John Whitney (animator)

John Hales Whitney Sr. (April 8, 1917 – September 22, 1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the pioneers of computer animation. Life Whitney was born in Pasadena, California, and attended Pomona College. He is a descendant of the Whitney family through his father’s direct line. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under René Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films. Their work, Five Film Exercises (1940–45) was awarded a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. (dream sequences), and the graphic designer Saul Bass (titles). In 1960, he founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, which used the mechanical analog computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, titled simply Catalog. In