In late 1981, by some great fortune, I came across a small newspaper ad promoting an evening class to be held at Simon Fraser University called, "Art and Computers". I had never used a computer before but was quite curious about computer animation.

The fee was $40.00 and there were no prerequisites. So I enrolled.

It changed my life.

There were only six students in the class, and we met once a week in a cluttered, windowless room filled with computer hardware.

The heart of the animation system was a very pricey Evans and Sutherland Picture System II, connected to a DEC PDP 11 and a 16mm film animation camera.

Our instructor, Jerry Barenholtz, was an early pioneer in computer graphics, and the software he wrote to create and record animations on this system was called, "GRAX".

Jerry showed us how simple programming with "GRAX", combined with the manipulation of buttons and dials attached to the system, could be used to generate 3D animations that played back in real time.

It was only white lines on a black background, but in an hour I could create animations that might take me days or weeks to make by hand.

I became obsessed and spent as much time at SFU as I could, usually at night, making dozens of short animations.

It wasn't long before I used "GRAX" and the computer system to make a 2½-minute film titled, Time Lines. The film was recorded frame-by-frame using the computer-controlled 16mm film camera pointed at a high-resolution B&W monitor.

As with my first animated film, Perspectives, the soundtrack for Time Lines was created by my musician/composer friend, John S. Gray.

Unfortunately, the full 2½-minute film has been "lost", and the 29-second excerpt below is all that remains. (Fortunately, John archived a full version of his soundtrack.)

Wireframe Update

In July of 2024, more than 40 years after the original Time Lines project, I decided to try re-creating that wireframe excerpt from 1982 using modern computer animation software & hardware. In this case, Houdini 20.5 running on a high-end Debian Linux workstation with a couple of nVidia graphics boards.

I thought it would be trivial, but it wasn't as simple or straightforward as I expected.

Click on the image link below to follow that adventure.

Time Lines II (the making of)

Also in 2024, before finishing the updated wireframe segment from the original Time Lines project, I began working on a series of still-frame images to be called Ground Level.

The project took on a life of it's own, and after two years of on-again, off-again work, it evolved into Time Lines II another 2½-minute animation.

Click on the image link below for more information about the evolution of that project.

Time Lines II

Below is the final version of Time Lines II that was completed in October of 2026.

It opens with a re-creation of an excerpt from the original 1982 Time Lines animation, and uses the original soundtrack by John S. Gray.

Ground Level

Before completing Time Lines II, I felt I had to revisit the original idea behind Ground Level and get back to creating some new still frames or perhaps a simpler, cleaner animation of box sculptures.

Click on the image link below to follow the progress.