
How TV Logos Were Made Before Computers (2017) - benbreen
https://www.fastcompany.com/90125752/the-ingenious-way-tv-logos-were-made-before-computers
======
DubiousPusher
Not television but the 1936-46 Universal Pictures one was especially pleasing
and impressive to me.

[https://youtu.be/nLx4ucZ8v4Y](https://youtu.be/nLx4ucZ8v4Y)

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](https://youtu.be/AsMEneC7F4o)

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

~~~
867-5309
I speed read that as "incidents" and and after brief viewing and realisation
am both disappointed and relieved

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

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DonHopkins
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!

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

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gumby
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.

~~~
inakarmacoma
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...

~~~
ghaff
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.

~~~
BashiBazouk
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...

~~~
mattkevan
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.

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Theodores
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.

~~~
DonHopkins
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](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.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20approach%20to%20man-
machine%20communication.pdf)

[https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc)

Here's the fucking manual!

[http://bitsavers.trailing-
edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340...](http://bitsavers.trailing-
edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340_Display_Programming_Manual.pdf)

(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](http://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/types)

~~~
akx
The AM music is unsurprisingly similar to bytebeat.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o)

~~~
DonHopkins
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATbMw6X3T40)

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toolslive
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).

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rectangleman
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispW6-7b2sA)

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

My favourite part is 14:30 onwards.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpXMH9xJy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpXMH9xJy0)

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ggm
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.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU)

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Eric_WVGG
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/...](https://img.discogs.com/2YTnJ0ck1qdsZWJJ7R-xs8kKgew=/fit-
in/600x781/filters:strip_icc\(\):format\(jpeg\):mode_rgb\(\):quality\(90\)/discogs-
images/R-13130539-1549221247-8899.mpo.jpg)

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...

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srachamim
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.

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open-source-ux
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](https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=127)

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cryptoquick
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

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VeninVidiaVicii
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.

~~~
acidburnNSA
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.

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deltron3030
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.

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

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

~~~
Eric_WVGG
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.

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

