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.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 