DigitaL
Animation
Creators
The History of DAC
The record of the world’s first amateur CG animation production made in the 1980s.
Back in the 1980s, a time now long past, PCs had just transitioned from 8-bit to 16-bit. In Sendai, Japan, known as the “City of Trees,” three students who had just entered university met by chance. From there, an “amateur CG animation” production project was born, and their creative activities began.
At that time, PCs were not as widespread as they are today, and the only storage media available were 720KB floppy disks, without hard drives. The only way to capture video was with an 8mm film camera recording a CRT screen. The internet was nowhere to be seen.
Looking back from today’s perspective, everything was lacking in functionality and extremely inconvenient. However, at that time, it was all cutting-edge technology. This is the record of those young people (at the time) who daringly took on the challenge of creating beautiful CG animations using the latest CG technique, “ray tracing.”
NEWS
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6/13/2024: Archived content from NHK WORLD can be viewed.
"Groundwork for Japan's CG animationーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS"
NHK WORLD : https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/videos/20240611202425181/
YOUTUBE : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjMePy1Z9ag -
6/9/2024: English pages added.
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6/3/2024 : The English translated introduction of DAC (in "Ohayou Nippon") will be broadcasted at NHKWORLD (6/11/2024 : 7:27 AM-7:40 AM, EDT(UTC-4)).
１）View at NHKWORLD (LIVE) : https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/programs/#live
２）View at YOUTUBE (LIVE) : https://www.youtube.com/user/NHKWorld
Rebroadcast: <10:15 AM, 11:15 AM, 1:15 PM, 2:27 PM, 8:15 PM, 10:15 PM, 11:15 PM, 6/11>
<0:15 AM, 6/12>
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4/29/2024 : Our works are archived in "CG ANIME ARCHIVES".
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4/28/2024 : "INTO THE BLUE" is introduced as the world’s first amateur CG animation production in "Ohayou Nippon" TV news progam of NHK.
About Us:
The Beginning of DAC
Nakagawa, Mori, Onodera in 1986
Digital Animation Creators
This is the amateur CG animation production project team formed in 1984 by three students who enrolled at Tohoku University.
Shigeo Nakagawa / Producer and Scenario Writer
Kenichi Mori / Software Responsible
Kazuhiko Onodera / Photography Hardware Responsible
Initially, Nakagawa and the other two members belonged to different clubs and, although they attended the same Kawauchi Campus of the Liberal Arts Department, they did not know each other. Just before the summer vacation of their freshman year, Nakagawa, who had been captivated by a CG book published the previous year using computers(*), wanted to animate it and, through an introduction by acquaintances, met Mori and Onodera from the Tohoku University Animation Society. It soon became clear that Mori was a genius programmer, and Onodera was a master of mechanical control. From this chance encounter, the amateur CG animation production project “DAC” began, which was probably one of the earliest in Japan.
(*) Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, 1983, "The 3 dimensional computer graphics", CQ publishing
The Works of DAC
