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Gary Demos

Abstract

Gary Demos spent the 1970s and 1980s solving the problem everyone else skipped: how to get a photographic image into a computer and back onto film without anyone noticing the round trip. He built film scanners and recorders at Information International, animated Peter Fonda’s head for Futureworld in 1976, quit during production of TRON to found Digital Productions, and bought an early Cray X-MP (Cray Research counts Digital Productions as the X-MP’s first customer) to render The Last Starfighter (1984), a film whose spaceships are computer-generated rather than models. The company was sold in 1986 and dead a year later, taking most of the first commercial CGI industry with it. Demos kept going: two Academy Scientific and Engineering Awards, a compression company that Dolby bought in 2003, roughly a hundred patents, and the Academy’s Gordon E. Sawyer Award in 2005 for a career of technological contribution.

Cray X-MP
A Cray X-MP. Digital Productions took delivery of the first one built and used it to render feature-film effects. Image: Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Lecture at Caltech

By Demos’s own account, he found the subject as a Caltech undergraduate in 1970, at a screening by the filmmaker John Whitney Sr., who made abstract films using surplus military analog computers as animation stands. Demos took his BS in engineering and applied science at Caltech in 1971 and went to Utah to work at Evans and Sutherland under Ivan Sutherland, where the hardware and the algorithms of interactive computer graphics were being invented at the same time. He arrived in the industry by way of an art screening and left Utah with the engineering.

Fifteen years later his business partner was John Whitney Jr., the lecturer’s son.

Triple-I

Information International, Inc., known as Triple-I, was founded in 1962 by Edward Fredkin, better known in computing for naming the trie. The company built precision imaging hardware: CRT film recorders, of which the FR-80 was the commercial success, writing digital images out at up to 16,384 by 16,384 pixels, and scanners using photomultiplier tubes to read film back in. It was equipment for the aerospace and printing trades that happened to be exactly what a film effects house would need, if a film effects house had existed.

Demos and John Whitney Jr. ran the Motion Pictures Product Group and made it exist. Their pixelated android point-of-view in Westworld (1973) is generally counted as the first use of digital image processing in a feature film. For Futureworld (1976) they scanned and animated Peter Fonda’s head, putting three-dimensional computer graphics on screen in a feature for the first time. Tests followed for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, then effects for Looker (1981).

The company’s machine was a Foonly F1, the fastest PDP-10-compatible ever built, assembled by Dave Poole, Phil Petit and Jack Holloway out of Stanford’s cancelled Super-Foonly design after DARPA pulled its funding in 1974. Triple-I was its first customer. Triple-I and MAGI produced most of the roughly thirty minutes of computer animation in Disney’s TRON (1982), including the Master Control Program, Sark’s carrier and the Solar Sailer. Demos and Whitney Jr. left before the work was finished (see the Academy’s refusal to consider TRON for a visual-effects nomination, on the grounds that using a computer was cheating).

Renting a Supercomputer

Digital Productions was founded in 1982 with backing from Control Data Corporation. The bet was simple and expensive: film-resolution imagery needs more arithmetic than any graphics workstation of the period could supply, so buy the fastest computer on the market and sell time on it as pictures. They ran a Cray-1S, then in October 1983 traded it in for a Cray X-MP; Cray Research counts the company as the X-MP’s first customer, though the first production machines also went to national laboratories that year (see Seymour Cray and Supercomputing). The rendering code was written in Fortran, because Fortran was the only language whose compiler vectorized well enough to use the machine.

The Last Starfighter (1984) is what they built it for. Digital Productions delivered about 27 minutes of computer-generated imagery across roughly 300 shots, with frames averaging 250,000 polygons rendered at 3000 by 5000 pixels in 36-bit color. The spaceships in the film are not models photographed on wires; they are geometry, and they are meant to read as real objects rather than as the deliberately abstract world of TRON. The company also did the hyperspace sequence in The Ice Pirates (1984), effects for 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984), and work on Labyrinth (1986). Demos and Whitney Jr. shared an Academy Scientific and Engineering Award for 1984 “for the practical simulation of motion picture photography by means of computer-generated images.”

Their sales argument was economic rather than aesthetic: computer animation, they claimed, took about half the time and between a third and a half the cost of building and shooting physical miniatures. For a few years, with a Cray, that was true.

Dead End: The Cray as a Render Farm

The Toronto company Omnibus Computer Graphics bought Digital Productions from Control Data in June 1986, over the founders’ objection, and took over Robert Abel and Associates, the third of the three significant American CGI houses, a few months later. Sources differ on both prices; they agree that Omnibus borrowed heavily for the two deals and that the consolidation never happened, since the three studios ran different hardware, different software and different sales operations. By early 1987 the debt was somewhere between $25 and $30 million. On 13 April 1987 Omnibus defaulted and closed all three studios on the same day, and about 150 people in Toronto, Hollywood and Los Angeles arrived at work to find they had none. The first commercial computer-animation industry in the United States went with them.

The business model was the deeper problem. A supercomputer is a capital asset that must be kept busy, and a film’s effects schedule is bursty: months of nothing, then everything at once. Worse, the hardware assumption expired. Digital Productions had been right that a 1983 workstation could not render a film frame in reasonable time and wrong that this would remain true. Silicon Graphics machines (see Dead End: Silicon Graphics) and then commodity processors in racks made rendering something a studio could buy incrementally, one box at a time, instead of financing a Cray. Pixar rendered Toy Story in 1995 on a farm of ordinary Sun workstations. Demos’s technical judgment about what film-resolution CGI required was correct; his hardware bet had a five-year shelf life.

Getting Film In and Out

The part of the work that outlived the companies is the least visible: the scanning and recording chain. Digital effects are only usable if a live-action negative can be read into a computer at full quality and the result written back out to film so that treated and untreated shots are indistinguishable in the same reel. Everything downstream, compositing, wire removal, digital sets, the digital intermediate that eventually replaced photochemical color timing, depends on that round trip being invisible.

At the 67th Academy Awards, for 1994, the Academy gave a Scientific and Engineering Award to Gary Demos and Dan Cameron of Information International, David DiFrancesco and Gary Starkweather of Pixar, and Scott Squires of Industrial Light and Magic, for pioneering work in the field of film input scanning. It is a rare citation: five people from three rival organizations, credited for the plumbing that made all their other work possible.

After Film

Demos founded Whitney-Demos Productions with his partner in 1986, then DemoGraFX in 1988, which moved from making images to moving them: digital video signal processing, compression pre-filtering, and layered image coding of the kind that lets one bitstream carry a base picture plus enhancement layers for higher resolution or dynamic range. Dolby Laboratories acquired DemoGraFX in April 2003, along with its patents and its work on the then-new H.264 standard. Demos holds roughly a hundred patents, and later worked at Lowry Digital and on his own codec research at Image Essence.

In 2005 the Academy gave him the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, an Oscar statuette for an individual whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry. It is the same field he entered by watching an abstract film in a Caltech lecture hall.

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