Major Post 13: Pinscreen Animation in “The Nose”

Posted on by Sydney McPherson

In my last post, I talked about how Alexander Alexeieff used his pinscreen technique to create animations. A film he used the technique on is The Nose which he created in 1963. After watching the documentary, I can now understand how he achieved the look of the light passing over the roofs of the buildings in the opening scene. Alexeieff would have begun with the pins pushed out to where they were showing a mid-gray. Then he probably pushed the pins back in for a light gray, doing this line by line to make the movement gradual. This same technique would’ve been repeated in the next scene when the light shines in from the window and moves down the wall (fig. 1).

  • Figure 1
  • Figure 2

It’s cool that the pinscreen technique automatically includes shadows. The darker object on the floor was probably created by pushing the pins outward far enough to create black and cast a shadow on the pinscreen as a result (fig. 2). I can compare this to how in 3d software, the shadows are generated for the animator. Usually in 2d animation, the shadows would be drawn in by the animator, but The Nose is like a mixture between drawn and 3d animation; it has an “illustrated” look, yet it uses 3-dimensional objects.

Sydney McPherson

Major Post 12: Pinscreen Technique

Posted on by Sydney McPherson

We looked at some films by animator Alexandre Alexeieff who invented the technique of pinscreen animation. This technique is basically another form of stop motion animation. At first, I didn’t really understand how the technique worked to create images, and so I watched a documentary on the process. The pinscreen is large and consists of a white background that had thousands of small holes. In each hole there is a cylindrical pin that sits flush in the hole or can be pushes out from the backside (fig. 1).

  • Figure 1
  • Figure 2

The actual images seem to be created using the shadows that the pins cast on the white background, once pushed out (fig. 2). In the video, someone demonstrates how the animator would achieve the shades of black, gray, middle gray, light grey, and then white. Depending on the angle of the light source, when all pins are pushed out to their max, the shadows overlap and cover all the white, creating a black surface. When the pins are pushed in just a bit, more of the white shows and looking from far away, the mixing of the black shadows and white background create mid-gray (fig. 3). And so, the pins can be placed at different lengths to experiment with the tones created (fig. 4).

  • Figure 3
  • Figure 4

In my next post, I will discuss how the technique is applied to some animations by Alexeieff.

Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4u-C8kyUeA

Sydney McPherson