The Quantel Paintbox

Long before Adobe and Autodesk had After Effects and Flame there was the Quantel Paintbox. My first job was at The Weather Channel in the mid 90s, and I got to paint with pixels on a Quantel Harriet. The Harriet had a “Ramcorder,” the precursor to the RAM Preview, of 383 frames which allowed for realtime playback and it had a live video out direct to air which luckily I only had to use once. While I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the Paintbox, I felt constrained, held back by its shortcomings. Eventually I graduated from limitations of the Paintbox and leveled up to an SGI Indigo2 sporting Discreet Logic Flint and SoftImage 3D Extreme.

My mentor and friend, Eddie Terrill, aka E.T., at The Weather Channel told me a story about their first year with the very first Paintbox in use at a broadcast network back in the early 80s. The Weather Channel Art Department were the first Paintbox users in the United States. Their in-house art department won 26 Gold BDA awards that year. The serial number on their Paintbox was number 1. MTV was one of the other few early adopters of the Paintbox. Enjoy this article about artist David Hockney and his time “painting with light” on the Quantel Paintbox here.

When we transitioned to SGIs I asked E.T. if he could train me on Flint. He looked at me deadpan and simply said, “read the manual.” Like my overnight After Effects training I read the entire wire-bound Flint manual in one night. I jumped into the hot seat the next day with E.T. alongside me giving me his wise insights into compositing and animation on the Flint. Later that year three of us got the opportunity to visit Marshall Graphics Systems in Tennessee for SoftImage 3D Extreme training. A few years later we transitioned to Apple Macintoshes, replacing all of the legacy SGI hardware with much less expensive gear with our own “Rebel Mac Unit” quite similar to Industrial Light & Magic’s own Mac group.

We now had access to tools ILM has also implemented like Puffin Designs Commotion and ElectricImage Animation System. We also replaced Adobe Premiere with Apple Final Cut Pro. We utilized local Rorke Data disk arrays paired with Pinnacle Systems Targa SDX cards for DigiBeta ingest and recording. As we entered into the 2000s we delivered graphics as QuickTime files encoded in the Digital Voodoo codec. Our SDX cards were replaced with D1 Desktops. I actually worked for Digital Voodoo as their worldwide technical support line. A few years later Grant Petty was ousted from the company he created, and he founded Blackmagic Design. BMD’s DeckLink found its home into my own homegrown broadcast design, animation, and compositing studio.

Disney’s Multiplane Camera

During a recent family trip to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, for my daughter’s sixth birthday we enjoyed a walking tour through Walt’s incredible journey as a dreamer and entrepreneur. This humble, miniature museum laid out key moments in Walt Disney’s life. He and his brother, Roy O. Disney, founded Disney World. However, Walt died in 1966 just 5 years before the doors opened. His brother came out of retirement to officially realize the brothers’ dream. Disney World officially opened on October 1, 1971 to the delight of the world. While it’s gone through many a transformation since its inception, it still remains an escape, a land of imagination where dreams do come true.

As we followed the historical placards through the dimly lit space there was one in particular caught my eye that stated “Multiplane: New Depth In Animation.” Disney developed a camera system that could layer elements onto separate planes in space. Then by moving the camera through the layers this technique gave the scene a believable, lifelike quality of depth previously only applicable to live action. This system was eventually replaced by digital compositing techniques, but the term “multiplane” stuck. We still use this term today when referring to multilayered comps in After Effects and other compositing applications like Flame, Fusion, Blender, and Nuke.

ABOVE IMAGES © DISNEY.

“With the introduction of parallax, scenes achieved a greater, more natural level of depth.”

When Walt Disney introduced the multi-plane camera in Snow White it was a game changer. New possibilities gave animators more freedom to bring their scenes to life.

With the introduction of parallax scenes achieved a greater, more natural level of depth. In many respects this technique is still used today, but in a digital variety.

MacPaint: 30 Years Later

Released with the very first Macintosh computer in 1984, MacPaint sold for $195 and included its word processor companion, MacWrite. MacPaint was developed by Bill Atkinson. He was one of the original members of the Macintosh development team at Apple. I can still remember when I first used MacPaint in my high school art class.

I painted a surfer catching the crest of a wave. It was crude, but the spray paint can sure did beat painting pixel by pixel with the arrow keys on my Commodore 64. Little did I know at the time, but the desktop revolution was just a few years away. First it will revolutionize print, and next it leveled up compositing and vfx for television and feature films.

ABOVE MACPAINT IMAGE © APPLE USED FOR EDITORIAL AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. ILLUSTRATION BY SUSAN KARE.

In 2014 CloudPaint was released online by Martin Braun. It’s an emulator of the original MacPaint program.

It will transport you back nearly 30 years to the dawn of the original MacPaint.

The Internship

When you start a new job somewhere, there’s no telling what it will lead to. I heard a story years ago about a guy that answered the phones at Industrial Light & Magic who eventually became a visual effects supervisor there. I don’t work at ILM, but my college internship produced a relationship that lasted nineteen years. Plus we celebrated quite a few accolades along the journey. In 1994 while attending the University of Georgia for Graphic Design I was fortunate enough to begin an internship with the Georgia Museum of Art, the state’s official art museum. Around that time I was also the Graphic Editor for The Red & Black student newspaper in downtown Athens. Little did I know my design talents would eventually arrive in the Library of Congress.

Bonnie Ramsey, Director of Publications and Public Relations, was my mentor. She had a deep passion for advertising and identity design. The very first piece I designed was for an exhibition of Art and Margo Rosenbaum’s work. It was called “ShOut!” and I used the ‘O’ as a metaphor for a mouth shouting. Bonnie said when she saw that clever play on typography she knew we would get along quite well. After my internship ended, Bonnie and I kept in touch and nearly every year for 14 years we produced a handful of award-winning, including Best In Show, exhibition catalogs, checklists, and hard and soft cover texts. Bonnie is retired now, and I am pleased to share that we are about to collaborate on another exciting project.

I was fortunate to meet Lamar Dodd in his home one afternoon while he was cataloging his work. I had designed a poster earlier that year which included one of his daughter’s paintings. Per the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art website: “Founded in 1937, the School of Art is named for Lamar Dodd who as a young man in the 1920s traveled from his home in Georgia to New York to be part of the Art Student’s League.

There he learned from and worked with many of the luminaries of American art. He returned to Georgia to head the Art Department at the University of Georgia from 1939 until his retirement in 1972. Under his leadership, the department grew significantly. The department was renamed the Lamar Dodd School of Art in 1996.” Visit GMOA. Visit the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens.

“It is Pitch Black. You Are Likely to be Eaten by a Grue.”

Now couldn’t be a better time than ever to be a classic gamer. One thing I remember most about my first computer, the original Commodore 64, was playing Zork, an all-text adventure game set in a magical, fantasy world. I can still hear the sound of my dot matrix printer screeching away as I kept an ongoing transcript of my latest adventure. In 1992 id Software released Wolfenstein 3D, and a year later their Doom series further defined the FPS in all of its gruesome detail.

And who could forget Dragon’s Lair, the animated adventure from animation genius Don Bluth? I spent many a Saturday at Putt Putt Golf & Games and Aladdin’s Castle going through the moves to slay the dragon, Singe, as the crowd of teens around me cheered me on at every move. Now I can take the games around in my pocket and play whenever I like. Zork © Infocom, The Ultimate Doom © id Software, and Dragon’s Lair © Digital Leisure, Inc.