A Slade School of art trained painter, Malcolm Le Grice turned to film in the mid-1960s and first learned to write Fortran code whilst collaborating with Alan Sutcliffe on a performative work entitled Typodrama, for the Computer Art Society's first exhibition Event One at the Royal College of Art in 1969.
With a grant from the Science Research Council, he used Paul Nelson's SCFOR package on Atlas to produce an 8-second black and white 16mm film called You Lips 1 using the SC4020 over a period of 9 months.
The film animates a series of concentric ellipses, progressively superimposed upon itself in varying phases in the development of the animation. A colour version of the film was made by optical processing at the London Filmmakers Cooperative.
In 1970, the colour version was superimposed with military images in the film Reign of the Vampire. and was also a section of the film series How to Screw the CIA, or How to Screw the CIA?, about military hovercraft.