Blast(off) from the Past

Going through some old Betacam tapes today I came across this countdown animation we created, probably in 1995 or '96. Back then, nonlinear systems were still fairly exotic (we had a Media 100 "whole deal", as I recall) so it was common practice to put a countdown on your master tapes to help the tape operators at the dub house or broadcast facility cue up the tape and know when the program was starting. (This is still done, particularly for broadcast, but it's become less important with digital media servers that have random access to files for playback.)

We had just opened shop as Pixel Workshop, and were still stretching our wings, trying to find our place in the production community, and thought it would be cool to do a fancy countdown showing off our animation capabilities. At the time we were using the Electric Image Animation System, which was the high-end animation tool for the Mac, and cost a hefty $7,500 per seat. Big bucks for poor, right out of college twenty-somethings that we were! But it was among the best looking animation packages out there, and it was fast. Keep in mind our fastest machine in the shop was a Powermac 9500/132. So render speed mattered, and Electric Image was blazing fast. (We've long ago switched to Maya, but I'll bet Frank McIntyre, who animated this segment, still has his cool EIAS leather jacket in the back of some closet in his palatial estate... )

Here's what we came up with -


Not bad, especially considering it was at least thirteen years ago. Looking at this now, I can see it was heavily influenced by Marathon, which we spent countless late-night hours playing on our networked Macs. (None of us had kids then...) There's also a certain Battlestar Galactica vibe there, launching out of the landing bay. (The original series, which we worshiped as kids...)

The textures aren't as photorealistic as they'd be today, the lighting is a bit overt (Oooh! Lens flare!) but overall this is still a clip I have a lot of affection for. It's fun to look back every now and then, to see how far you've come.

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