Cranston/Csuri Productions

Cranston/Csuri Productions (CCP) was an American computer animation company based in Columbus, Ohio. It was founded in 1981 by artist Chuck Csuri and investor Robert Cranston Kanuth to commercially exploit computer animation technology created by Ohio State University's Computer Graphics Research Group (CGRG). CCP and CGRG shared a single facility on campus.[1]

Csuri initially recruited six CGRG researchers into the company: Wayne Carlson, Michael Collery, Marc Howard, Bob Marshall, Don Stredney, and Ed Tripp. Later hires included James Kristoff, Maria Palazzi, John Berton, Julian Gomez, Paul Sidlo, Ron Tsang, Paul Conley, Steve Martino, and John Weber. CGRG developed and maintained tools for character animation, procedural effects, modeling, and rendering that CCP used in approximately 800 groundbreaking animated television and advertising projects. Some of these, like the GRASS programming language and the animation system Twixt, found wider popularity outside CCP itself.[2]

CCP's business operations shut down late in 1987 following the collapse of promising initial efforts to license its software, which ran only on expensive mainframe computers.[3] By the late '80s, computer animation production had begun to switch from mainframes to cheaper desktop computers with 3D graphics capabilities, such as SGI workstations running retail software like Alias Wavefront. This change not only launched many new competing production houses, but also rapidly eliminated the market for mainframe-based graphics products. That same year, CCP and CGRG became part of Ohio State's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), which as of 2022 remains in operation.

References
  1. Hayward, Philip (1990). Culture, Technology & Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century. London: J. Libbey. p. 45. ISBN 0861962664. OCLC 29033757.
  2. Carlson, Wayne. "A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation". OSU Dept. of Design. Ohio State University. Archived from the original on 2015-07-31. Retrieved 2015-07-24.
  3. Sito, Tom (2013). Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 172. ISBN 978-0262314312. OCLC 936201609.


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