures (read: user defined 2D function generators aka knobs for tweaking Fourier coefficients). In short: not only we could achieve it today, but it could be massively more useful. And with a custom analog asic or two, you could render basic game console graphics, with geometry and texture data fed in via digital potentiometers and nothing else (thousands of them, but on a chip they are no big deal). I’d go as far as claiming that low power ultra-mobile game consoles could do graphics and lots of game engine physics in an analog fashion with much less power use than digital computers with GPUs. An 8x8 CMOS digital multiplier uses about as many transistors as dozens of good analog multipliers. And the latter will be faster as well. There are ways of merging digital “housekeeping” and analog signal processing at chip scale that can produce modern GPUs at a fraction of the power use. Even analog memories are much denser than DRAM. And so on. The analog future is bright.
My father was Francis Honey, VP of Computer Image Corporation and lead engineer. This was my childhood in the sixties through 1972, when Dad left. I didn't see any, here, but they also did work with the Smothers Brothers, Sesame Street (Jim Henson came to our house for dinner, once, and I have two photos of him with Dad and the CI team), Electric Company, Frank Zappa, Coca Cola. Dad met with Ringo Starr when the Beatles were looking at CI for a film or music videos. Unfortunately, the business people thought they should ask for the moon $$$$ ("It's the Beatles!!!") and so the thing fell through. Dad would take us down to the offices for private screenings of their latest work. Those were exciting times ... Jim Henson, Smothers Brothers, Frank Zappa!!!
The surprising thing about a lot of these images is that they used a lot of ANALOG video cameras and disc recorders in order to create them, which they kept secret from their clients. Far fewer computers were used than a lot of people might believe. It was (almost literally) a lot of smoke & mirrors. But the results were often amazing, especially for 40+ years ago.
Yes indeed, they first had to create/distorb those monochromatic images on a scanimate system then colorize it via an analogue colorizer, then they had to record those images via a video camera trough a teleceline process, for more layers,they had to repeat that process and then mix those recordings together via an analogue mixer together, wich was a painfull trial on error and long process,but the results speaches for their selfes, this is amezing mind blowing stuff shown here.
Clients supplied the logos and most of the other visuals. The "scan" part in Scanimate implies just that: scanning and filming materials before having them processed by an analogue computer system, often combining the output with other animation techniques for varied results (traditional film, stop animation, chroma keying etc). As unwieldy as it was, the process itself was no secret. On the contrary, the achievements of the system, from before its inception right to its commercial demise, were extensively reported by specialist publications at the time. Given that there were less than a dozen of such machines in the whole world at the height of Scanimate's popularity, and only two have survived to this day (one of them fully operational and adapted to modern times, i.e. able to communicate with modern workstations), the animation produced is that more unique.
@@Aleksa_Milicevic I decided to search Scanimate it was very interesting almost like an analog Moog synth but with video and was pretty much real time. Though they did have some digital CGI back then but it had to be printed to film frame by frame.
But an analogue computer is still a computer... still, yeah, extensive use of (mostly analogue) video synthesisers back then, since the expense of computer time and the need for custom software made rendering (in the sense we understand the term today, which already existed back then) fairly expensive.
I’m 22 and this video is pretty much entirely responsible for introducing me to Cass Elliot (the scanimate intro to her tv special is at 11:47). I bought the album that goes with her special because of this video!
They created the images on paper then placed them in front of a video camera. They ran the camera's feed through various filters to add color, distortion, & motion, then filmed the results.
In addition to the other answers, state of the art tech in the 70s would probably surprise you - just none of that tech would be available (mostly due to a combination of high cost, lack of demand *and* in many cases lack of maturity) for the customer electronics market (save maybe at the highest end) for 5 - 10 years.
it was crasy. Basically an analog frame grabber, and many opamps, were able to render a video signal from a camera into a vector graphic, which could easily be "modified". This was then scanned back into video, and then color could be processed. This was sent to tape, and there you go.
6:18 -7:10 Parts from those presentation on HBO, there are used by channel 13 of Santiago, from prime-time show "Martes 13", on 1983. / Partes de esa presentación en HBO, son utilizadas por el canal 13 de Santiago, del programa de máxima audiencia "Martes 13", de 1983.
Even in the 1960s. My father was VP and lead engineer of Computer Image Corporation through 1972. I'm guessing that at least some of what is shown here was from the sixties. If not, no different from what I grew up watching.
That song in the beginning... it's definitely a CTI production. That may be Hubert Laws on flute and it's definitely the incomparable Steve Gadd on drums.
The "6 O'Clock Movie" with the circle 7 was for KABC in Los Angeles, which used it up to 1971 when the Prime Time Access Rule forced it up a half-hour as "The 6:30 Movie." Notice this station didn't use Walter Raim's "Big Show Theme" as used by WABC's "4:30 Movie" (but I ask, what did KABC use?). As for the theme of WPIX's "Harper News," they would use it on-and-off through 1977 when they first adopted the "Move Closer to Your World" theme for what after 1974 became "Action News."
Nice! I thought that Dolphin used it in the first place when it comes to scanimation. Computer Image graphics was second close to Dolphin. BTW, the second to last clip was funny, reminds me of "Sesame Street".
4:35 V-E-N-T-U-R-A, Ventura Ventura It's an economy car It's a prestige car Ventura's an economy car with prestige Pontiac Ventura, right From Pontiac (Pontiac!) "Ventura is the low-priced economy car from Pontiac." V-E-N-T-U-R-A "Ventura's a cut above." Ventura!
That Dimension section. I don't know what it's supposed to be for. I did see bikes in the footage, so maybe it's supposed to be part of a bike commercial.
I think it's sports related, there's a a running and fencing portion in it as well. But I'm not sure since there's some dancing too. Very curios about what that could be.
This video proves that people in their early-mid 40's are still young. In 1975, a 43 year old would have been born in 1932, and would have probably been middle aged by then. My aunt was born in 1977 and is a grandmother. It's a real mind-f*** seeing this video and knowing that someone wasn't even conceived when it was made, was born, had a kid, who then went on to have a kid of his own. It also screws with my mind to know that if I had been my current age when this was made, I'd be 69 now. The standard retirement age is 65. Here I am, a senior in college, wondering WTF am I going to with my life and yet if I was almost 26 at the time this was made I'd probably be retired. Let me go scream - how TF is that even possible? The guillotine was still being used in France when this was made. Go look at Halcyon Hall at the Bennett School for Girls in NY - that place is a collapsing death trap, and when this was made it was still being used. My dad had a 1977 Scout SUV that had lap belts and a metal dashboard - that postdates this video. This video is 43 years old, and the effects in it are beyond impressive and have aged very well. I was born in 1992 and a lot of the things on TV didn't look this advanced even then. So upbeat! December 1, 2018 4:50 am
it's freaky, isn't it? i worry all the time about how "old" ive already gotten...i was born in 1991. it's so easy to lose track of the reality of age and time... which is to say, there's plenty of time, and aging is slower than we think.
It gets...weirder. Some of the stuff in this video (like the intro to the Cass Elliot special at 11:47) is as old as 1973. And there’s also a Dolphin Productions feel that demos similar scanimate graphics from 1974!
@@benjnavarro28 The CBS Special Presentation graphic at 11:45 came out in 1970, I think, and was already out of use by 1975, having been replaced by the famous "rotating" logo in 1973. Also, if you did the same calculation, I'm now 30 and this video is now 47 years old, so I'd be 77 if I were my current age when this was made, and into my 80s if I were my current age when some of these logos (like the aforementioned CBS Special Presentation) were made! It's sort of depressing to watch '60s/'70s stuff and then realize that if I had actually been an adult to witness that era, I would be elderly now with probably not many years left. But on the same token, it minimizes age differences because me and 80-year-olds have something in common: we were 30-year-olds in a world with computer animation. My grandmother on my dad's side, who now has 3 great-grandchildren, was younger than I am now when this video was made. Computer animation is older than most people think. Most people probably think it came out in very rudimentary form in the 1980s, because that's when computers became affordable for home use. In actuality, there is a computer animation demo reel even older than that Dolphin one; Computer Animation Industries' one from 1972. Some of those animations date back to the late 1960s! And I actually have since found out they offered computer programming classes at the aforementioned Bennett College. They were short-lived and unsuccessful, but the fact they offered COMPUTER PROGRAMMING classes at a college that, as of the time it was torn down last spring, had over half the floors collapsing inside its main building really just does not feel right. The building those classes were actually held in remained structurally stable until it was torn down in September 2021 (as part of the 8-month-long process of tearing the whole abandoned college down) because it had just been built in 1972, but still, the college's main building, Halcyon Hall (a gorgeous, huge building opened in 1893) which was never torched, never hit by a hurricane/tornado, and never extensively vandalized was already most of the way collapsed from natural decay. 1 - Computers are older than we think, they've been prevalent for most living people's entire lives 2 - Natural decay and water damage especially don't move at our timescales. You'll find surprising commonalities with today's things and those in buildings collapsed from natural decay. I've even seen a bowling alley abandoned after I'd already been in my first 2008 or newer Honda Accord that already had a major roof collapse. February 26, 2023 2:14 am
@@benjnavarro28 The TV show that all this makes me instantly nostalgic for is "The Electric Company", the children's show that probably taught me to read. They made heavy use of Scanimate from the beginning, and that show premiered in 1971 (I watched it from the first episode as a small child).
Like a scene demo but without computers nice. There is a good tomorrow's world episode here on YT about effects like this but he also talks about 3D stuff too. Actually having said that, I think this uses more crude, but still very cool, techniques like cartoons.
Great montage on computer technology in the 1970’s. The music & graphics really show how much progress has occurred. To think. This is almost fifty years of computer technology on display. If a personal computer in 1976 cost around $1k. How much did this equipment cost for commercial use? I think I found a topic to research this weekend.
I wonder if electronic-music composer Larry Fast (Of Synergy fame) was inspired to create Cybersports by one or more of the sports-related imaginings seen here?
This has the actual theme which was later used for the defunct Home Theater Network (HTN) in the 1980's. Here is an example. th-cam.com/video/0hh0SReM82E/w-d-xo.html
No. Well, apparently it's part of the special opener that they did. I thought that CIC made the CBS Special Presentation logo, but they actually made the scanimate butterfly logo.
TVC: C TVIdent: A Feature: F intro: I Radio: R AM: MW FM: FM TV: TV CableTV: CA News: N NBC WRIT News Radio 1340 4:00 CR MW Home Box Office Ident 6:18 ATV CA Encore ITV CA Feature FTV CA CBC Sports 9:02 ITV CHCH 11 11:12 ATV N CBS Television City Hollywood ITV WPIX 11 News 13:30 CTV N Rock in Stereo WPLJ 95.5 FM CR FM Radio Station Kbpi Number 105.5 FM CR FM KBHKTV 44 San Francisco 16:08 ATV
I think Scanimate or something like it was actually used for one effect in Star Wars: the Death Star's targeting display when they're waiting for the rebel base to come into range.
This makes me even more nostalgic for a time period I didn't even grow up in.
Un famoso okno xd
It's called anemoia. I feel it sometimes too and I really love it.☺💗💓
Yea true but i did watch some dated movies and tv shows that had this kind of look but in the 90s and 2000s not when they where current.
me too
You and me both
A friend's father was involved with making these early computer animations. The soundtrack alone is a study in mid 1970's culture, the images are iconic to those of us who grew up with them, but the contribution to the history of both computers and advertising are unparalleled. Ont this, the day of his passing, may these images be shared and enjoyed forever.
My Dad, Francis Honey, was VP and lead engineer of CI through 1972. Who was your friend? If from the early days of CI, I probably knew him and his father.
The fact that such fluid computer animation was possible in the 70s blows my mind.
How this is even possible blows my mind
Because they did not use bitmap graphics.
It was analog actually. They used Scanimate.
fun fact. many of the uncanny "early 90s cgi" computer animations are actually from the late 70s and early 80s as tech demos for systems that were the size of rooms
The look of Scanimate work is iconic, and i'm not sure it's even achievable/emulatable to a convincing degree. A lost art form.
Ikr
You could achieve similar effects with some clever shader works. Might be one of the easier effects to write GLSL shaders from. Its basic is modern shader's 2D Texcoord manipulation.
These days the entire scanimate machine, fully analog and running at 1080p (150MHz pixel clock) from an SDI HD source would fit into a briefcase - and that’s still full analog built out of discrete chips. Op amps are tiny and fast. There are even ways of getting rid of the CRT screen used for rendering and instead use addressable low dispersion recirculating delay lines (admittedly a few hundred of them, and they’d need to be waveguides so not cheap, but still). The user interface with all the knobs and buttons would be bigger than the “guts” of it. So if someone wanted to pay for it, it could be recreated in a form usable in a modern studio, with larger dynamic range, and with more powerful effects such as texture and bump mapping - shaders can be analog, after all, and doing 3D graphics with analog fragment shading is not a big deal. With a few more briefcases of stuff you could have an analog machine that could render Doom, in an entirely analog fashion, with procedural textures (read: user defined 2D function generators aka knobs for tweaking Fourier coefficients).
In short: not only we could achieve it today, but it could be massively more useful. And with a custom analog asic or two, you could render basic game console graphics, with geometry and texture data fed in via digital potentiometers and nothing else (thousands of them, but on a chip they are no big deal). I’d go as far as claiming that low power ultra-mobile game consoles could do graphics and lots of game engine physics in an analog fashion with much less power use than digital computers with GPUs. An 8x8 CMOS digital multiplier uses about as many transistors as dozens of good analog multipliers. And the latter will be faster as well. There are ways of merging digital “housekeeping” and analog signal processing at chip scale that can produce modern GPUs at a fraction of the power use. Even analog memories are much denser than DRAM. And so on. The analog future is bright.
@@MakotoIchinose Could you achieve the kind of organic "happy accidents" which analog equipment gives?
I can also create similar effects with my own eyes, through a phenomenon known as Retinal Fatigue.
No denying that Scanimate was incredibly ahead of its time. Essentially an analogue synthesiser for images
My father was Francis Honey, VP of Computer Image Corporation and lead engineer. This was my childhood in the sixties through 1972, when Dad left. I didn't see any, here, but they also did work with the Smothers Brothers, Sesame Street (Jim Henson came to our house for dinner, once, and I have two photos of him with Dad and the CI team), Electric Company, Frank Zappa, Coca Cola. Dad met with Ringo Starr when the Beatles were looking at CI for a film or music videos. Unfortunately, the business people thought they should ask for the moon $$$$ ("It's the Beatles!!!") and so the thing fell through.
Dad would take us down to the offices for private screenings of their latest work. Those were exciting times ... Jim Henson, Smothers Brothers, Frank Zappa!!!
Would you or anyone know what was used for WPIX' "Harper News" theme at 13:30?
@@wmbrown6 no idea. Sorry. I would also like to know what was used for that first piece.
@@mongofan1 - That makes both of us, then.
You are a legend man! Thanks for carrying on your father's legacy sharing his stories. Merry Christmas to you! 🎄
@@wmbrown6that’s a bad ass tune….so is the moog funk one at 11:00 that sounds like a weird cover of give it up or turn it loose by James Brown.
The surprising thing about a lot of these images is that they used a lot of ANALOG video cameras and disc recorders in order to create them, which they kept secret from their clients. Far fewer computers were used than a lot of people might believe. It was (almost literally) a lot of smoke & mirrors. But the results were often amazing, especially for 40+ years ago.
Yes indeed, they first had to create/distorb those monochromatic images on a scanimate system then colorize it via an analogue colorizer, then they had to record those images via a video camera trough a teleceline process, for more layers,they had to repeat that process and then mix those recordings together via an analogue mixer together, wich was a painfull trial on error and long process,but the results speaches for their selfes, this is amezing mind blowing stuff shown here.
Clients supplied the logos and most of the other visuals. The "scan" part in Scanimate implies just that: scanning and filming materials before having them processed by an analogue computer system, often combining the output with other animation techniques for varied results (traditional film, stop animation, chroma keying etc). As unwieldy as it was, the process itself was no secret. On the contrary, the achievements of the system, from before its inception right to its commercial demise, were extensively reported by specialist publications at the time. Given that there were less than a dozen of such machines in the whole world at the height of Scanimate's popularity, and only two have survived to this day (one of them fully operational and adapted to modern times, i.e. able to communicate with modern workstations), the animation produced is that more unique.
@@johneygd They might have perfected it when SYSTEM IV came out later in the 80s
@@Aleksa_Milicevic I decided to search Scanimate it was very interesting almost like an analog Moog synth but with video and was pretty much real time.
Though they did have some digital CGI back then but it had to be printed to film frame by frame.
But an analogue computer is still a computer... still, yeah, extensive use of (mostly analogue) video synthesisers back then, since the expense of computer time and the need for custom software made rendering (in the sense we understand the term today, which already existed back then) fairly expensive.
I really love 1970s music.
I’m 22 and this video is pretty much entirely responsible for introducing me to Cass Elliot (the scanimate intro to her tv special is at 11:47). I bought the album that goes with her special because of this video!
I can't even imagine how they did that with the 70's tech.
Dedication my friend. Dedication.
They created the images on paper then placed them in front of a video camera. They ran the camera's feed through various filters to add color, distortion, & motion, then filmed the results.
Scanimate... There's a video here explaining the process.
In addition to the other answers, state of the art tech in the 70s would probably surprise you - just none of that tech would be available (mostly due to a combination of high cost, lack of demand *and* in many cases lack of maturity) for the customer electronics market (save maybe at the highest end) for 5 - 10 years.
it was crasy. Basically an analog frame grabber, and many opamps, were able to render a video signal from a camera into a vector graphic, which could easily be "modified". This was then scanned back into video, and then color could be processed. This was sent to tape, and there you go.
They began promotions for the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics before they were even hosted. WOW!
6:18 -7:10 Parts from those presentation on HBO, there are used by channel 13 of Santiago, from prime-time show "Martes 13", on 1983. / Partes de esa presentación en HBO, son utilizadas por el canal 13 de Santiago, del programa de máxima audiencia "Martes 13", de 1983.
0:53 Beautiful transition. I can't believe that this was an early form of computer animation made in 1975
I think nowadays, that kind of transition would be almost impossible to do. And if possible, it would be corny.
Many of these were a few years old already: Mama Cass died in 1974...and that Pontiac Ventura was a '74 or earlier.
@@saxongreen78 Yep. The Cass Elliot special premiered in September 1973
Even in the 1960s. My father was VP and lead engineer of Computer Image Corporation through 1972. I'm guessing that at least some of what is shown here was from the sixties. If not, no different from what I grew up watching.
Scanimate machines are huge, comparable to 3 full sized refrigerators. Now You can do the same effects with a smartphone or tablet.
5:16 I almost thought the guy said "even CD's" but it's CB's as in CB radios, lol.
13:51 gone but not forgotten. It's over a year now.
I wish this video would never end! Scanimate always makes me smile.
That song in the beginning... it's definitely a CTI production. That may be Hubert Laws on flute and it's definitely the incomparable Steve Gadd on drums.
The song is "I Won't Be Back", by Joe Farrell.
Logofanatic Ah there we go, thank you!
+kz1000ps Anytime!
6:19 HBO Promo 1975 - 1981
7:47 HBO Promo 2
7:11 HBO Encore 1975
This has so much energy!
oh that kbhk-tv ident has aged beautifully
it does look a bit modern
1:34 - Vintage Maritime TV footage from what is now CTV Maritimes!
What ever did become of the Hydronics company that has their ad at 2:58?
They still look great.
Tasty stuff. The library music for the HBO idents is also rather delicious.
this looks extremally good for its age
The "6 O'Clock Movie" with the circle 7 was for KABC in Los Angeles, which used it up to 1971 when the Prime Time Access Rule forced it up a half-hour as "The 6:30 Movie." Notice this station didn't use Walter Raim's "Big Show Theme" as used by WABC's "4:30 Movie" (but I ask, what did KABC use?). As for the theme of WPIX's "Harper News," they would use it on-and-off through 1977 when they first adopted the "Move Closer to Your World" theme for what after 1974 became "Action News."
The song KABC used was "Afternoon of the Rhino" by The Mike Post Coalition.
It’s a blessing that you didn’t deactivate the comments.
Imagine how good they look at their native resolution on the right monitor.
Computer Image Corporation 1975 (198th decade) Demo Reel
This would be even more amazing if it were deinterlaced to 60fps and scaled to 720p. You'd get a great feel for the fluidity of the animations.
256byteram someone should find the reel and reupload it.
Most of what remains are 3/4 inch cassette tapes. They were crappy to begin with. At least you get the idea.
@@royweinstock8738how about film chain 16mm
Nice! I thought that Dolphin used it in the first place when it comes to scanimation. Computer Image graphics was second close to Dolphin. BTW, the second to last clip was funny, reminds me of "Sesame Street".
Um, scanimate was used since the late 60's, so neither was the first, or so i believe
6:19 MY FAVORITE COMPANY!!!!
This is what flash animation use to look like in '70s before Flash existed.
I can see how this is flash
flash animation but instead of being free they cost 10.000$+ to make but have better sound.
13:51 RIP WPLJ 1970-2019
The first music of this video makes me nolstalgic
The name of the full song is “I Won’t Be Back” by Joe Farrell
i'd rather have scanimate come back than the minimalist route most networks are going thorugh
it's like 70s vaporwave, that sounds terrifying
to make it even scarier I think just a few of these are from the late 60s, that channel 7 6 o'clock movie bumper at 12:41 is from 1967
1:13 oh, now we're talking! That's the groovy stuff right there.
4:35
V-E-N-T-U-R-A, Ventura
Ventura
It's an economy car
It's a prestige car
Ventura's an economy car with prestige
Pontiac Ventura, right
From Pontiac (Pontiac!)
"Ventura is the low-priced economy car from Pontiac."
V-E-N-T-U-R-A
"Ventura's a cut above."
Ventura!
How could I replicate these effects on digital hardware?
Nowadays you could create something like that in After Effects.
Or, if you want to get fancier, you can write shader codes to be recorded.
Really love the jingle from 5:14
same lol
Me too! It’s so catchy!
The girl in the H&B commercial could've easily been the Oz Film logo's granddaughter.
6:19 full HBO 1975 promo theme
6:07 Entertainment will be randomly generated!
6:19 Looks like the 3 Intros of HBO Feature Presentation
CBS Promo, ABC Monday Night Football Opening, HBO Idents and More Promos - Circa 1975
I'm not sure If HBO had a ratings bump pre-1976?
Killer soundtrack.
These look really good. It's too bad a lot of companies didn't use them well, which is why they got a bad reputation.
That snazzy intro though...
Those Are From Dolphin Productions!
13:29
14:55
That Dimension section. I don't know what it's supposed to be for.
I did see bikes in the footage, so maybe it's supposed to be part of a bike commercial.
I think it's sports related, there's a a running and fencing portion in it as well. But I'm not sure since there's some dancing too. Very curios about what that could be.
This gives me MAD Electric Company vibes.
Electric Company used Scanimate all over. It was the show's signature look.
6:12 *w e e d e a t e r*
*w e e d e a t e r*
hi
why did the chicken cross the road?
idk why
@@igp899 weed eater
I love how the only colour palette available was 'neon sick'
7:11 what song is that?
What's the name of the music from 9:03 - 10:02?
13:30 My 1st best scanimate logo!
isn't that WBAL News or WPIX?
This video proves that people in their early-mid 40's are still young. In 1975, a 43 year old would have been born in 1932, and would have probably been middle aged by then. My aunt was born in 1977 and is a grandmother. It's a real mind-f*** seeing this video and knowing that someone wasn't even conceived when it was made, was born, had a kid, who then went on to have a kid of his own. It also screws with my mind to know that if I had been my current age when this was made, I'd be 69 now. The standard retirement age is 65. Here I am, a senior in college, wondering WTF am I going to with my life and yet if I was almost 26 at the time this was made I'd probably be retired. Let me go scream - how TF is that even possible? The guillotine was still being used in France when this was made. Go look at Halcyon Hall at the Bennett School for Girls in NY - that place is a collapsing death trap, and when this was made it was still being used. My dad had a 1977 Scout SUV that had lap belts and a metal dashboard - that postdates this video.
This video is 43 years old, and the effects in it are beyond impressive and have aged very well. I was born in 1992 and a lot of the things on TV didn't look this advanced even then. So upbeat!
December 1, 2018 4:50 am
it's freaky, isn't it? i worry all the time about how "old" ive already gotten...i was born in 1991. it's so easy to lose track of the reality of age and time... which is to say, there's plenty of time, and aging is slower than we think.
It gets...weirder. Some of the stuff in this video (like the intro to the Cass Elliot special at 11:47) is as old as 1973. And there’s also a Dolphin Productions feel that demos similar scanimate graphics from 1974!
@@benjnavarro28 The CBS Special Presentation graphic at 11:45 came out in 1970, I think, and was already out of use by 1975, having been replaced by the famous "rotating" logo in 1973.
Also, if you did the same calculation, I'm now 30 and this video is now 47 years old, so I'd be 77 if I were my current age when this was made, and into my 80s if I were my current age when some of these logos (like the aforementioned CBS Special Presentation) were made! It's sort of depressing to watch '60s/'70s stuff and then realize that if I had actually been an adult to witness that era, I would be elderly now with probably not many years left. But on the same token, it minimizes age differences because me and 80-year-olds have something in common: we were 30-year-olds in a world with computer animation.
My grandmother on my dad's side, who now has 3 great-grandchildren, was younger than I am now when this video was made.
Computer animation is older than most people think. Most people probably think it came out in very rudimentary form in the 1980s, because that's when computers became affordable for home use. In actuality, there is a computer animation demo reel even older than that Dolphin one; Computer Animation Industries' one from 1972. Some of those animations date back to the late 1960s!
And I actually have since found out they offered computer programming classes at the aforementioned Bennett College. They were short-lived and unsuccessful, but the fact they offered COMPUTER PROGRAMMING classes at a college that, as of the time it was torn down last spring, had over half the floors collapsing inside its main building really just does not feel right. The building those classes were actually held in remained structurally stable until it was torn down in September 2021 (as part of the 8-month-long process of tearing the whole abandoned college down) because it had just been built in 1972, but still, the college's main building, Halcyon Hall (a gorgeous, huge building opened in 1893) which was never torched, never hit by a hurricane/tornado, and never extensively vandalized was already most of the way collapsed from natural decay.
1 - Computers are older than we think, they've been prevalent for most living people's entire lives
2 - Natural decay and water damage especially don't move at our timescales. You'll find surprising commonalities with today's things and those in buildings collapsed from natural decay. I've even seen a bowling alley abandoned after I'd already been in my first 2008 or newer Honda Accord that already had a major roof collapse.
February 26, 2023 2:14 am
The passage of time'll getcha. Look at me, I'm writing this 5 years in your future.
@@benjnavarro28 The TV show that all this makes me instantly nostalgic for is "The Electric Company", the children's show that probably taught me to read. They made heavy use of Scanimate from the beginning, and that show premiered in 1971 (I watched it from the first episode as a small child).
I can't find the original logo of 5:16
Is not a logo is a commercial
Those are from Electronics: Graphic Arts From The Future!
4:35
8:47
11:49 thats very nice
1:46 SIETE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The reference to CD audio at 5:31 puts some of this animation work in Q4 1982 or later, rather than 1975
Announcer said CB (as in, Citizens' Band radio), not CD, so this ad is from 1975 or earlier. It even says Sight and Sound '75 at the beginning.
Like a scene demo but without computers nice. There is a good tomorrow's world episode here on YT about effects like this but he also talks about 3D stuff too. Actually having said that, I think this uses more crude, but still very cool, techniques like cartoons.
Scanimate / System IV analog video processor
@@curcumin417 Analog? Thanks!
Superb 70s type motion graphics - yee haw!
Great montage on computer technology in the 1970’s. The music & graphics really show how much progress has occurred.
To think. This is almost fifty years of computer technology on display. If a personal computer in 1976 cost around $1k. How much did this equipment cost for commercial use? I think I found a topic to research this weekend.
11:00 Cabbage music
That NFL MNF intro... L O V E I T
11:43 - Finally - with NO video glitches!
What is the name of the piece that accompanies the Jack Paar Tonite show opening at 14:55 ?
More (Theme from Mondo Cane)
Kind of a good weird, and very retro. I like it!!
I wonder if electronic-music composer Larry Fast (Of Synergy fame) was inspired to create Cybersports by one or more of the sports-related imaginings seen here?
we need these graphics back, they would save tv
I would still watch TV if these graphics, idents, and commercials would come back.
15:30 ... *cough* You guys get all of that?
Computer Image's CAESAR system. Not Scanimate. (Both analog tho)
6:19 HBO
This has the actual theme which was later used for the defunct Home Theater Network (HTN) in the 1980's. Here is an example.
th-cam.com/video/0hh0SReM82E/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/YclB-1DtYfU/w-d-xo.html uses the same theme
thanks for sharing
Big 13
That's From Image West.
16:09
Юла XP Професионыл that AK sound...
What is the special at 11:44?
8:48 Speggiman's logo capture
What was that "Dimension"? Some sorta local PM Magazine knockoff?
+Ian Sherman PM Magazine was launched in 1978. This was 1975. Unlikely to be a retroactive knockoff :).
How I miss analog.
Please is there a full show please give me a hyperlink to it please
say, whats that dimension sports network. i wanna know more
Pre-3D! :)
(Well, not that there wasn't fledgling 3D, primarily in engineering, and technical realms.)
11:44 You call that Scanimate?
I know, it looks like Cel animation.
No. Well, apparently it's part of the special opener that they did. I thought that CIC made the CBS Special Presentation logo, but they actually made the scanimate butterfly logo.
Yeah, that actually looks kinda creepy.
What was that Sesame Street parody from?
I think it may have just been a series of words to demonstrate what they were able to do. I like the Dimension thing best!
@@tonysaladino1062 Yeah, I assumed that wasn't commissioned by anyone, it was just an in-house gag they did as a demo of manipulating text.
Making with Scanimate or something else?
Some comments say there's stuff from 1967, maybe some animations were made in CAESAR.
TVC: C TVIdent: A Feature: F intro: I
Radio: R AM: MW FM: FM
TV: TV CableTV: CA News: N
NBC WRIT News
Radio 1340 4:00 CR MW
Home Box Office
Ident 6:18 ATV CA
Encore ITV CA
Feature FTV CA
CBC Sports 9:02 ITV
CHCH 11 11:12 ATV N
CBS Television City
Hollywood ITV
WPIX 11 News 13:30 CTV N
Rock in Stereo WPLJ 95.5 FM CR FM
Radio Station Kbpi
Number 105.5 FM CR FM
KBHKTV 44 San Francisco 16:08 ATV
Some splendid motion graphics work. And it's all digital...from the mid 70s! Did this company have any notable work?
eighth decade
wheres bell telephone
2:58 Cyberpunk 1975
2:58 Orwell would turn over in his grave....
scanimate???
yes
what is h&b?
wow, original star wars movies may be hard different of what we know if this technology was more spreading in the past...
I think Scanimate or something like it was actually used for one effect in Star Wars: the Death Star's targeting display when they're waiting for the rebel base to come into range.
6:06 WEED EATER
Really? That's what it says?
@@RQBtv Yes.
16:09 is KBHK before to became Field Communications Station.
I usually like dolphin productions reels