An artist in the computer lab
Emshwiller made Sunstone with Alvy Ray Smith at the New York Institute of Technology. The Computer History Museum counts it among the most important early computer-animated films.
Emshwiller came to the NYIT computer graphics lab as a painter and filmmaker, and led Sunstone as its artist. Smith was the technical lead, with Lance Williams and Garland Stern also on the team. Over about eight months they made three minutes of animation in which a stone face becomes one side of a turning cube.
It was shown at SIGGRAPH in 1979 and on public television, and MoMA holds it. Emshwiller went on to set up a computer animation lab at CalArts. Smith, who later co-founded Pixar, has called Emshwiller his mentor and Sunstone the most important collaboration of his artistic life.
Documented history