John Whitney (animator)
John Hales Whitney Sr. was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the pioneers of computer animation.
Life
Whitney was born in Pasadena, California, and attended Pomona College. He is a descendant of the Whitney family through his father's direct line. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under René Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films. Their work, Five Film Exercises was awarded a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.During the 1950s, Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. In 1952, he directed engineering films on guided missile projects. One of his most famous works from this period were the animated title and dream sequences from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with fine artist John Ferren, and the graphic designer Saul Bass.
In 1960, he founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, which used the mechanical analog computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, titled simply Catalog. In 1966, IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its first artist-in-residence position.
By the 1970s, Whitney had abandoned his analog computer in favor of faster, digital processes. He taught the first computer graphics class at UCLA in 1972. The pinnacle of his digital films is his 1975 work Arabesque, which is characterized by psychedelic, blooming color-forms and demonstrates the principle of "harmonic progression". In 1969–70, he experimented with motion graphics computer programming at California Institute of Technology. His work during the 1980s and 1990s benefited from faster computers and his invention of an audio-visual composition program called the Whitney-Reed RDTD. Works from this period, such as Moon Drum, used self-composed music and often explored mystical or Native-American themes.
All of John Whitney's sons are also film-makers.
Several of the films, were preserved by the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles. HD transfers from their preservation have been seen in major museum exhibitions including Visual Music at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Hirshhorn Museum, Sons et Lumieres at Centre Pompidou, The Third Mind at The Guggenheim Museum, and others.