Computer-generated imagery

Computer-generated imagery emerged because an experimental filmmaker realized that military surplus could create art—and repurposed an 850-pound anti-aircraft targeting computer to paint spirals for Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1958, the opening credits of Vertigo became the first feature film sequence created with computer assistance. The spiraling, twisting shapes that visualize the film's themes of obsession and disorientation were based on Lissajous curves—parametric equations discovered by 19th-century mathematician Jules Lissajous. Designer Saul Bass conceived the graphics, but the execution required something unprecedented.

John Whitney Sr. had spent years exploring mechanical animation. In the 1940s and 1950s, he and his brother James created experimental films using a custom device built from war-surplus analog computers. Whitney's key acquisition was an M-5 anti-aircraft gun director—a Kerrison Predictor used during World War II to calculate where anti-aircraft shells should be aimed to intercept moving targets. The M-5 weighed 850 pounds and comprised 11,000 components, but its movement was governed by mathematical equations. It was, in a meaningful sense, a computer.

Whitney mounted the M-5 and animation celluloid on a platform with a pendulum above it. From the pendulum hung a pen connected to a 24-foot-high pressurized paint reservoir. As the M-5 moved in tandem with the pendulum, executing its mathematical instructions, it drew the spirals that open Vertigo. No traditional animation stand could have created such precise, mathematically modulated motion.

The technique Whitney pioneered—using mechanical computation to control camera and artwork motion—became motion-control photography, a foundational special effects technology. Whitney continued developing computer animation throughout his career, creating 'Catalog' in 1961, considered the first fully computer-animated experimental film. His son John Whitney Jr. and colleague Gary Demos would later create the digital image processing for Westworld (1973), the first feature film to use digital imagery.

Vertigo's opening sequence thus represents a strange conversion: weapons guidance systems repurposed for aesthetic expression, military computing redirected toward human emotion. The technology designed to predict and destroy was transformed into a medium for exploring psychological vertigo.