‘Lapis’ by James Whitney (1966). Original music by Ravi Shankar.
This is not early computer animation. James Whitney’s brother John developed a motion-control animation apparatus using components derived from WWII anti-aircraft fire-control equipment. A camera looked down onto a twelve-inch illuminated field, and artwork could be rotated and moved through precise compound sinusoidal paths. James created the dot-pattern artwork manually on transparent cels/glass plates. Mechanical multiplication created complexity and the resulting effect was thousands of independently moving dots.
‘Lapis’ runs about 10 minutes and took three years to make. The title is Latin for “stone” and evokes lapis philosophorum, the philosopher’s stone from alchemy. James was seriously interested in alchemy as well as the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and later Krishnamurti, Taoism, nuclear physics and Jung.
This footage is from a VHS recording of a Canadian TV broadcast in the ’80s, but it’s very much worth seeing the restored 16mm version on a big screen if you can catch it.
