The Animated Film Camera - Text 3
While it is obviously difficult to draw conclusions about the entire industry from this sole example, it nevertheless demonstrates two things:
- The difficulty in conceiving of the animation of drawings as a completely separate invention lies in the fact that there is no “base device” making it possible to animate drawings, in the sense that this kind of work is done with a traditional camera without any modification to its internal workings; instead, the duration and speed of a turn of the crank (which were initially subject to a human factor) were simply regulated. It is hardly surprising that the first patent associated with animated drawings, applied for by John Randolph Bray in 1914, was based not at all on the invention of an animation camera[2] but rather on the mode of production, which animators wanted to rationalise.
- The way this device operates reveals how a traditional camera functions internally because the camera in question is a traditional camera. This kind of procedure analyses, breaks down and dissects the gearing down mechanism which increases the number of turns as the rotating speed of the crank increases: to obtain fewer images, the operator’s cranking speed had to be reduced.
As a result, we see that the debate around the “invention of animated drawings” cannot really be undertaken by means of a camera-based approach, because no camera existed which was technically distinct from a live-action moving picture camera. Hence the many controversies around the invention of animated drawings and the many suspicions of theft, with the earliest studios established in the United States adopting Cohl’s method and adapting it so as to be able to modify the speed of the animation and thereby the number of drawings to be made, as we can note the following quotations from John Randolph Bray and the article “Cartoons that Move and Act” (1916):
The method for controlling the speed of action in the picture is an important feature of my invention. That is, if rapidity is required the picture is only given two or more exposures and as the movement diminishes in speed a correspondingly increased number of exposures is given.[3]
The number of exposures given to each drawing varies according to the results the cartoonist may desire.... The camera to photograph the drawings is geared to take one picture each revolution of the crank, instead of eight, as in ordinary motion picture photography.[4]
Here we can clearly see how the technical principle described by Cohl was taken up by the industry, whose main goal, under the pretext of wanting to control the speed and rhythm of the actions shown in the film, was to optimise production by reducing as much as possible the number of drawings that had to be made. What was at issue here was not so much aesthetics as economics. And yet the manufacturers were clearly aware that the essential difference with the traditional camera was, in the end, much more theoretical than technical. This would have a strong impact on the way in which animated drawings were seen over time in the animation industry, as its output tended more and more, in most cases, to clearly resemble what could be seen as its model: live-action images.
This resemblance was in no way a “natural inclination” on the part of animation; it was an ideological model structured by the pre-existence of the camera which, for technical reasons tied up with the exhibition of films in movie theatres, had to prevail over other models. This same 1916 article states, in fact, that the idea of “pasting the drawings together endwise in a long strip and running them by the camera, will not work in practice.”[5] This observation is based on the impossibility, in this scenario, of varying the number of exposures in order to vary the speed. We see the extent to which this observation had a particular orientation, because the rhythm of an action can very well be defined, at bottom, by the number of drawings shown – the only problem being, of course, that of multiplying the number of illustrations to be made, something which could not be done in an industrial context whose goal was to accelerate the output of technicians and artists for financial reasons. Here is where the connection with the camera invited the manufacturers to come up with a more “mechanised” approach to the production of animated drawings. We might think that conceiving a drawing, a manual act and thus an artisanal one, would run counter to such an approach; and yet animation studios went ahead and established methods for mechanising this stage with a view to “automatising” the manufacture of images, here again in the manner of a traditional movie camera.
