Major Post 11: Different forms of animation

Posted on by Sammy Liu

Light and Shadow

This class we learnt about Alexandre Alexeieff who invented Pinscreen, which is a method that uses a lot of pins with different lengths in protrusion to create light and dark spaces. This technique allows for more flexibility in lighting and three-dimensional space – an aspect that requires more time in Cell Animation.

His works: The Nose (1963)
NFB: Mindscape (Pinscreen too)

Our second artist is Caroline Leaf – one of the earliest animators who used sand to animate. She had a low artistic background but during one of her art classes where her teacher asked them to bring stuff in, she brought in sand. Leaf carried on experimenting with sand and her technique has certainly inspired many more down the generation of artists – for example:

Which is sOO cool and expressive. I think similar to the Pinscreen technique – light and shadow and three dimensional space is something that’s achieved faster too.

The last artist that I will mention here is William Kentridge, a South African Artist, famous for his prints.
We had noticed in class, how most experimental animators have Fine Art backgrounds, and Kentridge is another example of that transition in professions.
His piece, Felix in Exile (1994) expresses social issues in his country, South Africa, and explores the physical and mental struggle of those times.
A rather uncanny source of his inspiration for his creations comes from using “other people’s pain as rare material” – Kentridge.
This stood out to me because at my first impression it sounded rather inappropriate and possibly insensitive, yet actually, with further thought, with appropriation perhaps the artists can portray it in a way that could be healing, or at the least, acknowledged.

In this video, he talks about how he uses charcoal because “you can change charcoal as quickly as your mind changes” pulling in the idea of spontaneity again; a mind-set similar to our previous artist, Norman McClaren.

Class notes:
William Kentridge
Felix in Exile (1994)
History of the Main complaint (1997)
Eyewash (1959) – Rober Breer
Fuji (1974)
Jake’s Professor – COMMUTER – Matt Patterson
George Dunning – Yellow Submarine (1968) designed by Hienz Edelman
Also Founder of TVC in London.
Paul Driessen –
The End of World in Four Season – multiple frames (like a comic book style) moving at the same time.
The Killing of an Egg (1977)
Frederic Back – Cel overlays. Colouring pencils on frosted cells.
Frederick Back – Crac (1981)

Major Post 11: The Street

Posted on by Sydney McPherson

In class 12, we focused on some animations that were created using inventive techniques. One film was The Street created by Caroline Leaf in 1976. It’s an adaptation of a short story by Mordecai Richler that he wrote sometime around 1969. The story tells of a little boy whose grandmother was sick. He was promised to receive her bedroom once she passed away, yet almost three years went by before she died.

On Caroline Leaf’s website she talks about her setup for creating films like The Street. The film was animated using paint on glass. She worked in a dark room that had top-down lighting, using gouache and watercolors as her paints. She added glycerin to her paints so that they wouldn’t dry, giving her more working time. Leaf painted her drawings on the glass surface and used a wet cloth to wipe away the old drawings and continued until the film was complete.

This technique reminded me of a film we watched in class one, called “The Bigger Picture” by Daisy Jacobs. I wonder if Jacobs was inspired by artists like Caroline Leaf, as Jacobs film was created by painting and repainting drawings on the walls of the film set. Both films feature dynamic camera movement as transitions between scenes. In The Street, drawings will swirl together and unfurl into the next image. In one scene, the mother is stirring something in a bowl and the bowl transforms into the son’s face, revealing the mother’s spoon is now a brush that she is using on the son’s hair.

I really enjoy the use of the paint as a storytelling technique and that Caroline Leaf worked with the messy aspect of paint and used it to her advantage in this film.

Sydney McPherson

“Direct Animation”. Caroline Leaf, http://carolineleaf.com/direct_animation.php.