Anyway, back to Hummingbird, the digitised creature drawn with outstretched wings, was ‘cut up’ into lines. These lines were transformed by the program written in FORTRAN, but whereas TP used FORTRAN to create what us animators call ‘character animation’, Csuri used it to do a thing called ‘morphing’.
Csuri took a line and told the computer to transform that line’s x/y co-ordinates over time, whereas what TP did was say to the computer, okay – this frame you draw these co ordinates…the next frame these… and so on – and he did this in such a way as to create, ‘the illusion of life’.
Morphing is a technique in the character animators tool kit, but Csuri didn’t use it to create character animation. The bird does not appear sentient like Kitty and Flexipede do. That hummingbird is dead! It doesn’t even blink. “‘E’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!” It’s a manipulated still drawing, not a cartoon character. Does it care? Probably not. It’s in the MoMA.
Csuri never claimed to have created the first computer-animated character. He agrees that he created the words first morphing images – (although at the time, the term hadn’t been coined.)
And so it looks like Flexipede is still in the running as the world’s first computer animated character… But OH NO! Drat and double drat Muttley! Here comes Michael Noll with his Computer Ballet, made way back in 1965!!!