From Paintbox to PC: How London became the home of Hollywood VFX

Framestore's rather low-key office in Soho. The company's 1990s-era logo is still in the window. (credit: Alan Travers)

Adult entertainment in Soho has now been squeezed down to just a couple of small streets

In a darkened room on the backstreets of London's red light district, Mike McGee stared at a screen. Surrounded by a thick wall of cigarette smoke and impatient chain-smoking clients, he swiped a pen across the table, his movement replicated with surprising accuracy as a pixel-perfect line on the screen above. The clients—TV producers from the BBC—were impressed. In just a few short minutes, McGee had transformed a single frame of video into the beginnings of a title sequence. In a world where labour-intensive optical effects and manual rotoscoping were the norm, this was a revelation.

For 12 years, McGee worked out of this room, painting onto the screen, his eyes left bloodshot and burning from the smoke as runners dashed in and out to empty overflowing ashtrays. It was a painstaking process; the Quantel Paintbox and its pressure-sensitive stylus were groundbreaking pieces of technology when they were released in 1981, but they had their limitations. The huge 14-inch platter hard drive could store 160MB of data, enough for just over six seconds of video at 25 FPS. Longer pieces required playing out each frame to tape before wiping the hard drive, a risky process that resulted in McGee and his staff working eight-hour shifts around the clock to minimise cockups.

The Paintbox and its multi-frame follow up Harry—which could store up to 30 seconds of footage and manipulate multiple frames of animation at once—would come to dominate the TV industry throughout the 1980s and early '90s, defining the decade's iconic visual style (see Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" video). It would even star in its own TV show on the BBC, Painting with Light, alongside artists like David Hockney. And for McGee, a graduate of the famous Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Paintbox would spark a career in the visual effects industry spanning nearly three decades.

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