In honor of DIY Movie Making Month, here’s Eastern Europe’s favorite cat and mouse team, Worker and Parasite!
OK, so, the mouse actually starved during collectivization. But there’s a cat, anyway, and it’s a very early example of “computer” animation. Sort of. YouTuber avatarlemon explains:
Soviet computer animation was made in 1968. A group of russian physicists and mathematicians with N.Konstantinov in the head of it created mathematic model of the cat and its moving and realized this model in the program for the computer “BESM-4″. Computer printed hundreds of frames on the paper using alphabet symbols and then they were converted to the cinefilm.
[via Slashdot]
This is an interesting use of what must have been a very scarce computing resource. 1968 was pretty much deep Cold War. Wonder how the mathematicians managed to justify this use of the people’s resources?