I really enjoyed the time spent discussing the work of Norman McLaren. His animations stand out for me from other animators because they are so expressive. I feel like he tries to tell stories and give his animations personality and experiments with his visuals to create interesting work.
Spook Sport is a collaboration between McLaren and Mary Ellen Bute in 1939. It’s great that they had a basic narrative for the film, as many of the abstract and experimental animations we have viewed, have been only about translating music into visuals. They included this basic narrative at the beginning of the film along with a breakdown of which character each shape represented. We discussed the direct-to-film method and I’m blown away by this. Animation today with our intuitive technology is still challenging and time consuming, so I can only imagine the dedication McLaren and bute put into Spook Sport to create the animations.
In the film on McLaren’s process, he showed how he used a light behind the film strip on a tall drafting table and drew on each frame one by one. He had no ‘onion skin’ or way of previewing the animation that he was doing and had to stick with whatever marks he made, until he viewed the finished film strip. In the first minutes of Spook Sport, there are several Spooks lined up behind each other and they all begin hopping towards screen left. This movement is executed so smoothly and is perfectly timed to the music. I am not sure how Norman McLaren drew these film frames without a way to track where the characters were in the previous frame; regardless, it’s quite impressive.
Sydney McPherson
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 