As the 1970s progressed Pearce Studios gradually picked up more work from various sources and a lot of it was quite technical. Dave Hall's plaintive cries from the far corner became louder and more frequent. "What this job needs is a computer !" By 1979 it seemed a logical step to take as a tool for the type of work we were being involved in and might suit the visual graphic style or “look” we were producing by manual slave labour methods. So Dave was tasked with researching the possibilities and coming up with a report and recommendations.

After much research the short list was narrowed down to a system being offered by Cambridge Interactive Systems for automotive, mining, and aircraft design. You can find out more about CIS and MEDUSA here and scroll down to the heading Medusa a product of CIS: 1977 till 1983.

In early 1980 we purchased a Prime computer and the 3D MEDUSA software for what felt like a small fortune from this small company of 5 boffins in Cambridge led by a 20-storey brain called Tom Sancha. We had to delay installation as Hitch Hiker's Guide cropped up out of the blue catching us rather by surprise.

Strangely, the purchase was not connected in any way with H2G2 but although we realised it would be the perfect tool we had to accept that there was no way we would be able to install and learn how to use the system in the time available for the BBC deadline.

So as is now widely known we applied the manual methods we were already using to pretend that the H2G2 graphics really were computer generated. Once that was completed in 1981 we proceeded with the computer project. This involved a dedicated air-conditioned computer room with a fridge-freezer sized cabinet standing alone in the middle of it, a large workstation with green screen, a digitizing tablet the size of a large drawing board, and a pen plotter that used Rotring pen cartridges.

By now we had been commissioned by the BBC to work on the second H2G2 series and we were aiming to use the new kit. Unfortunately, just before we were due to start, Douglas pulled out and headed for Hollywood ! Thanks Douglas ! We now had to find enough work suited to the new kit to start paying for it.

The Medusa software was not geared towards animation but from the manuals that came with the software we learned to build 3D digital models and view them as 2D green line images. I learned Basic and a smattering of Fortran as well as the Prime computer language and the Medusa control language and wrote procedures to specify camera flight paths as two 2D lines - one in plan view providing X and Y and one in elevation providing the Z height. Each line consisted of many hand positioned points representing sequential FROM and TO camera positions. I learned just enough to get the Prime coding language and Basic to cooperate and interrogate the lines to extract the co-ordinates from these points. By raiding the children's algebra and geometry text books I managed to write some stuff to convert them into points in 3D space and used them to build a command file specifying a 3D animation sequence which we could then leave running overnight to produce a series of individual 2D views of the 3D model and environment. As time passed I was able to come up with coding to sub-divide spline curves into the required number of points with fairings (ease in and ease out) of specified lengths.

These views were then each plotted onto paper or animation cel using a Rotring pen. Paper plots were reversed-out in the darkroom to create clear lines in black photolith for back lighting under camera and each registered in place with a piece of gash 35 mm film punched with 3 holes to fit on an animation peg bar. They then needed "spotting" with opaque black paint to clean up any imperfections in the black. Apart from the computer front end of this process this was the same frame-by-frame manual technique we had been using for other earlier work that rolled on into the production style for Hitch-Hiker's Guide. Plots on animation cel were first registered with punched gash film then painted on the back as normal top lit animation artwork.

At this time this was one of only 3 systems in the UK offering this sort of service, one of which was at Imperial College. So we were now getting quite a bit of work as a computer animation service from Ad agencies and design outfits as well as using it for our own work. But this was still an extremely labour-intensive process and, although it allowed us to do things that would have been even more tedious before, it still involved many man hours.

So I started bothering Tom Sancha again at the Cambridge outfit who sold us the software and kit about how we might cut out the plotting and manual work and go direct to film. They now had a developer employee called Dave Garnet (lots of Daves around in those days !) who was tasked with pondering on our problem. He came up with a 'magic box' that sat between the computer and the Rostrum Camera control box which was home made by me anyway so I could hack in the leads from the magic box to the buttons and relays in the control box.

The magic box came with a control language that allowed a series of very English-like commands to be interpreted into activating several buttons and relays and sensor return signals like the frame counter etc. So it was now possible to switch the direction of the camera from Forward to Backward - to take a single frame - to run the camera for a designated number of frames - and to open and close an external shutter. The magic box also spoke to a small aircraft instrumentation display that had a very bright, green-tinged, line display about 6 inches by 4 with a depth of "gubbins" behind it of about a foot or more.

The back lighting and back projection screen was lifted out of the Rostrum camera table and a piece of ply with handles and the screen set into it was dropped into the back-lighting glass space in the table. The table was centred to line the screen up under the camera lens and the camera cradle lowered to frame correctly onto the screen. So by using the commands like a 'dope' sheet I could create a command file like -

SHTR CLOSE
DIR BACK
HOLD TO FRM 200
DIR FORW
SHTR OPEN
LOAD B.001
EXP 2
LOAD B.002
EXP 2
 etc.

It soon became obvious that as monochrome this was pretty limited in its application. So the external shutter system was developed to become a disk with several lens sized holes spaced around the outer edge. One slot was not a hole, in order to retain the closed shutter option, and one was left clear for a straight white (-ish !). The rest all had coloured lighting gels which fitted with the colours we were habitually using for back-lighting anyway. So now with this external shutter-filter-wheel the command file could look like this -

DIR FORW
COL ORG (or GRN, YEL, RED, BLU, MAU, PRP, etc)
LOAD B.001
EXP 2
LOAD B.002
EXP 2
 etc.

So we were now able to pretty much bypass the manual and plotter processes we had been using up to this time when and if the style required for a project allowed us to do this.

The on-going Digital Story is inextricably part and parcel of the general on-going history of Pearce Studios Ltd. If you came to this page via a link from the Pearce Studios page you can return to the continuing story here - or to start at the beginning of that tale go here.