Faber was diagramming the impact of Pre-Viz software on the typical feature film workflow. PreViz is software that combines and replaces several creative stages in Film Pre-Production – storyboard and animatic capabilities to calculate and visualise suitable camera angles, positions, movements, and to sketch the basic mise en scene and actors positions and movements. Nowadays, pre-biz software – easy to use 3d modelling and rendering software based on the production of animatics – such as Frame Forge Studio, Mesh, Moviestorm – point the way to new film-making workflows more in tune with the digital world.

This (offset-litho/paper) catalog was the ‘World Wide Web’ of the late 1960s – a repository of content linked by the zeitgeist concerns of the counter-culture: ecology, environment, counter-culture, anti-war etc… contributions from hundreds of people, edited by Brand (later to write The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT). The Catalog was a mail-order catalogue (note that the civilisation of the American West was based on mail-order catalogues, such as Sears Roebuck (from 1894). But it was a mail order catalog aimed at and created by a younger generation who were exploring a different curriculum – a counter-curriculum – to the conservative, capitalist, military-industrial world of the older generation. Typically the Whole Earth Catalog had sections on ‘Understanding Whole Systems’, Farming, Husbandry,Self-Suffiency, Shelter, Arts and Crafts, Surfing, Sailing, Music, Computing, Philosophy – in fact the whole gamut of areas of interest to the counter-culture. Brand was seminal in the San Francisco counter culture, and after WEC went on to found the first electronic community (the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) in 1985 (8 years before the WWW really got going). Fred Turner has documented his life and work in From Counterculture to Cyberculture – Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006).

Of all the stylistically exaggerated Sixties movies (including Losey’s delicious Modesty Blaise) it is Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme that does it for me. Written by Michael Moorcock, Notting Hill Gate’s omnipresent sci-fi author and eccentric, it stars Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius, Jenny Runacre as Miss Brunner, and a phenomenal cast of the best of British at that time. The film is an example of how the underground – the counter-culture in which Moorcock played a leading role – inspired mass entertainment. Other movies around this time that transmuted sci-fi and comic-book characters to the big screen included Vadim’s Barbarella, Losey’s Modesty Blaise, Michael Elliot’s The Year of the Sex Olympics and McGoohan’s The Prisoner (both for TV).

Twenty years before Scott McCloud’s brilliant insight into digital comics, Reinventing Comics, Bob and Aileen Stein’s The Voyager Company began to explore the territory of ‘interactive comics’ – migrating the page to the screen and using the hypermedia tool Hypercard to add features such as hyperlinked context, interviews, video, indicing, bookmarks and other features entirely new to the general public in 1994 – a couple of years before these became part of the expectation of the media experience after the Web. The best of the current ibook tools (such as Apple’s iBook Author) are only just starting to catch up (in form, and in content-design tools) with what the Voyager creative team did 20 years ago.

In 1906 the industrial designer Peter Behrens was asked to redesign the publicity material for AEG, the giant German electricity supplier – a major national combine incorporating power supply and electrical products. Behrens implemented what was probably the first ‘corporate identity’ programme – the implementation of standardised brand imagery throughout both the AEG product line and all its publicity.