Home > Gallery > Tex Tape v.1 (1993)

Back in the early 90's computer animators were enjoying a Renaissance of sorts. Going fast were the days of graph paper and 16 colour palettes (see my article here on Two Bits). Now animators were dabbling in photo-realism.

I was fortunate enough to work with animation and special effect visionary Peter Bowmar while attending Toronto's Ryerson University at the time. He was in the Film program blowing up cars (and people), and I was in the Media Arts Program producing computer animation that got me nearly expelled. We were a good match for a project.

Somehow the idea of distributing high-quality textures specific for the computer animation industry came about. At the time there was really no internet (although Peter would spend hours on his Unix computer at Ryerson pouring over things called "newsgroups"). But we were both fans of budding CGI and neither of us had much money, plus we had plenty of friends who were in the same situation. 

Production

So we spent a winter and spring collecting surprisingly high quality textures. Brick, fabric, concrete ... all the standards were there. The film was professionally developed then scanned on a friends scanner to floppy discs. The discs were transferred to Peter's Video Toaster which was hooked up to a friends Betacam we got for free for the night. Peter created a bin of images and tapped the space bar for a "dip to black" every 30 seconds to create our master.

Distribution

There were no CD burners at the time. The reason we went to tape was that everyone in the Amiga community, and even Mac and PC users, had access to frame-grabbers. The idea was actually brilliant: create a tape of full screen high quality textures and leave them on screen for a set amount of time. Include a catalogue of all the textures with rough time-code for easy access. The tape itself was under 10 minutes. But even old slow-scan digitizers like the old Newtek Digi-View and DCTV could use it. Even better was the fact that it was cross-platform.

Photo Montage created after one of our Tex Tape demos for the Toronto based animation group TAZA. I think that's me on the left! (R. Ogner)

Peter and I hit the road stopping at the Ontario Computer Show in Burlington, Ontario. (P. Bowmar)

Where Are They Now?

Peter and I worked that Tex Tape all across Canada, taking out ads in the national Computer Paper and working local trade shows. We sold a few dozen copies and picked up local distribution. It was fun. Peter is now working as a CGI God at Rhythm and Hues and I'm a senior Video Editor at CTV. We're both big fans of animation and visual effects, and produce animation for film, video and personal projects.