Bounce
Bounce is a project that started in 1983 and finished in 2022. The project started at Ohio State University, which was closely connected to the hugely innovative Cranston Csuri company who were pioneers in computer animation. As an 11 year old I was mesmerised by the possibilities of creating images with a computer. Since personal computers were not really powerful enough to animate, I had to shoot a 8mm film capturing my rudimental coding of a circle shape (do you know hard it was to program a circle and fill it in??), render it, shoot a frame on the camera, reprogram the next position on the screen, render it, shoot another frame and so on. After nights of frame by frame filming - then waiting for the film to be processed - the net result was a somewhat underwhelming bouncing virus-like circle in five states of size. It moved predictably left to right, up and down, and back again. It certainly didn't look the reflective spheres on checkerboard floors that was cutting edge computer graphics at the time. The sole Apple IIe computer in the graphics lab at Ohio State was the tool (280x192 resolution @ 6 colors). This was before the Macintosh, MacPaint and the revolution of the mouse which was to arrive one year later.
Transparent Spheres Robert Connelly
Computer Graphics Research Group, OSU
George Out West Donald Stredney
Cranston Csuri Productions
Bounce Title Screen
The 8mm film was lost to time and I rediscovered it in 2021 in an unlabelled small canister. I held it up to the light and could recognise small circles in the lowest resolution possible on the smallest film stock possible. But there was something magical about discovering this time capsule and I had it transferred to a file. When I watched it back for the first time in 39 years I was struck by how basic it was (and it was literally programmed in BASIC). And how time consuming it was to do in 1983. Computer graphics had come a long way.
I exported all the stills from the file and it suddenly took on a new life. The stills were wonderfully organic - dirt, dust, scratches and grain delivering an inconsistent color palette and exposure. I arranged one frame next to the other, then larger sequences and eventually laid out the entire animation sequence across 1,440 frames. There is no column and row solution for 1440 frames, so I put aside 40 and ended up with a matrix of 56 columns by 25 rows. Each row would have a complete rise and fall of the persistent circle. Bounce looked like some crazed swimming pool by David Hockey with an uninvited virus appearing repeatedly. The project had gone full circle - from coding an image, rendering it digitally, displaying it on an analogue CRT screen, capturing it on film, playing it through a projector and digitising it back to file, and finally exporting out digital files to be remapped together in a new way. The result was three minutes of motion seen in one instant. But I guess Eadweard Muybridge got there first with his The Horse in Motion in 1878.
Bounce
Bounce
Eadweard Muybridge
The Horse in Motion
David Hockney
Gregory Swimming Los Angeles March 31st 1982
The 40 frames I put aside were called Extra Bounce.
I extracted 288 frames from the first loop. I tossed three frames aside and selected individual frames to make up nine other works of different matrices. Among the nine works, no still frames were duplicated. For instance Bounce 1x1 uses still frame number 80. Bounce 2x2 uses frames 5, 53, 124, and 139. And so forth to Bounce 9x9.
Bounce Series 1x1 thru 9x9
By the end I had set aside 3 unused frames from the first loop. These make up Extra Bounce. Additional frames were set aside that were 'blank' before the animation was rendered on the screen. The result was a blank computer screen on the 8mm negative. This are Misfire 1, 2 and 3.
Extra Bounce 2
Misfire 1
Misfire 1 Print. 762 x 1016 mm on German Etching 310 gsm
Misfire 2
Misffire 3
I animated the main Bounce 56x25 composition with each successive frame delayed by one frame. This is effectively 1400 loops playing at once. Likewise the same technique was used for each of the nine matrices, But this time each successive frame is delayed by the multiplier. So Bounce 3x3 has a 3 frame delay on each successive frame. Bounce 8x8 has an 8 frame delay. The greater the delay the greater the movement between the frames.
