Even if you’ve heard of Scanimation, it’s not likely you’ve ever seen an actual Scanimate or know how it works. And that’s OK, because neither does most of the rest of the world. The exception is a handful of film and TV technicians, most of whom are in their 60s and retired — and one of whom happens to be Dave Sieg of Asheville.
Sieg moved to WNC a few years ago and owns the sole remaining Scanimate, the last of a mere eight of the analog computer-animation systems ever produced. Conveying how the machine operates is way easier shown than told.
“None of this is simple to explain,” he says. “When you see it, you get it.”
The Scanimate’s era is the 1970s, when personal computers were still exotic and most animation was a painstakingly manual process. Sieg’s first job in the film industry was with a company that had two Scanimates. In the early ’90s, when he heard that the last one in existence was heading for landfill in Washington, D.C., he rented a U-Haul to fetch it. It’s the centerpiece of his collection of vintage technology, housed in a former machine shop that he remodeled into living quarters.
The collection includes an original Macintosh computer, the iconic white box with a black-and-white screen; an AmPro 16-mm projector from 1951 (“Still runs like a top!”); his grandmother’s Seth Thomas clock from 1923; and machines that can play virtually any kind of obsolete video format for transfer to modern digital form. When he’s not at his job as an engineer at a research and development lab in Mills River, Sieg tends his growing collection of what he calls “oldish things” and offers advice to fellow vintage-technology enthusiasts. “I’ve had many inquiries and a few visits, including one young local man who wanted to learn how to build vacuum-tube guitar amplifiers.”
But the Scanimate holds center stage in all its metallic and wired glory, looking like a leftover prop from a 40-year-old science-fiction movie. It was top-of-the-line technology when Sieg, who just turned 60, worked in the film business in Hollywood. “I really enjoyed the big-city amenities when I lived in L.A.,” he says. “But I hated freeways, commutes, crowds, boring weather and ugly terrain.” After surviving a canyon fire that came within feet of burning down his house, Sieg headed back east to his childhood home in Tennessee, where he ended up creating a special-effects company called ZFX, still in existence as a consulting service for the client base he built up over 20 years. Upheavals in his personal life started a search for a change of venue, and that’s when Sieg discovered Asheville: “It’s got just the right mix of big-city-like amenities without being too stressful a place to live, and it’s got even better mountains and scenery than East Tennessee.”
During his Hollywood/Scanimate years, Sieg worked on special-effects sequences and backgrounds for two major films, Paramount’s Explorers and Flight of the Navigator. “They were both kids’ films with cheesy story lines,” he recalls. “Scanimate did a scene for the very first Star Wars movie, though. And lots of cheesy effects for TV series like Logan’s Run, even some early music videos like Ron Hays’ video for Sgt. Pepper.”
Sieg’s kept a lot of those sequences for his extensive media library and included them in the first of two DVDs he’s produced about the Scanimate. “A lot of the animation methodology developed for Scanimate has become standard in the computer animation world, so it was groundbreaking, even though by today’s standards it seems primitive,” he explains. “Even so, the look it produces isn’t easily synthesized in the digital world, and I have to laugh at some of the recent attempts to look retro like Scanimate.”
He discovered he wasn’t alone in his love of Scanimate after he set up a Web site about it. “I started getting amazing responses from fans, former Scanimators, former clients, and curious students from all over the world,” he marvels. Sieg even found a link between Scanimate and Asheville’s own electronic heritage as the long-time residence and workplace of late synthesizer wizard Robert Moog. “There was a guy named Gino Piserchio, who was a contemporary of Andy Warhol and a Moog synthesist, who did some soundtracks for several Warhol films. I have a photo of him with a huge early Moog Synthesizer cross-connected with a Scanimate at a production studio in New York. I always felt there was a strong symbiosis between the two machines, the difference being only eight Scanimates were ever produced, and in their heyday they sold for a million dollars.”
But while the Scanimate recedes into animation history, computer-generated films from major studios like Pixar and Disney are still big money makers, built on technology used by people like Sieg, who hopes to produce a series of short videos on the techniques of early animation.
And there’s the future to think about, too — a future that will look upon DVDs and CDs in the same way we regard 16-mm film. Just in case our distant descendants might want to see what we were up to, Sieg’s already converting some of his archival material to a new kind of disc drive that uses obsidian as the recording medium.
“It’s guaranteed to be readable for 1,000 years.”
Visit www.scanimate.net to learn more about the Scanimate.