Lately I’ve been talking with my high school VJ-U students about the differences between analog/optical methods and digital techniques: forced perspective vs. green-screening, papier-mâché and clay vs. 3D modeling, et cetera. On [CreateDigitalMotion](http://createdigitalmotion.com/2008/03/20/videos-from-the-dawn-of-video-mechanical-effects-and-oscilloscope-games/), I saw John Whitney’s “Catalog” a demo reel of his optical effects work from 1961, made with an “analog computer” that Wikipedia says “was built in the late 1950s by converting the mechanism of a World War II M-5 Antiaircraft Gun Director.” I went to Wikipedia’s source to verify this claim, Gene Youngblood’s seminal **Expanded Cinema** (the whole book is [available from vasulka.org as a PDF](http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_ExpandedCinema/ExpandedCinema.html)). Sure enough,
> An M-5 Antiaircraft Gun Director provided the basic machinery for Whitney’s first mechanical analogue computer in the late 1950’s. This complex instrument of death now became a tool for producing benevolent and beautiful graphic designs. Later Whitney augmented the M-5 with the more sophisticated M-7, hybridizing the machines into a mammoth twelve-foot-high device of formidable complexity upon which most of the business of Motion Graphics was conducted for many years.
> Similar to the analogue device built by Whitney’s brother James for the production of Lapis, but far more complex, the machine consists of primary, secondary, and tertiary rotating tables, cam systems, and other surfaces for pre-programming of image and motion sequences in a multiple-axis environment. [Youngblood, p. 208]
Sort of like the world’s largest [Spirograph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph)! Grab the PDF and check out pages 207 to 216 for some pictures of Whitney and the computer.
Thanks, Jonny!
