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Electric Image
Established Date: Jan. 1, 1983
- All
- UK
- co-founder
- Technical Director
- ILM
- software engineer
- animation
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Paul Docherty left his position as Head of Graphics at London's leading post house Molinare and set up Electric Image in 1983. The company was funded by private shareholders, a number of which were previously Pauls clients. Paul and his then Technical Director Stewart McEwan (who Paul had hired out of Molinare) spent two years producing real time video based animation for the television market on Dubner equipment.
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They first bought the first two SGI terminals (at that stage SGI only made?terminals) sold out of the US and used them as a front end to a DEC VAX 11-780. The disk drives were two removable platter 'washing machines' which stood about 3 feet high and held a massive?450megs of data.
Fun Fact! -
We were told that only a month before a shipment marked 'Tractor Parts' had been intercepted on its way to West Germany and found to contain a VAX computer, so the extremely jumpy American customs people grabbed our SGI terminals. We had to hire a lawyer in the states in order to get them released, two weeks after we were due to start on British Telecom International's new corporate identity using this gear.
Tractor parts -
Paul did a source code co-development deal with Abel Image Research (Robert Abel's software division), where Electric helped with some the PAL video issues and worked closely with the Abel team to debug the code. ( The development team at Abel at the time included Roy Hall, Hank Weghorst, Kim Shelley a number of other Cornell luminaries. ) EI began using the Abel system for television work and eventually added an Oxberry Matrix 35mm camera for film work. Like most …
Abel Image connection -
The various shareholders felt that we should have a gimmicky name for the VAX/SGI/AbelGraphix combination, so at a late night pub session Colin Reynolds drunkenly suggested 'Doris'. After a few more pints we decided that DORIS stood for Digital Optical Raster Imaging System and that's what we told the press it was called.
DORIS -
The company was responsible for many European firsts; the first to use C and Unix for commercial graphics production (most everyone else was using VMS and Pascal), the first bit of serious raytracing on UK television (an ident for Yorkshire Television), the first real time display SGI graphics terminals, first UK dynamics animation package (written by David Benson). A heavy use of clever compositing and geometric projection tricks (picked up from the Abel initially) gave the company's work a distinctive …
Many "firsts" -
About this time EI became one of the founding shareholders in The Framestore, along with director Steve Barron (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Merlin, etc.). The new company had the first Quantel Harry and has since grown in to one of Europe's largest digital post houses.
Framestore connection -
Paul Docherty -
Stewart McEwan
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Simon Maddocks
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David Benson
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Framestore
Fun Fact!
They first bought the first two SGI terminals (at that stage SGI only made?terminals) sold out of the US and used them as a front end to a DEC VAX 11-780. The disk drives were two removable platter 'washing machines' which stood about 3 feet high and held a massive?450megs of data.
Tractor parts
We were told that only a month before a shipment marked 'Tractor Parts' had been intercepted on its way to West Germany and found to contain a VAX computer, so the extremely jumpy American customs people grabbed our SGI terminals. We had to hire a lawyer in the states in order to get them released, two weeks after we were due to start on British Telecom International's new corporate identity using this gear.
Abel Image connection
Paul did a source code co-development deal with Abel Image Research (Robert Abel's software division), where Electric helped with some the PAL video issues and worked closely with the Abel team to debug the code. ( The development team at Abel at the time included Roy Hall, Hank Weghorst, Kim Shelley a number of other Cornell luminaries. ) EI began using the Abel system for television work and eventually added an Oxberry Matrix 35mm camera for film work. Like most companies of this early era, the EI team had to work pretty much from scratch creating custom renders, color look up tables, modeling utilities etc., and without the benefit of the academic superstructure that already existed in the US.
DORIS
The various shareholders felt that we should have a gimmicky name for the VAX/SGI/AbelGraphix combination, so at a late night pub session Colin Reynolds drunkenly suggested 'Doris'. After a few more pints we decided that DORIS stood for Digital Optical Raster Imaging System and that's what we told the press it was called.
Many "firsts"
The company was responsible for many European firsts; the first to use C and Unix for commercial graphics production (most everyone else was using VMS and Pascal), the first bit of serious raytracing on UK television (an ident for Yorkshire Television), the first real time display SGI graphics terminals, first UK dynamics animation package (written by David Benson). A heavy use of clever compositing and geometric projection tricks (picked up from the Abel initially) gave the company's work a distinctive look and built up a reputation for quality
Framestore connection
About this time EI became one of the founding shareholders in The Framestore, along with director Steve Barron (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Merlin, etc.). The new company had the first Quantel Harry and has since grown in to one of Europe's largest digital post houses.
Paul Docherty left his position as Head of Graphics at London's leading post house Molinare and set up Electric Image in 1983. The company was funded by private shareholders, a number of which were previously Pauls clients. Paul and his then Technical Director Stewart McEwan (who Paul had hired out of Molinare) spent two years producing real time video based animation for the television market on Dubner equipment.