Cranston/Csuri Productions

Cranston/Csuri Productions (CCP) was an American computer animation company founded by computer scientist Chuck Csuri and based in Columbus, Ohio.^[1] In 1981, Csuri obtained funding from investor Robert Kanuth's firm The Cranston Companies to commercially exploit computer animation technology created in Ohio State University's Computer Graphics Research Group (CGRG) lab. CCP shared a single facility on campus with CGRG, in the former Academy for Contemporary Problems building.

Csuri initially recruited six CGRG researchers to join the company: Wayne Carlson, Michael Collery, Marc Howard, Bob Marshall, Don Stredney, and Ed Tripp. Later additions to the staff included animator Maria Palazzi and Julian Gomez, creator of the animation system Twixt. Before CCP went out of business in late 1987, its suite of production tools for character animation, procedural effects, modeling, and rendering saw use in roughly 800 groundbreaking animated television and advertising projects.

The company ultimately failed after the collapse of promising initial efforts to license its software, which ran only on expensive mainframe computers.^[2] By the late '80s, computer animation production had begin to switch from mainframes to cheaper desktop computers with 3D graphics capabilities, such as SGI workstations running retail software like Wavefront. This change not only launched many new competing production houses, but also rapidly eliminated the market for mainframe-based graphics products.

References

1. ↑ "Culture, Technology & Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century - Philip Hayward - Google Books". Books.google.com. Retrieved 2015-01-24. 
2. ↑ "Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation - Tom Sito - Google Books". Books.google.com. Retrieved 2015-01-24.