Nail board animation

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Nail board animation or needle wall animation uses the so-called nail wall , which is an area that is studded with movable nails, each of which can protrude differently from the wall. The surface is illuminated from the side, which causes the nails to cast shadows. This technique was used to produce animated films with a wide variety of effects for the representation of surface structures that are difficult to achieve with any other animation technique, such as animation with cels .

origin

The technique was invented and developed by Alexandre Alexeieff and his wife Claire Parker in their joint studio in Paris. They carried out the first tests in 1932, and in 1935 Parker was awarded the French patent in their name by the Institut national de la propriété industrial , followed by the US patent in 1937. The two produced a total of six short films within 50 years. Because the device is difficult to operate, these films have a short running time, and because the images are created by shadows on a white surface, they are black and white films. Thanks to the poetic nature and quality of the animation, Alexeieff and Parker have received numerous awards over the years.

It is unknown whether the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was involved in developing the technique. However, it bought one of the nail walls built by Alexeieff and Parker, and on August 7, 1972, the two demonstrated the device to a group of NFB animators. Since Cecile Starr (a friend of Alexeieff and Parker and publisher of her work in the USA) insisted on taking the opportunity to gain Alexeieff's knowledge in an interview with Norman McLaren , this demonstration was filmed and later published under the name Pin Screen . This film can be found along with “Pinscreen Tests” (1961) on Disc # 7 in the Norman McLaren : The Master's Edition DVD collection. As can be seen in the film, numerous animators, including Caroline Leaf , experimented with the wall of needles towards the end of the demonstration.

Until his retirement in 2005, Jacques Drouin from the NFB worked with needle wall animation. The 1976 film Mindscape / Le paysagiste was one of his pin-walled works. Michèle Lemieux is one of the most recent NFB animators using this technique with her film Here and the Great Elsewhere from 2012. The NFB is said to be the only functioning one in the world Own needle wall for animations. (As of June 2012)

In the mid-1980s, Ward Fleming patented a vertical, three-dimensional screen of which there were also smaller toy versions called “Pin Art”. Although Fleming's screen may have been inspired by the nail wall technique, and it shares certain similarities with Alexeieff and Parker's original nail wall, it should not be confused with this one, as it uses nails that move freely rather than those that remain in the desired position . In addition, the images on Fleming's screen are not created by casting shadows, but are formed by the nails themselves.

The nail wall apparatus

A nail wall is a surface perforated by thousands of nails. Every nail casts a shadow through light falling from the side. However, the nail is able to cast different shadows, since it can be pushed more or less far into its hole. The nails cannot be moved too easily and offer a certain resistance so that unwanted shifts and the associated image errors can be avoided. This resistance to movement of the nails depends on the calibration of the needle wall. The white surface gets darker the further the nails protrude from it. The more the nails sink into it, the less shadows are cast, which makes the nail wall lighter. It takes on shades of gray and eventually, when the nails have completely disappeared into the wall, it becomes completely white again.

The animation technique

According to Claire Parker, the images created with the nail wall made it possible to create an animated film that escaped the flat “comic” world of cel animation and instead immersed itself in drama and poetry through chiaroscuro and shading effects. To get the desired shades of gray from the shadows cast by the nails, various methods are used.

The original nail boards built and used by Alexeïeff and Parker used over a million nails. Today these nail boards are in the Center national du cinéma et de l'image animée near Paris. The nail board, currently on the National Film Board of Canada , uses 240,000 nails. Groups of nails are usually moved with a small tool or other special device. Because they are so thin, it is very difficult to move a single nail. This is also not aimed at, since the risk of bending the nail and thus ruining the whole nail board is too high. The shadow cast by a single nail is also barely noticeable. Only when they are moved in groups is the density of the shadows of the nails large enough to achieve the chiaroscuro effect. Groups of nails are pressed in and brought out with different tools. These range from specially made tools to everyday items such as light bulbs, spoons and forks, to Russian matryoshka dolls. The individual images are created one after the other, with each being created by changing its predecessor. After each individual image has been photographed, the images are strung together to achieve the desired animation effect. The frame in which the nails are located must be very stable and securely fastened so that every single image, which was carefully put together day after day, week after week, can be stably captured by the animation camera.

This type of animation is extremely time-consuming and difficult to perform, making it the most unpopular animation technique. Another reason for their unpopularity is their high cost. The nails are relatively cheap to buy individually to fill a single board of nails, but are often used over a million nails, which increases the cost of the board's production rapidly.

Digital nail board animation

Because the animation process is so costly and labor intensive, some computer programs have been developed to simulate the images that a physical board of nails provides.

One of the advantages of a digital nail board is the ability to accurately reconstruct images. In a traditional nail board, after a previously created image has been replaced with a new image, the only way to restore it is to recompose it from scratch, with no guarantee of the accuracy of the restoration. With a digital nail board, on the other hand, the same image can be restored and changed without first reassembling it.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rolf Giesen , James zu Hüningen: Nadelwandanimation . Lexicon of film terms. November 10, 2013. Retrieved June 3, 2015.
  2. ↑ Maureen Furniss : Animation ( English ) MSN Encarta . 2007. Archived from the original on March 28, 2008. Retrieved June 3, 2015.
  3. ↑ Patent FR792340 : Perfectionnements apportés aux moyens pour l'obtention d'images, signes, etc., notamment pour la réalisation de films cinématographiques dits dessins animés. Published December 28, 1935 , inventor: Claire Parker. ‌
  4. ↑ Patent US2100148 : Apparatus for Producing images. Published November 23, 1937 , inventor: Claire Parker. ‌
  5. ↑ a b c d e Pedro Faria Lopes: The Pinscreen in the Era of the Digital Image ( English ) 1999. Retrieved June 3, 2015.
  6. ↑ Overview of the pinscreen animation technique ( English ) National Film Board of Canada . Archived from the original on September 15, 2013. Retrieved June 3, 2015.
  7. ↑ Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker correspondence with Cecile Starr ( English ) Harvard University . November 24, 2014. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 3, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / oasis.lib.harvard.edu
  8. ↑ Maureen Furniss : Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics ( English ). Indiana University Press , December 1998, ISBN 978-1-86462-039-9 , pp. 54-57 (accessed June 7, 2015).
  9. ↑ Here and the Great Elsewhere. In: Collection. National Film Board of Canada , accessed June 7, 2015 .
  10. ↑ Iain Blair: NFB pushes Canadian artists in edgy direction. In: Variety . June 4, 2012, accessed June 7, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Patent US4536980 : Vertical three-dimensional image screen. Published August 27, 1985 , Inventor: Ward Fleming. ‌