John Whitney

John Hales Whitney Sr. (April 8, 1917 – September 22, 1995) 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 (1940–45) 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. (dream sequences), and the graphic designer Saul Bass (titles).

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. In March 1973, Whitney presented a selection of his recent computer-graphics work at the Theatre Vanguard in Los Angeles, including Permutations, Osaka, and Matrix, alongside his brother James Whitney's Lapis.

Flyer for Whitney's 1973 presentation at Theatre Vanguard in Los Angeles.

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". used self-composed music and often explored mystical or Native-American themes. Later, Whitney would augment the mechanism with an M-7 mechanism, creating a twelve-foot-high machine.

Archive The Academy Film Archive houses the Whitney Collection and has preserved over a dozen films from the collection. The collection encompasses the work of John and James Whitney, as well as John's sons Mark, John, and Michael.