Image West Track #2 from the Scanimate DVD

00:00:00 The Image West Story 1979

The Image West Story: Brian Ross and Tom Heyes present the lowdown on how Image West got started. This video was produced for presentation to the Omnibus board of directors. Omnibus, the parent company of Image West was a Canadian company. The primary stockholders were John Pennie and Cliff Brown. (John Pennie sold Cliff Brown his shares in 1981 and Omnibus went off in the digital direction, while Image West stayed with analog rescan technology.)

00:12:01 Image West Demo Reel 15B 1979

Image West was always more commercial than Computer Image, but they were not really that much more successful in the long run. The variety of material is stunning. They had some excellent designers! For the time, they had a real lock on a great market!

00:27:42 Image West Demo Reel 18 1980

More Image West commercial animation from 1980

NOTES: There is no telling who actually owns the copyright to these images now, since Lee Harrison, founder of Computer Image, and inventor of the Scanimate is dead, Computer Image and Image West are both no longer in business, and the clients the jobs were done for have long since ceased to care about them. I present them here as a historical archive of material that I feel is an important piece of the history of computer-generated animation. Much of this material is supplemented by explanations and further details on this website. I would like someday to archive this material with nice menus and package it better, but I am doing this as a labor of love and in hopes of preventing these images from disappearing from the public eye altogether.

Note about the footage quality:All of the Image West material came from 3/4" and is of reasonably good quality. If you have additional material or better quality copies, please contact me, dave@zfxinc.net.

updated June 03, 2022