Symmetry Test 11A

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Paul Allen Newell

1982

Film/Animation

16mm film, color, sound, 3 min. 50 sec.
Music by Jerry Kaywell

Film and Animation

Description

Symmetry Test 11A grew out of John Whitney's computer animation class at UCLA, where Newell studied Whitney's use of harmonic motion. Storyboarded in the spring of 1977, the film began as a set of outline figures, choreographed on a Tektronix 4051 terminal in BASIC.

In 1978, Shirley Clarke, for whom Newell was then a teaching assistant, suggested he approach the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Jim Blinn was making the Voyager flyby films. Robert Holtzman's computer graphics laboratory let him use its equipment at night when no one else was there. David Em held the official artist-in-residence post at the time. Newell was jokingly called the “unofficial” artist-in-residence.

Early JPL versions were written in Fortran and the final film was coded in C on a VAX driving an AED framebuffer. Each frame was shot from the monitor with a Mitchell 16mm camera in a darkened room. The score was composed and performed on synthesizer by Jerry Kaywell of HK Sound. Newell composed the colors in RGB rather than in the NTSC video color space, which he unfortunately learned about only later.

The film was accepted as Newell's M.F.A. thesis in December 1980. He continued to work on the imagery, completing the final version in 1982. The film screened in the SIGGRAPH 1983 Film and Video Show in Detroit.