Spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under Rene Leibowitz.
1939
Returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films.
1940-45
Their work,‘Five Film Exercises’ was awarded the first prize at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949.
1948
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Whitney was born in Pasadena, California and attended Pomona College. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under Rene Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films. Their work, Five Film Exercises(1940–45) was awarded a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
During the 1950s, Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. In 1952, he directed engineering films on guided missile projects. One of his most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass.
The young John Whitney worked in the Lockheed Aircraft Factory during the war and while he was working with high-speed missile photography, he was technically adept enough to realize that the targeting elements in such weapons as bomb sites and anti-aircraft guns calculated trajectories and produced finely-controlled linear numerical equivalents, which could potentially be used for plotting graphics or guiding movements in peacetime artistic endeavors. A decade would pass before he was able to buy some of these analog computer mechanisms as"war-surplus" and construct with them his own"cam machine," which pioneered the concept of"motion control.”
Whitney built his first analogue computer in the late 1950s when he converted a World War II M-5 anti-aircraft gun director to create a complex drawing machine. This instrument gave him the ability to explore the world of motion and movement in a new kind of abstract space powered by computers.
The customized gun was able to control cameras that would maneuver above the artwork and, astoundingly, perform the kinds of functions that would later be common on digital computers. With these bespoke machines Whitney could create a peerless type of art while keeping ahead of the computing technology of the time. And, while his machines were mechanical, they anticipated the applications of computer software which we now take for granted.
Whitney Sr. created slit scan, a split-screen effect with cascading images on both sides of the screen, which made its way into 2001. The Whitneys also got two minutes of computer animation into Westworld, going all the way back to 1973. Years later, Whitney Jr. was responsible over twenty minutes of computer animation in The Last Starfighter.
Biography