"Lovelight" Studio Programming System

By the fall of 1976, work on the Lovelight show had begun in earnest. A new image drawing system was built to replace the PCX-100. The new system featured an image digitizing tablet and a custom-made digital cassette recorder. It was a substantial improvement over the PCX-100; however, it did have one serious limitation. The recording system did not allow the artist to view the projected laser image while it was being drawn. Not only that, the laser image looked so different from the tablet image, the artist was effectively drawing "blind". To make the swan at right, the artist had to practice drawing a distorted version of the image over and over, until the desired result was achieved. The process was so difficult it could take a day or more for each drawing. The reason for this will be explained elsewhere in this website, but in simple terms, the speed limitation of optical scanners causes the sharp curves of a drawing to be flattened and displaced.

Note that the blue "splash" in the drawing at right was not drawn by hand; it was an analog effect created with an electronic image rotator. The blue "reflection" of the yellow swan was made by electronically reversing the vertical axis of the original image. Due to the extreme difficulty of making accurate drawings, true frame by frame animation was not attempted. Motion was added to the images by means of analog circuitry designed for panning, zooming, rotating, and other effects.

The show was recorded one color at a time on a Hewlett Packard instrumentation recorder. The X, Y, and Z (blanking) signals were FM encoded. Each track of the recorder could contain three signals, with FM center frequencies of 15, 30, and 45 kHz.
 

Great care was also taken to synchronize all movement with the music soundtrack. This was done by means of meticulous attention to detail, not by feeding the music signal directly to the scanners, as is often done in less sophisticated shows.

Next: the Lovelight Projector