A Computer Animated Hand

A Computer Animated Hand
The title screen, crediting the film simply as A Computer Animated Hand.
Directed by	Edwin Catmull Fred Parke
Produced by	Edwin Catmull Fred Parke
Release date	1972 (1972)
Running time	1 minute (approx.)
Country	United States
Language	Silent (intertitles in English)

A Computer Animated Hand is a 1972 American computer-animated film produced by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. Produced during Catmull's tenure at the University of Utah, the short was created for a graduate course project. After creating a model of Catmull's left hand, 350 triangles and polygons were drawn in ink on the model. The model was digitized and laboriously animated in a three-dimensional animation program that Catmull wrote.

The film consists of three sequences: the data output of the hand without lines, a halftone sequence that lacks smooth shading, and finally, the completed animation. The film depicts the hand swiveling, opening and closing, pointing at the viewer, and lastly, zooms to the inside of the hand. The clip also features animation of an artificial heart valve and human faces. Snippets of the film were used in the 1976 film Futureworld.

As one of the earliest examples of computer animation, the film has been hailed as groundbreaking and revolutionary. Catmull went on to become a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and President of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. In 2011, the film was inducted in the National Film Registry, labeled "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Library of Congress scholars wrote: "In creating the film, Catmull worked out concepts that would become the foundation for computer graphics that followed."

Catmull hoped as a child to become a Disney animator but reversed his ideas in high school, ruefully concluding he lacked the ability to draw. He graduated from the University of Utah in 1969 with a degree in computer science and physics, taking a job at Boeing shortly afterward. His position was soon terminated in a mass layoff along with thousands of other employees. Catmull revised his idea of becoming an animator during this time, believing computers might allow him to animate.

Fred Parke, a fellow Ph.D. student in his class who helped produce the film, recalled that computer animation was "sort of on the lunatic fringe at that time. […] People were just barely to the point where they could get a computer to put out still images." It was obvious it would take years for the state of the art in computer hardware to catch up with this ambition, and there were multiple problems on the mathematical and programming side. Nevertheless, in 1972, Catmull took the opportunity to create the short animated clip for a graduate course project.