Fletcher engineer keeps television time machine running strong

By Bill Evans

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    FLETCHER, North Carolina (WLOS) — Over 100 million viewers were expected to watch the big game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers on Sunday. But one local television engineer said he would be paying extra close attention to the broadcast’s open—the introduction produced to draw the viewer in and set up the big game.

Dave Sieg of Fletcher was instrumental in creating the first Super Bowl open to use motion graphics. In 1980, NBC Sports hired Sieg’s employer at the time, Image West in Hollywood, to create a 3D introduction to Super Bowl XIII.

“This was pretty amazing stuff, back in the day,” Sieg said as he watched the open on a computer in his workshop.

3D animation graphics today can be created on a laptop computer, but in 1980, it look a rack of machines about six feet high and 10 feet wide to do the work. And Sieg has all of the vintage analog equipment running today, as it did nearly a half century ago.

“For about 10 years if you saw computer animation on TV, it was from one of the eight Scanimate computers in the world,” he explained.

The Scanimate produced state of the art animation graphics from around 1975 to 1985.

“Before that, they had to use film and shoot it a frame at a time with an animation stand, and so an animation would take days if not weeks to put together just a few seconds of animation.”

Sieg was a young chief engineer who left his job at the University of Mississippi to work at Image West in 1979.

“I found a job listing for this company in California that was looking for somebody that knew computers and video, and at the time there were people that knew one or the other, but both was really rare,” Sieg said. “It required a really interesting mix of artistic, creative, graphic design skills with electronic circuit design skills, and it was a lot of fun.”

Sieg calls the Scanimate a visual version of the Moog synthesizer.

“It could make spirographic patterns that resolved into moving words,” he said. “It did a lot of scenes for Sesame Street. For instance, the letter A would turn into spaghetti, then resolve into the number 4.”

In addition to network sports opens and the occasional Sesame Street project, Image West also produced animated graphics for music videos, including The Jackson’s “Blame It on the Boogie,” the TV series “Logan’s Run” and even a scene from the first “Star Wars” movie.

Sieg left Image West to work for Omnibus in Hollywood, one of the innovators of Computer Generated Imagery, or C.G.I. He formed the company ZFx in East Tennessee after leaving California and relocated to Fletcher in 2005.

He is now semi-retired and keeps his love for the “old school” alive, by keeping the machines alive– the nearly fifty year-old technology, still up and running.

“All of these old pieces of equipment that still function perfectly, and do what they were designed to do, should not just end up in the landfill somewhere.”

Sieg and ZFx still have clients who request the vintage look for graphics, and he is able to manipulate the analog images real-time on the Scanimate, with a network of patch cables, knobs and toggle switches.

“Yeah, you can click on something today and it just automatically does all this stuff, but this is the way we used to have to do it, and it was complicated. There’s a reason to keep old technology around — if nothing else, to remember how you got here.”

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