#ataripunk

But! Recently, in all my music/noise electronics, I was playing with a little electronic circuit sometimes called the AtariPunk Console. It's a pretty simple build — one chip, and a handful of other components — but it makes fun buzzing notes that play in interesting arpeggios. Here's a breadboarded, kit version:

(This kit is from Tech Will Save Us; I like the way that the shelf box becomes part of the enclosure.)

The far control, by the button, adjusts volume, while the nearer two change the pitch in strange ways.

This version has an innovation I added to the kit design — that button. When it's held down, you hear the tone. The base design just buzzes for as long as there's power.

This is an enclosed version I put together some time ago. The knob nearest the speaker is the volume.

The enclosure itself is interesting; they were apparently made in the 1980s to house kids' walkie-talkies, but never got built. I picked up a bunch of them from a surplus place years ago. (Hah, I just checked, they're still available — and still 35¢ each.)

So I decided to build the girls one of these things, in the walkie-talkie case format, but with a pushbutton instead of a power switch. I realize this is kind of silly to post about it since I forgot to take a single picture of it before mailing it — but the design is along the general lines of the one shown. The switches and light are gone, and the volume knob is farther from the other two and more clearly related directly to the speaker. The pushbutton and jack migrate to the side. And the pitch knobs are now those retro "chicken head" knobs.

qué se haga la luz!

Fake CG animation was a big deal in the early-1980s. What can digital animators today learn from this short-lived trend?

Max Headroom and the Strange World of Pseudo-CGI

By Neil Emmett on Monday May 13, 2013   11:46 am

Comments 29

I’ve come across people who believe that Max Headroom, the Channel 4 character from the Eighties, was a genuine piece of computer animation. But although he was conceived by the animators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (of Cucumber Films fame) Max himself was portrayed by actor Matt Frewer, placed into latex makeup and a shiny costume and set amidst a range of technological tricks.

Half of the frames from the footage used in Max Headroom were removed in production, resulting in a juddery look to suggest animation shot on twos, and Frewer was bluescreened in front of a basic digital backdrop. The crew even added deliberate faults to the “animation” – such as the stammer which became Max’s trademark – to complete the effect.

This process seems somewhat surreal today, in our brave new world of Maya, Xtranormal and Blender. Max Headroom was created at a time when 3D CGI animation was desirable, but not always affordable; if the budget did not allow it, then the crew had to fake computer animation in front of the camera.

Another good example of this can be found in the 1981 film Escape from New York. Early on in the movie we see what appears to be a wireframe model of Manhattan; in actual fact, a physical model was built for this sequence, with reflective tape placed along the edges of the buildings. Shot under ultraviolet light, this recreated the luminescent green-on-black effect of primitive CGI.

There has even been an incident in which a budget imitation of CGI itself received a budget imitation. In 1987 an unidentified signal hacker managed to replace two television broadcasts with a mildly disturbing video of a home-madeMax Headroom show. In this improvised effort Max was portrayed by a man in a shop-bought mask, while the moving backdrops – in the original series, an example of genuine digital animation amongst the pseudo-CGI – were replaced with somebody offscreen wiggling a bit of corrugated metal about.

These are all extreme examples; during this period, it was more common for digital animation to be emulated using hand-drawn techniques. Often used as a visual motif in kids’ science fiction-themed cartoons (witness the cel animated wireframes in the opening sequence to Transformers) this approach was put to good use by Rod Lord’s animation work on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxytelevision series from 1981. Created using litho film and coloured gels, these sequences suggested digital graphics simply by combining glowing primarily-coloured images with a black background. An added plus was that the animation could get away with being a little bit jerky…

One sequence in Hitchhiker’s Guide portrayed an intergalactic war as an early video game, a theme drawn upon by other animators: for example, in 1982 a British public information film used Space Invaders-like imagery to advise audiences on safe driving [see image below]. The biggest example of this, however, came when Disney produced an entire feature film based around the look of eighties arcade games: Tron.

Tron contained genuine CGI animation backed up with large amounts of compositing tricks based around matte effects and backlighting; this made the live action footage look as though it had been digitally processed. As a result, the film stands as arguably the premiere example of pseudo-CGI.

In her book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor Clare Kitson remarked on the fact that Max Headroom, Channel 4’s biggest animated hit, was not actually animated. But as she went on to argue, perhaps it is time for a reappraisal:

I wonder if we might indeed classify those sequences as animation nowadays. With the plethora of different technologies now employed, the previous narrow definition (which insisted that the movement itself must be created by the animator) seems a bit old-fashioned. These days anything that appears on a screen and moves but is not a record of real life – including creatures moved by motion capture – tends to fall under the animation umbrella… The current popular synonym for animation, ‘manipulated moving image’, seems to be made for Max.

Of course, if Max had been made using actual CGI he would have ended up as a creaky old relic, rather like the “Money for Nothing” video which came out the year after his debut. Instead, Jankel, Morton and Frewer came up with a genuinely iconic creation that has aged surprisingly well.

Today, it is all too easy for animators to fall back on the tricks of their software and lose track of the wider aesthetic potential of their work. What Max Headroom—and, to an extent, some of the other pieces mentioned here—show is the opposite effect: digital animation spurring creativity in analogue work. They have an ingenuity and hand-made charm which is missing from so much modern computer animation.

Primitive digital imagery has had something of a resurgence across the past decade or so, to the point where pastiches of 8-bit pixel graphics have found their way into mainstream productions such as Wreck-It Ralph. Perhaps it is time that the animators and digital artists of today rediscovered the lesser-known cousin of this aesthetic: the strange world of pseudo-CGI.

NEIL EMMETT is the editor of The Lost Continent, a fantastic resource devoted to British animation, past and present. This piece is an expanded version of a post that originally appeared on his site.

Dex was already ducking under the fence by the time he saw the sentry. It was an Arctek machine, top of the line perhaps half a decade ago, subtly modified and equipped with a sonic stunning device (nonfatal, but exceedingly unpleasant -- developed for crowd control by the Argentinian equivalent of DARPA). "Identify yourself," it said.

"Dexter Logan. I'm here to see Tom."

The robot buzzed quietly for a moment, and Dex noticed that the Cicadas were out. "Dex!" The tone was familiar -- a synthesized simulacrum.

"Tom? Quit fucking around and call off the bot."

The robot swung its sonar apparatus smoothly back and forth, in a crude mimicry of a person shaking its head. "I'm not fuckin' with you, Dex. It's been a while. Ten years?"

"Eleven," Dex said.

"Eleven candles candles," the robot said. "Candles candles candles candles candles candles. Candles eleven of them."

"Fuck." Tom's a broken robot, thought Dex. Just then, a figure surfaced from within the long grass.

"Dex, my man. Come with me."

Dex followed Tom, and the robot trailed a few feet behind, still stuck in its verbal loop. "Some kind of fluke in my model traversal," Tom said. "Fucker works just fine until suddenly it decides some word or phrase links to itself with a probability of one. Sometimes it matches my patterns enough to get registered as me, and then I have to go in and delete the bullshit from the database by hand."

The farmhouse was small and old, but it offered shade from the unseasonably warm weather. The table was piled chest-high with second-hand junk. Scavenged robot chassis sat under it, sometimes on the floor and sometimes on chairs. The shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling had its power cable extracted, cut, joined with a pair of plastic caps, and cut again further down. Tom brought in a pair of stools from an adjoining room.

"It's been a while. What, ten years?"

"Eleven."

"Eleven. What can I do for you?" He glanced at the cupboard. "A beer, maybe?"

"I'm afraid this isn't a social visit. I need your help."

Tom got up abruptly. "I think I'm gonna need a beer, then." He found a reasonably clean glass and cracked open a can of lukewarm beer, then settled down and took a long swig out of the can, not bothering to pour. "Okay, shoot."

"I got fucked over, Tom." Dex sighed.

"Infringement, again?"

"Fuck no." He grimaced. "Five years for that shit, and I wasn't even doing it -- just running the BBS. Staying straight now. Pen testing. Figured that was the way to go -- using my skills but no chance of getting locked up."

"So?"

"So, I think maybe I'll need that beer after all." While Tom got up, Dex took another look around. There were cameras and microphones everywhere. Through the crack in a half-opened door he glimpsed a bank of closed circuit television monitors. "You recording this shit, Tom?"

"I record everything. Turns out that's the only way to get believable responses." He put a much cleaner glass down on an empty spot on the table and poured an equally warm beer into it. Dex looked at it as though it might contain more cameras.

"I did pen testing yesterday for Tim Dolby."

"The VP of Program Data?" Dex nodded. "But, yesterday..."

"I know. There's more." Dex paused. "Whatever scam he's pulling, he had me steal some files for him and fence them overseas."

"What files?"

"I don't know, man." Dex took a swig of his beer. He got mostly hot foam. "I just know the filenames, and those were UUID. Base 64 shit."

Tom began fidgeting with his pen. A few years as cell mate had left Dex with an understanding of this man's nervous habits, and he felt apprehension.

"So a guy fakes his death, steals some files, frames you... And you run to me?" A whine crept into his voice. "You think I ain't got enough problems as is?"

"I covered my tracks as best I could."

"Still--" he took a deep breath and calmed slightly. "Where overseas?"

"The Caucuses."

Tom sighed. "You just got fuckin' lucky, man." Dex stared blankly. "What, haven't been watching the news?" He took a device out of his pocket and flicked on a small CRT hidden amongst the bric-a-brac on the far side of the room.