Exact imagination and distributed creativity: a lesson from the history of animation

• Authors: Michael Century
• Venue: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition
• Year: 2007

This paper discusses the introduction of software as a creative medium for animation production at the National Film Board of Canada during the 1960s and 70s. In a creative environment shaped by a strong auteur tradition, in which individual film-makers fashioned new technical set-ups as part and parcel of each new expressive work, the first system for figure based computer animation was introduced and proved out with a highly convincing demonstration film, La Faim/Hunger (1973). The techno-aesthetic frame of auteur animation conditioned the collaboration with programmer-engineers so as to sustain an already strongly embedded tradition of individual authorship. The collaborating team seamlessly distributed creative contributions between the roles of director/artist, software programmer, technical animator, and producer. The last two roles were central because they both entailed the ability of a single individual to understand both sides of the technical and artistic creative process, thereby serving as a bridge to the other two more specialized roles (artist and programmer). The collaboration in this emblematic case was a strong instance of "exact imagination", a concept here introduced to designate a close interdependency between the technical and artistic components of a creative work. A particularly valuable result of exact imagination when distributed amongst collaborators is the production of diverse outcomes -- original contributions accepted within multiple disciplinary domains. Collaborative research today will benefit from the emergent formulation of such an exact imagination, distributed across networks of differentiated creative individuals, and buttressed by enlightened institutional policies.