Early Motion Graphics

Hooray for Harry Marks, he was one of my favorite clients. But you're wrong, these WERE done with computers, it's just that they were ANALOG computers.

The slitscan camera was basically an animation stand on steroids. The camera was mounted on a track which moved toward a large slit, behind which back-lit artwork passed, for each exposure. The moving camera caused the artwork to "scan" in the third dimension. This was not computer graphics, but a camera trick.

I do agree that it was a computer in the same sense that a slide rule or an animation stand is a computer. But when I say "done without computers" I mean in the narrower sense we think of today (i.e., digital) when we think of computer-generated graphics.

(Unless, perhaps, you have some inside info I'm unaware of about the technique that was used.)

Yeah, you and I are both essentially right. There's a lot more to the system than just slitscan, there were complex analog mechanisms that altered the camera parameters, they weren't programmable in the sense of modern computing, more in the sense of early plugboard computers that had to be manually rewired to be reprogrammed.
There's more info out there on the Slitscan machines and Marks' early animation systems, and from what I recall (and it's been years since I heard about this) they were the first animation systems to ever be operated under computer control, with a PDP-8 (although that was a little later than Marks' earliest experiments). I'll have to go dig some of it up.

FWIW, TVParty always steeps me deep in a mixture of nostalgia and fetid things best forgotten...

TVParty always steeps me deep in a mixture of nostalgia and fetid things best forgotten...

Heh. I know what you mean. Believe it or not, I discovered the Harry Marks stuff there while on an idle quest for information about Captain Kangaroo.

I was given a tour of Novocom when Harry had them exclusive. George Joblove showed me around. The amazing thing, was that in addition to the backlit artwork platten that had micro stepper motors, THE LENS ITSELF also had precision motors to locate the image in exact, precise locations, so movement was controlled by the backlit platten AND the shifting lens that allowed for other effects.