Registration - Text 3
The principle developed by Norman McLaren at the time was simple: it consisted in leaving ten or twelve black frames between each stage of the animation and to opt for a principle of discontinuity. This constraint, which is behind the film Blinkity Blank (1955), achieved a peculiar effect, because after a few tests McLaren discovered that the product of these gaps on the film stock created a kind of intermittent animation. Technical experimentation and working within constraints were thus the origin of a singular artistic experiment. Although McLaren made only a few films using this technique, it was taken up by Pierre Hébert, who saw in it a true political gesture[3] (that of acting on the film stock in such a way as to deface it).
Although Hébert took up this underlying technique, it was to adapt it in order to obtain less intermittent effects which did not reproduce the forms obtained by McLaren. The method he established thus sought to mitigate the problem of registration posed by the opacity of the film stock: whereas transparent film made it possible to employ McLaren’s device, with its use of a mirror as described above, opaque film stock required the animator to find another method in order to know precisely where to draw on the film stock and how to ensure continuity in the movement while maintaining a fixed form (maintaining an identical drawing over a large number of images is one of the challenges of drawing on film animation). The principle developed by Hébert was based on the use of transparent six- or twelve-inch rulers (in order always to be able to see the film stock when they were placed above it), which made it possible to cover, respectively, one or two seconds of film (corresponding to a certain length of film strip). Hébert prefers a twelve-inch ruler, using the shorter one only when the former is too cumbersome.
With this method, the animator can mark each image in such a way as to delineate the surface of the frame precisely. Guiding marks are thus placed on the side of the film stock (often on the right-hand side) between the perforations. In this way, for example, it is possible to indicate the rhythmic structure of the action, by placing a mark every ten, twelve or twenty-four frames. In particular, using this method it is possible to locate the upper and lower edges of the frame, in keeping with an understanding of how the film stock functions: the border between two frames is located in the middle of each perforation, meaning that this imaginary line must not be crossed for each drawing (in which case the illustration would spill into the image in the next frame). Hébert tends to privilege the bottom or the top of each perforation as the border of the frame in order to avoid this uncertain “middle” area, perceptible to the naked eye but difficult to measure. Hence his preference for working with double-perforation film stock in order to determine more precisely the imaginary lines separating each frame from the next horizontally.
