Two's Company

Charlie Vaughn had an idea for an award-winning product, but found he had to start and manage two businesses at once to get it on the market.

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Most small business owners don't receive an Academy Award for their efforts. Charlie Vaughn and Gene Nottingham are exceptions. Last spring, the two men walked to the podium in the International Ballroom of Hollywood's Beverly Hilton Hotel to accept an award for technical achievement in film. They had successfully married computer technology to conventional photographic techniques, creating a breakthrough in animation and photographic special effects.

A few weeks after the award, Vaughn was swamped with over 100 unsolicited requests for information on his Cinetron Computer Systems, and he was faced with handling orders on a scale he'd never anticipated. Back in 1968, though, awards -- or even orders -- had seemed unlikely ever to materialize. His colleagues, in fact, were spectacularly unimpressed when Vaughn first thought about hooking up a computer to an animation stand -- a contraption consisting of a movable camera suspended between 12-foot columns over a large, movable platform that holds artwork. "Animation is an artistic endeavor, and in 1968 computers were not accepted as they are now. They were just the things that screwed up your gas bill," says Vaughn.

But Vaughn knew the art of animation could be incredibly tedious. Producing the illusion of motion from pieces of static art involved long hours of precisely calculating distances and camera positions. Then the operator had to move the camera and artwork by hand for each shot. Operators would frequently cut corners, and the resulting motion would look jerky, rather than lifelike. And the whole process was time-consuming. "A real hotshot could do a three-second piece of action in two, maybe three hours," says Vaughn. "The calculations were excruciating to execute, and the potential for error was tremendous."

At the time, Vaughn was an executive vice-president and film director at Storer Studios, an Atlanta-based film production house which, like most operations ot its kind, turned out TV commercials, motivational and training films, and special effects for motion pictures. He frequently found himself working at night "getting up the numbers so the operators could shoot in the morning. I couldn't bear all the hours of manual calculation that were required," he says. "I scarcely knew how a computer worked at that point, but I had a feeling that if I could use one right, it would allow me much more time to go fishing."

With the computer doing the calculations, Vaughn figured, hours could be sliced off production time, and improved accuracy would result in a better final product. "It was fine to chain a guy to an animation stand for weeks at a time when he was making 75? an hour," he says. "But by 1968 even an ordinary animator was worth $15,000 to $30,000. That labor was too expensive to waste. The way I saw it, every production house in the world was going to need a machine just to keep competitive."

Vaughn made a deal with Storer. If the company would buy a minicomputer, he'd develop a system. If it fell flat, he'd buy back the computer. If the system worked, the company could use it, but he'd retain all rights to the machine.

Storer agreed, and Vaughn started tinkering. Though his formal education had ended after high school, he had a natural aptitude for math, and after a two-week cram course, he had enough computer know-how to jury-rig his machine. In a year he had a prototype. "Surprisingly it was usable," he says, "but only by me. For anybody else, it was nothing but a hunk of junk."

The biggest problem with the machine was its makeshift electronics. A friend of Vaughn's put him in touch with Gene Nottingham, an electronic engineer for Lockheed who dabbled in the arts, and by 1970, the two had debugged the machine. That year Vaughn left Storer, applied for a patent, and, with Nottingham, began looking for buyers for the $50,000 system.

Potential customers, however, weren't that easy to convince. "They'd say, 'Hey, what do we need this thing for?" says Vaughn. "Here's an artist, a cameraperson with 25 years' experience in plotting out numbers by hand and feeling in harmony with his equipment. He found it difficult to see how he could retain that feeling of harmony, let alone enhance anything, by turning it over to this monster box."

Vaughn finally persuaded a former New York business associate to order a system. The partners now had a purchase order and no funds. They persuaded a friend at Hewlett-Packard to "lend" them a new computer, even though they had nothing to offer in return but the promise of future payment. Then they begged and borrowed the other parts they needed.

"With money from that sale, we staggered back to Atlanta and lined up another sale, and then sold and built a third system, hand-to-mouth. All along we kept saying 'We need to get something steady going," says Vaughn. "The machines weren't exactly going like hotcakes, and in the meantime we wanted to eat." Bankers they approached for loans "wanted to put us in the shade and give us a cool drink."

Then in 1972 Storer Studios closed its doors, and the partners had an idea. They decided to buy back the prototype and diversify their business by opening their own film-production house.

It was an unusual step for a fledgling concern, but it made sense. Vaughn had produced hundreds of commercials and had a number of useful contacts. He was sure the production business could generate enough income to fill in the valleys between machine sales. Besides, he realized the best way to refine and enhance the system was to continually test its capabilities on the job.

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