Компьютерная анимация 1968

March 21, 2010 12:38 PM

Soviet CGI, circa 1968 (SLYT)
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot (20 comments total)

This is really cool. Shame about the Pirates music.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 12:40 PM on March 21, 2010

Holy moly, that's amazing. Great find, CJP!
posted by brundlefly at 12:43 PM on March 21, 2010

Shame about the Pirates music.

At least it's not Linkin Park.
posted by hellojed at 12:46 PM on March 21, 2010

Or this.
posted by brundlefly at 12:47 PM on March 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

The Internet kitten meme has a long tale.
posted by stbalbach at 12:50 PM on March 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

The first programmers.

(swoon)
posted by Afroblanco at 1:00 PM on March 21, 2010

I'm going to be seeing the face at 0:45 in my nightmares tonight.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 1:01 PM on March 21, 2010

In Soviet Russia, Komrade Kitte ASKIIs the questions!
posted by cenoxo at 1:34 PM on March 21, 2010

What a find! A minor quibble: the name of the creator is not "Nikolay Nikolayevicha Konstantinova" (a bizarre mix of case forms) but Nikolay Nikolayevich Konstantinov. A great post, and a great vindication of SLYT!

(In case you were wondering, the Russian title is Кошечка 'Kitty,' and at one point he says мяу 'meow.')
posted by languagehat at 1:39 PM on March 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

Is there any more information about what I'm looking at here? What is this being displayed on? Is it a film made of the computer display, or printouts animated traditionally?
posted by DecemberBoy at 2:05 PM on March 21, 2010

Pretty impressive if you consider that the BESM-4, the machine on which this was made, ran at 666.7 kilohertz and had an operating memory of 8 kilowords (in this case roughly 40 kilobytes).
posted by nasreddin at 2:07 PM on March 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

More old computer graphics here (Though most of it is 70-80-90s stuff)
posted by ymgve at 2:43 PM on March 21, 2010 [4 favorites]

And to think, just two years later, the Americans managed to CGI a whole moon landing!
posted by Sys Rq at 3:35 PM on March 21, 2010

Outrageous, Sys Rq! The moon landing was not CGI! It was clearly claymation.

Nice find, Chinese Jet Pilot.
posted by chairface at 4:01 PM on March 21, 2010 [2 favorites]

Good Lord, ymgve! I never thought I'd see Stanley and Stella again!
That was on an anthology tape of computer animation back in the '80s that the local video place inexplicably had. They wouldn't sell it but I checked it out every time Mom would let me. Hooray for VintageCGI!
posted by Countess Elena at 7:16 PM on March 21, 2010

cats and computers
posted by p3on at 7:18 PM on March 21, 2010

I'm underwhelmed.
posted by Doohickie at 8:02 PM on March 21, 2010

More Soviet bloc animation.
posted by Pollomacho at 4:26 AM on March 22, 2010

It looks very much to me that they printed each frame out on paper, then shot it with film. It is clearly computer animation, but the in those days standard output was done on paper.

I wonder if the code still exists somewhere? Good lord, the digital pack rat in me sometimes...
posted by Xoebe at 12:32 PM on March 22, 2010

ЛоЛкот!!!
posted by symbioid at 10:58 AM on March 23, 2010