An Ottawa-born revolution in motion pictures
Local scientists were pioneers in computer animation technology
At a special Academy Awards ceremony in March 1997, a pair of retired National Research Council scientists from Ottawa, Nestor Burtnyk and Marceli Wein, were called to the podium by actor Helen Hunt to receive Oscar awards (certificates in their case, not statuettes) for their pioneering roles in developing computer animation close to a quarter-century earlier.
In the early 1970s, Burtnyk developed and wrote a revolutionary program that allowed computers to generate in-between animation frames that moved the action, at 24 frames per second, from one scene to the next. In 1974, Peter Foldes’ 11 ½-minute National Film Boardproduced Hunger, which used Burtnyk’s technology, became the world’s first fully computer-generated animated film to be nominated for an Oscar, in the Best Animated Short Film category.
Burtnyk’s and Wein’s 1997 award was in recognition of Hunger and their role in creating the technology behind it. Two years earlier, the pair were recognized by the Festival of Computer Animation as Fathers of Computer Animation Technology in Canada.
Any lingering doubts regarding their legacy were largely dispelled at a post-Academy Awards ceremony at which Wein was approached by Jim Kajiya, currently Microsoft’s director of research and an expert in graphic rendering. At the time, Kajiya was also receiving an Academy Award for technical excellence.
“He was an animator at Pixar,” Wein recalls, “and he came to me and said that the film Hunger inspired him to choose a career in computer animation. “Well, that felt pretty great.” According to Kelly Neall, managing director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, which honoured Burtnyk and Wein in 1998, “Their work led the way for a flood of technological innovations in Canada and beyond. In typical Ottawa fashion, they were quite modest about their achievement and reluctant to blow their own horns, but we got them on the stage at the NAC in front of animators from Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks to take a bow!”
Burtnyk was the lead on the NRC project, and the person who actually wrote the program code. His career there began in 1950, and by the ’60s he had started the country’s first computer graphics research project of any note. Wein joined the project in 1966.
In 1969, Burtnyk attended a conference in California at which an animator from Disney explained how they made cartoons, with a head animator drawing the key action scenes, and assistants known as “in-betweeners” drawing and colouring the intervening cels.
“When I heard that,” recalls Burtnyk, “I thought that might be something to try on the computer. The artist would have complete control; he wouldn’t have to describe his objects in some language — he could just draw them. And then I had to figure out how to get the computer to connect one image to another.”
He pitched the idea to his division management, who gave him the green light and, within a year, using a computer much, much slower than today ’s standards and as large as two refrigerators (but with far less storage), he came up with a working program.
“We were doing something no one else was doing,” recalls Wein, now 83, “and something no one knew how to do.”
The National Film Board of Canada, in Montreal, was contacted, and a project to encourage artists to experiment with it was launched. The first to do so was expat Hungarian director Foldes, who at the time was living in Paris.
Foldes’ first film using Burtnyk’s program was an 8 ½-minute 1971 effort titled Metadata, which looks like little more than an experiment to see what the software can do. It was Foldes’ second film, Hunger, a morality tale about greed and gluttony in the modern world, that put in-betweening on the cinematic map. Apart from its Academy Award nomination in ’74, the film also won the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival, a BAFTA award for best animation and a Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival.
Three years after receiving his Academy Award, Burtnyk was inducted into the Order of Canada. He has also received the Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals. All of these honours stem from his work in animation which, although just a sliver of his 45-year career at NRC, remains the part of which he is proudest.
“It turned into a big thing,” he says. “We went after something that looked promising — we didn’t know quite what it would give us — and it turned into something, into one of the really big areas. There are so many people in Canada who passed through the system, visiting our lab, or working as summer students, or at the film board. There was a lot of exposure of what we were doing, and that helped it grow. And Canadian animation growth was significant — the big animation and computer graphics companies in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, they’ll all say that it grew out of NRC.”
This story was brought to you by the letter I, for In-betweening, and is part of a series of 26 stories about Ottawa, one for each letter of the alphabet. Stay tuned: up next is J, for Jimmy Johnston, one of the area’s first members of Parliament and a repeated victim of assault. bdeachman@postmedia.com