 | This article possibly contains original research .(January 2013) |
Pinscreen animation makes use of a screen filled with movable pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows. The technique has been used to create animated films with a range of textural effects difficult to achieve with any other animation technique, including traditional cel animation.
The technique was invented and developed by Alexandre Alexeïeff and his wife Claire Parker in their own studio in Paris, between 1932 (first tests) and 1935, when Claire Parker registered in her own name the Brevet d´Invention nº 792340 at the Direction de la Propriété Industrielle, Ministère du Commerce et de L´Industrie, République Française, Paris 1935. [1] They made a total of 6 very short films with it, over a period of fifty years. The films have short running time, because the device is difficult to use, and have a monochrome nature, due to the images being created using shadows over a white surface.
There is no material evidence that the National Film Board of Canada was involved in the development of the technique. The National Film Board of Canada did buy one of the pinboards built by them and, as guests of the NFB, on August 7, 1972, Alexeïeff and Parker demonstrated the pinscreen to a group of animators at the NFB. Due to Cecile Starr (friend of Alexeieff and Parker, and distributor of their work in the US) most insisting intervention talking to Norman McLaren that the opportunity should not be missed to preserve Alexeïeff's knowledge, this demonstration was filmed, and later released by the NFB as Pin Screen. This film, along with "Pinscreen Tests" (1961), appear on disc 7 of the Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition DVD collection. In this film several animators can be seen in the end of the demonstration experimenting with the pinscreen board, including Caroline Leaf.
Until his retirement in 2005, the National Film Board's Jacques Drouin remained involved in pinscreen animation. Drouin's pinscreen work included the 1976 film Mindscape (Le paysagiste). [2] Michèle Lemieux, used the pinscreen with support of the NFB for her 2012 film Here and the Great Elsewhere. [3] In 2015, the CNC acquired and restored the Épinette, the last pinscreen that Alexeïeff and Parker built in 1977. [4] Eight artists were invited to train on the newly restored device, under the direction of Lemieux as part of an initiative to inspire a new generation of pinscreen artists. French animator Justine Vuylsteker was one of the artists selected for the intensive four-week residency on the Épinette. This residency led Vuylsteker to complete the short film Embraced [5] in 2018.
A pinscreen is a white screen perforated with thousands of pins in small holes. Light shines from the side of the screen causing each pin to cast a shadow. Each pin, being able to slide back and forth through the holes, can cast different shadows. The pins do not move easily, presenting some resistance to movement in order to avoid unintended dislocation and thus image error. The pins' motion resistance depends on the pinscreen calibration. The white screen becomes darker the farther the pins are pushed out, protruding from the surface. The more the pins are pushed in less shadows are cast, the lighter the screen becomes, giving a grayish tone and eventually an all-white screen again.
According to Claire Parker, the images created by the pinscreen made it possible to make an animated movie which escaped from the flat, "comic" aspect of cel animation and plunged instead into the dramatic and the poetic by the exploitation of chiaroscuro, or shading effects. To obtain the desired gray tones that are cast from the shadows of the pins, several methods are used.[ clarification needed ]
The original pinscreens built and used by Alexeïeff and Parker had more than 1 million pins. Today those pinscreens are at National Center of Cinematography and the moving image, near Paris. The pinscreen currently in Montreal, at National Film Board of Canada, has 240,000 pins. [6] The pins are usually pressed with a small tool, groups of pins at a time, or with other specialized instruments. Being so thin, it is very difficult, and actually not desirable, to manipulate individual pins: moving one pin at a time there is the risk that it bends, thus ruining the pinscreen. Furthermore, the shadow cast by one single pin is negligible, almost non perceivable; only when manipulated in groups are the pins' shadows sufficiently dense to produce the chiaroscuro effect. Groups of pins are pressed and protruded with different tools, from specially created ones to more mundane, such as lamp bulbs, spoons, forks, and even Russian Matryoshka dolls. Frames are created one at a time, each frame being the incremental modification of the previous one. After each frame has been photographed, the images are strung together to create an image without pauses. The frame assembly containing the pins was built very solidly and mounted in a secure fashion to offer a stable image to the animation camera day after day, week after week as each image of the movie was painstakingly composed.
This form of animation is extremely time consuming and difficult to execute, rendering it the least popular method of animation. An additional reason for its unpopularity is its expensive nature. Individually, the pins are relatively cheap; however, it is not uncommon that a million or more may be used to complete a single screen, quickly increasing the cost for manufacture.
Probably the most famous use of Pin Screen technique is Orson Welles' 1962 film of Kafka's novel The Trial ; the film begins with a brief but striking memorable Pin Screen segment, elements of which reappear in a later scene projected onto and behind the actors.
Because of the cost and labor-intensive animation process, several computer programs have been made with the goal of simulating the images generated by a physical pinscreen. [7] One of the advantages of using digital pinscreen animation is the recovery of images. With the traditional pinscreen, there is no way to recover a previous image except for creating it all over again with no guarantee of precision. With digital pinscreen, the same image can be retrieved and altered without having to be recreated.
Animation is the method that encompasses myriad filmmaking techniques, by which still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets (cels) to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are computer animations made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Stop motion animation, in particular claymation, has continued to exist alongside these other forms.
The National Film Board of Canada is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries, and alternative dramas. In total, the NFB has produced over 13,000 productions since its inception, which have won over 5,000 awards. The NFB reports to the Parliament of Canada through the Minister of Canadian Heritage. It has bilingual production programs and branches in English and French, including multicultural-related documentaries.
William Norman McLaren, LL. D. was a Scottish Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound. McLaren was also an artist and printmaker, and explored his interest in dance in his films.
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Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff was a Russian Empire-born artist, filmmaker and illustrator who lived and worked mainly in Paris. He and his second wife Claire Parker (1906–1981) are credited with inventing the pinscreen as well as the animation technique totalization. In all Alexeieff produced 6 films on the pinscreen, 41 advertising films and illustrated 41 books.
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Claire Parker was an American engineer and animator. A graduate of MIT, her best-known contribution to the history of cinema is the Pinscreen, a vertically-mounted grid of between 240,000 and 1 million sliding metal rods that are first manually pushed into position to create lit and shaded areas, then filmed frame by frame. While the hand-operated, mechanical Pinscreen superficially shares characteristics with early optical toys like the zoetrope, it is distinguished by being one of the first devices ever to produce animation by reconfiguring a set of individual picture elements, later called pixels. A model with sufficient pin "resolution" can be used to create a Pinscreen animation of photorealistic images, a painstaking process analogous to modern pixel art.
Jacques Drouin was a Canadian animator and director most known for his pinscreen animation.
Pin art, also known as a pinscreen, is an executive toy. It consists of a boxed surface made of a crowded array of pins that are free to slide in and out independently in a screen to create a three-dimensional relief. Other similar product names are "PinPressions" and "Pinhead". The original Pinscreen toys were made of metal pins, which were heavier and tended to bend easily; newer Pinscreen toys are generally made of plastic pins. Pinscreens have also been used for animation production; a larger device working on a similar principle was invented by Claire Parker in 1935.
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