John Whitney Presentation

Images of Whitney with his Analog Computer:

http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/whitney/whitney.html


Stills from other Whitney films (#'s 3-6)
www.hirshhorn.si.edu/visualmusic/films.html#

Quote by John Whitney Jr. on using the Analog Computer:
I don't know how many simultaneous motions can be happening at once. There must be at least five ways just to operate the shutter. The input shaft on the camera rotates at 180 rpm, which results in a photographing speed of 8 fps. That cycle time is constant, not variable, but we never shoot that fast. It takes about nine seconds to make one revolution. During this nine-second cycle the tables are spinning on their own axes while simultaneously revolving around another axis while moving horizontally across the range of the camera, which may itself be turning or zooming up and down. During this operation we can have the shutter open all the time, or just at the end for a second or two, or at the beginning, or for half of the time if we want to do slit-scanning."

Information on other projects:
-in 1948 he was awarded a Solomon Guggenheim Fellowship.

- in 1949 he and brother James won first place at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium for their film "Five Film Exercises"

- In 1952 he directed engineering films on guided missile projects.

- in 1958 he produced the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which is his most widely-known work.
link to 'vertigo' intro:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz46qS38OgM




Information on "Arabesque"
-the last film to be completed on the analog machine, and is considered the pinnacle of this medium
-funded by grants from the NEA and IBM