How TV Logos Were Made Before Computers (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How TV Logos Were Made Before Computers (2017)

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230 pointsbenbreen47 comments

Not television but the 1936-46 Universal Pictures one was especially pleasing and impressive to me.

Recreated in 1972 for "The Sting" which at the time was a film made as a bit of a nostalgia trip. https://youtu.be/AsMEneC7F4o

Heh. I just found 40 minutes of BBC's hot air balloon idents. https://youtu.be/tdKbtvaSskA I love the internet.

I speed read that as "incidents" and and after brief viewing and realisation am both disappointed and relieved

I speed read that other word as "baboon" and had the same feelings.

CBS's children's television news spot "In The News" had an iconic spinning globe animation, to mesmerizing electronic music in the style of Raymond Scott. (I don't know if he personally made that music, but it sure sounds uncannily like Soothing Sounds for Babies, etc.)

CBS' "In the News" - from 1977!! (In which President Jimmy Carter sets up strict code of ethics and rules of conduct for public officials. Turns over peanut business to prevent appearance of conflict of interest.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stX3zM2oL8g

CBS' In The News On Chernobyl (1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgWVjmDabAg

Synesthopia: CBS’s In the News Theme. (The comments link to some other cool intros and theme songs.)

https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/03/17/in-the-news/

Raymond Scott ‎- Soothing Sounds For Baby Vol. 1 (1962) FULL ALBUM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k66nGplNRmQ

HN discussion of "Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer (cbslocal.com)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997110

>nineteen999 10 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into L...

>This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's:

HN discussion of "Ask HN: What, if anything, do you listen to while coding?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17119729

>scyclow on May 21, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Ask HN: What, if anything, do you listen to while ...

>I'm a big fan of Raymond Scott's electronic stuff because it's interesting, non distracting, and usually doesn't have lyrics. https://youtu.be/rYVIDJtKU-A

HN discussion of "Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pioneer (2008) (theguardian.com)":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995733

>firstworldman on Jan 29, 2016 | parent | favorite | on: Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pione...

>Raymond Scott is probably more well known, particularly because of having been sampled by Dilla. Oram and certainly also Delia Derbyshire deserve all their due... I can't imagine how exciting it must have been to be creating these sounds that no one had heard before.

>The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is more influential than they're ever given credit for, even now that the story is somewhat well known. And they were at the time too... If you're looking for 'pop' musicians who were influenced by those experiments in early electronics, check An Electric Storm by White Noise (band that featured Delia and Brian from BBC RWS), as well as United States of America's self-titled 1968 record. Both radical and timeless.

Thanks Don, as always your posts are from a wonderful alternative timeline. Perhaps we can rejoin it someday.

I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music.

It would make a great screen saver, at least!

If you're excited by live physical effects, they still exist: in theatre! Well, maybe not this year.

By the way despite all the great “AI” promise of lisp machines, flying logos were the big market for Symbolics. Sad but true.

I love the creativity of these old techniques. It’s seems how absurdly amateur much of old TV was, but these logos show how much professionalism and technical creativity there was as well.

Indeed, they were used for 1990 FIFA World Cup

What about it? The computer animated intro to it?

yes

I enjoy watching the DVD/BluRay bonus features on how films were made in the 1980s and before. Lots of interesting stuff.

Starting in the late 1990s and then progressively advancing until it is everything, all the special effects videos amount to "and then we used a computer." I mean, still a few interesting bits about how they got it into a computer (motion capture, etc), but it tends to homogenize.

Technically there would still be stuff I'd find interesting, but it goes beyond what DVD features will have.

Lord of the Rings had some good effects stuff in the making-of. And Fury Road. Last cool one I remember before LOTR was Independence Day. So many are just “a computer did it, exactly the same way as in every other movie” now.

I'm not sure if people realize, but "Copy" and "Paste" and "Cut" aren't just metaphors. There used to be entire jobs dedicated to people manually doing this with scissors, glue, tape, etc. to save time for senior execs who couldn't spend the time to rewrite their documents. And by that, I mean... the typewriters were pretty unforgiving of any typo, although the the IBM Selectix did have a key with whiteout ink, which was nice... imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline...

Also with newspaper production after photo typesetting came in but pre-Pagemaker, etc. Columns of copy were output and they were glued onto layout pages. Length was adjusted by cutting the copy at some point--hence, inverted pyramid style and mistakes were corrected by outputting new copy which was pasted over the old copy.

There were computer typesetting systems before Pagemaker (e.g. Quadex) though they were dedicated systems. Pagemaker replaced them.

Not glue. Hot wax. You can put down and pull up hot wax easily. Basically you have photo blue grid layout boards. Photo type setting, border tape and various photographic techniques. Mask mode in Photoshop is red because of rubylith which was a red film you would cut around a photograph and since red light does not expose B&W film, one could make the background white. All the layout just had to last long enough to expose the negative to which was then used to make the off-set printing plate.

I grew up in a graphic arts photography studio in the pre-computer graphic arts days. My father had an 1942 ATF camera, which was about 14 feet long and you were the "mechanism" in the darkroom placing the film on a vacuum board, exposing the film and running it through a processor for positive film or the usual three trays for negative film. The camera was originally made for WWII to enlarge surveillance photographs and had very little lens distortion.

Photo typesetting was expensive. Many times the way to fix spelling errors was to copy the type setting on to positive film then find the missing letters and with hot wax and an exacto knife, fix the error. I think it was cost of photo type setting that pushed graphic artists to get a mac and an early laser printer. Photo type setting was vastly better quality, but we would have the graphic artist print all their type out at 200% then reduce that down to 50% with the stat camera to get the resolution up.

As a teenager, it was always a rite of passage, especially with the girls, that you got your forearm hot waxed. Fun times...

>hot wax

Yeah, I actually knew that. We were using this tech at student papers in the late 1970s, early 80s. (And I was also the production director for a student group that had some offset presses and did poster design. The typesetting tech for that was more primitive than the newspaper had; you manually cranked the right letter in position and exposed it.

We used to use a rubber and solvent based glue called cow gum. Good, because it was re-positionable and didn’t mark the paper. Bad because after a couple of hours the solvent would get you high and give you a cracking headache.

My dad is a graphic designer who spent quite a bit of his career working pre-computer. One story he told was of a colleague who seemed to always make his columns of typeset text perfectly fit The space available. Turned out he’d just fold anything extra underneath, not caring that the last bits were missing.

The guy who invented copy/paste, Larry Tesler, recently passed away last month. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695

> Possibly Mr Tesler's most famous innovation, the cut and paste command, was reportedly based on the old method of editing in which people would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere.

> The command was incorporated in Apple's software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was released the following year.

Here is Larry's website. RIP. http://nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Home.html

> imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline...

I would hope that in that era, people would be more forgiving of tipex'd mistakes?

> imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline...

Yes. It's hard to comprehend how easy we have it today in so many things, and how so many things today will seem ghastly archaic tomorrow.

We tolerate limitations of tools because the alternative was not having the tool at all. Typewriters would have been a shining godsend for people who had only ever written by hand, so what's a little effort spent in correcting mistakes?

I learned to type at about 7 or 8 on what I believe was a surplus IBM model B electric typewriter, from before the selectric ball was invented. It didn't have a "one" key, you had to use a lowercase "ell". It was battleship gray, and it had a metal shell about as heavyweight as the bodywork on a 50s car, not to mention it had a steel chassis, innards that looked like a sewing machine if you unlatched the hinged cover, belt drive that ran constantly and idled with a noise reminiscent of the V8s of the era, and hurt about as much if you dropped it on your foot. The keys were very light, unlike what I've heard about the portable typewriters journalists used to carry. Barely touch them and it would go "snap, snap, snap" and then the carriage return would delicately release a spring with a click and send the massive carriage with the sheet of paper back "hrmmmmmmmmm..kaCHUNK" and you'd better not get a finger pinched in there. And if you pressed the "shift" key, several pounds of metal would actually be shifted instantly with a loud clunk you could feel to align the capital letters on the hammers.

I'm pretty sure it was the non-executive model at this link: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/modelb_intro...

Anyway, I remember using both whiteout and the tape that you typed over to erase letters.

Not rigorous of course, but copy/paste/cut should form a group like map/fold, algebraic structures are everywhere.

Another joyful detail is how the ident bounces around in the frame. This is because the ident was recorded on film and the film jumps around on the sprockets.

This you would not notice in the cinema or on a CRT TV in a darkened room but is quite apparent in a YouTube video.

In latter years when the ident would be put onto videotape for playback the bouncing on the sprockets would still be there as a result of the telecine process.

This did not come to an immediate end with the introduction of proper tools from the likes of Quantel. Some broadcasters were quite small, regional and proud of their long-standing analog idents. The whole channel would have to be rebranded and, as part of that exercise, the proper hardware added to do modern idents.

I recently used AfterEffects motion tracking, plus some blurring and glowing effects on a text overlay, to reproduce the jiggling of the telecine process of an old film recently digitized to video, and match the titles and credits at the beginning and end of the original film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

I'm in the progress of researching and writing an article about the subject of this video (light pen driven pie menus on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector display, in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University), which I'll submit to HN when it's ready some time soon I hope.

Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20...

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html

Check out Munching Squares on the same kind of hardware currently running at the Living Computer Museum, with an AM radio so the computer can play its own music synchronized with the graphics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc

Here's the fucking manual!

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340...

(Be sure to order all the luxury add-on options for your 340 Precision Incremental Vector Graphics CRT Display, including the 342 Symbol Generator for drawing text along with your vector graphics, the 370 High Speed Light Pen for pointing at said text and graphics, and definitely the Type 347 Subroutine Option -- a big fan cooled cabinet with a powerful hardware subroutine accelerator that is super useful! Otherwise you have to simulate subroutines in software, which sucks.)

http://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/types

The AM music is unsurprisingly similar to bytebeat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

Wow cool, that's like a daemon spawn between Munching Squares, Stephen Anthony Malinowski's Music Animation Machine, and the Obfuscated C Contest!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATbMw6X3T40

It's one of these things where age shows: If you're old enough, you just know this (at least:I do, and I think it's because I am).

Another thing worth mentioning is Scanimate which was an analog video animation system used in the late 70s/early 80s to create a lot of the flying/metallic logo effects that were common on TV at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispW6-7b2sA

Quantel was another company producing digital hardware specifically for TV effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ma_jeU50rY&t=5m32s

My favourite part is 14:30 onwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpXMH9xJy0

I visited BBC Shepard's bush in the eighties and saw the mechanical globe. It was very cool. In a hokey, home made ah-haaa kind of way.

Max Headroom is a real model trying to look like a computer model in the eighties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU

I had a neighbor who was a veteran from this era. Did some of the MTV stuff, some eighties news globes. Once I found the sculpture that this is based on just lying around in the hallway: https://img.discogs.com/2YTnJ0ck1qdsZWJJ7R-xs8kKgew=/fit-in/...

He was always asking me for some help with getting into digital 3D, but was hung up on building a server farm for rendering first. I could never convince him that he should take the time to learn Blender or Autodesk first and worry about hardware later...

This website is so bad. I scrolled too much and the address has been changed. Now when I'm trying to share it to others I get the wrong URL . Then I refreshed and I found myself in a different article without a way to get back to the one I read.

In the 1981 BBC TV series of the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', the animated sequences simulated the look of a computer display but weren't actually computer generated. They were drawn on sheets of acetate as traditional 2D animators had done for decades.

The animation is one of the most memorable aspects of the TV series and, despite being almost 40 years old, still holds up really well:

https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=127

DVNO, four capital letters, printed in gold, cuz details make the girls sweat, even more, while they're shaking their belt, no need to ask my name to figure out how cool I am

I just bought a mid century accordion a few days ago, and the amount of chords it can do with one button is incredible, not to mention the number of instruments it can emulate (9 on one side, 5 on the other). As a primarily digital artist, I am embarrassed to say how easy it is to forget the analog precursors of our modern tools.

In nuclear engineering, we use computational fluid dynamics programs and fancy neutronics codes to model reactor concepts. I was reading some history recently and found that back in the nuclear heyday they just used plastic cutouts and flowed special fluids that defracted light differently when under tension to design components.

They also used electrically conductive paper and cut it out into odd shapes and applied a voltage since resistance is an analog of both neutron diffusion and heat transfer.

Wild.

That’s Emacs for you

Search for Scanimate on YT, that's the name of the machine used to produce most TV logos in the 70s and early 80s, it's an analog synth for graphics basically.

Scenes created for star wars (19xx) are also quite fascinating.

You're aware that "(19xx)" also includes Episode I, right? :)

That goes for Phantom Menace as well. The heads in some of the shots of the pod race stadium were painted q-tips, and they couldn’t digitally get the waterfalls in Naboo to look right, so they poured table salt.

The most astounding thing there is how the entire page errors out of existence if I rotate my phone.

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