By 1970, IBM at Yorktown Heights had an SC4020 working 50% of the time on film production.
Camille Volence developed an animation system for generating the big display board animations at many American baseball stadiums. The system allowed the animator four levels of picture which could be moved relative to each other.
Franklin Gracer had an animation system on the 2250 for doing in-betweening. The user could draw the start and finish picture. He then indicated either the path between the two or the turning or both. The intermediate positions were calculated by first ensuring that the two pictures had equal numbers of line segments. If the number of lines were different, the smaller number of lines was extended by re-defining a completely new set of lines at equal intervals.
Art Appel was working on general three dimensional shading algorithms and had developed some very good views of a human head made up of a large number of connected flat faces. The output was on the SC4020 using the plotting dot. The IBM SC4020 machine had a modification allowing characters to be plotted at 16 different intensity levels of which about 14 were useful. They also had a pin-registered camera supplied by Stromberg-Carlson. Each frame took about 5-10 minutes to generate on a 360/91 and filled up a complete SC4020 magnetic tape.