State of the Art : Computer Graphics Give New Dimension to TV Ads in a Sharply Competitive Field
Even a super hero sometimes needs a computer’s help. Take an animated television sequence produced this spring for Marvel Productions in which Spiderman, the red-and-blue masked character, had to swoop down onto a Marvel logo.
Spiderman’s first attempt was a clumsy crash that missed the landing spot. Using a series of knobs that relay instructions to a computer, producers altered the character’s movements so that the next landing was smoother, although still lacking the grace expected of a super hero. A few more adjustments, and the landing was perfect.
This is high-tech animated choreography, made possible by powerful computer-graphics machines made by companies like Westlake Village-based Interactive Machines Inc., better known as IMI. The machines allow special-effects experts to easily manipulate sharp, three-dimensional images into smooth, fluid movements that once were too difficult or time consuming.
IMI-designed computers help make television-program titles and logos that appear on Home Box Office and ABC. In addition, they are used in the production of commercials such as the STP spot that takes viewers on an animated tour of an automobile engine. Mick Jagger’s “Hard Woman” video last year, in which the British rock star cavorted with a multicolored neon image of a woman, also was helped along by an IMI computer.
‘An Exciting Media’
“It’s an exciting media that is essentially limited only by your creative abilities,” said Dan Keitz, head of computer graphics for K & H Productions in Dallas.
IMI has grown in six years from a garage in Topanga, where it made inexpensive computers, into a $5-million-a-year business with 50 employees. It projects annual sales of $20 million in two years, when it hopes to go public. The company, which plans to move to a Calabasas industrial park by year-end to be closer to Los Angeles, says it has been profitable for three years and has earned more than $1 million in that period.
Although animation is a glamorous, rapidly growing part of IMI’s business, most of its orders now come from such aerospace companies as Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas. The aerospace firms typically use the computers to create realistic settings for flight-training simulators that the military uses to train its top guns.
Goodyear Aerospace of Akron, Ohio, for example, signed a $3-million contract with IMI this summer to include the computers in a two-cockpit F-15 flight simulator it is building for the Air Force.
IMI is part of a small, highly specialized field. Its competitors include Silicon Graphics in Mountain View and Salt Lake City-based Evans and Sutherland Computer, a large, diversified computer-graphics concern.
Kenneth E. Dozier Jr., IMI’s president and chief executive, predicts that demand for computer graphics machines will grow rapidly as they become more widely used in manufacturing, engineering, education and medicine.
IMI was founded by engineers George Semerau and Joseph Edwards, who still are executives with the company, and David Hunsicker, a financier who is not actively involved in the business. In March of 1984, IMI hired Dozier, who then was vice president of operations with Culver City-based Digital Productions, recently renamed Omnibus/Abel.
A native of Lexington, Ky., Dozier, 39, dropped out of the University of Kentucky in 1969 to tour the country as a keyboard player in a 12-piece, jazz-pop band that played at small clubs. His interest in electronic music brought him to Los Angeles and eventually interested him in computers. Dozier later earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from California State University, Los Angeles, a master’s degree in engineering from USC and a master’s in business from UCLA.
Dozier calls his company’s machines “mini-supercomputers,” so named because they are small but employ technology found in powerful supercomputers. The computer systems, which IMI assembles in Westlake Village, range in price from $40,000 to $150,000.
Wire-Frame Figures
Producers of computer graphics typically use the IMI machine to plot the motions of three-dimensional objects and characters. The figures show up on the producers’ video screens as wire-frame figures.
Smaller production houses often produce animated sequences entirely on machines such as IMI’s. Larger producers, however, typically will use IMI machines with more powerful computers that handle lighting, shading and high-resolution coloring.
In the production of the 1984 movie “The Last Starfighter,” for example, the IMI machine was used along with a $12-million Cray Research supercomputer to produce a 25-minute space-battle segment.
Demand Expected to Soar
Animation executives and market researchers predict that demand for computer-generated images in commercials will soar because commercial makers are under growing pressure to make visually seductive ads, appealing to viewers who can merely push a button for dozens of other channels or fast-forward their videocassette players.
A recent study by Palo Alto Management Group, a Mountain View-based consulting firm, projects that revenue for producers of commercials making extensive use of computer-generated images will jump from $234 million this year to $700 million in 1990.
Computer-graphics producers expect this growth to occur even though ads using computer-generated images are expensive to make--often costing more than $100,000 for a 30-second spot--and sometimes are so overwhelming that viewers forget the name of the product.
“In order to grab the audience’s attention in a cluttered marketplace, you have to reach out for more unusual images,” said Robert Abel, head of Abel Image Research in Hollywood and a pioneer in producing computer-generated images.
