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History of Animation - 6: Computers and Vector Graphics

      Computers would change the animation industry forever. Producing a full length animated feature film was very expensive, time consuming, and often impossible for small studios of a few artists. But computers would make full length feature films possible at a smaller price. Computer animation, like hand drawn animation style, had its own development cycle.
      Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is considered to be the first film to utilize computer animation. The opening of Vertigo is an opening credit scrawl, with spirals drawn around the outside of the screen. This opening scene was created by Saul Bass whom insisted that these spirals be accurate to the equations they were intended to represent. For this reason, these spirals were computer animated and not hand drawn. 
      The computer work in Vertigo was just a taste to what was to come. The first experimental computer animation was done by John Whitney, called Catalog (1961). This film was composed of many vector drawings that would shift and morph. These were all calculated and drawn based on equations. This film was created primarily as an experiment, but it showed that computers were capable of creating motion pictures.
      Advancements continued, with the development of a system that is still used in modern animation software, keyframe based rendering. In animations, keyframes are drawings that represent the starting and ending points of a transition or the motion of an object. The software Key Frame, named after the technology it was spearheading, was used to develop another vector graphics film called Metadata (1971). This film was a bit different from previous vector based films as the film did depict people and characters rather than nondescript shapes and lines.
      Keyframes were a big development of computer generated graphics, as they gave artists more control over the timing of events within the animation. This, and the fact that computers were becoming more than a room sized calculator, would bring about three dimensional graphics that might seem similar to those of today.

Sources: 
https://d23.com/disney-history/

https://www.britannica.com/art/animation

https://www.diyphotography.net/alfred-hitchcocks-vertigo-possibly-first-movie-use-computer-    animation/

https://computeranimationhistory-cgi.jimdo.com/
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