Dan slater's custom vsynth's
dslater@ix.netcom.com

Dan Slater has built a number of homebrew units over the years. They are all of his own design. Most are variations of the rescan (calligraphic) type systems. The most elaborate was a slit scan system. He still have most of this unit in storage. It was 30 feet long when setup.

History:
I have been doing analog image synthesis on and off since 1966 or so. Much was just for the fun of it. In the early 1970's I built a slit scan camera system that was used for some commercial film work. The slit scan camera is a mechanical / optical form of an analog image synthesizer that produces abstract film images. It was through this work that I ended up working with Douglas Trumbull, the special effects person who designed the slit-scan system used in the stargate sequence in the film 2001. His design was an extension of what John Whitney had been doing earlier. I also worked for Laser Images designing analog and digitally based laser projection systems; this was around 1974 to 1978 or so. Later I designed a very strange hybrid optical / mechanical / electronic analog image synthesizer system for Douglas Trumbull that was used in the first "Star Trek" movie. You can see the resultant footage if you rent the tape. It was used to produce the "worm hole" sequence. It was capable of much more than what was in the film. After all of this, I went into aerospace work. I still have some of the image synthesizer equipment around here and continue to build and experiment with this technology, now just for the fun of it.

-produced the vsynth that did the wormhole sequence in the original star trek film
-will try and take some pix for me.

Dan is seeking any information about the Innisfree Picasso CRT Image Synthesizer, as he has one that he is trying to get operational. If you know anything about this unit, please cc: the info to US, so we may update this page.


-Return to the Video Synth Main Page
-Go onto the next Video Synth


hallway | reception | tools | library | lab | lounge | hangar | school