Time-Split Accuracy - Text 1
Whereas the earliest experiments in animation always took place in “real time,” meaning improvised on the fly by animators (Émile Cohl in particular), the industrialisation of the animated drawing was a major change in the way the creation of drawings was organised. In fact beginning in the 1910s we can see the emergence of a principle of planning animation which sought to define in advance every movement that needed to be created before beginning to produce it. The first instances of this approach can be found, not within the industry, but in the work of that other pioneer Winsor McCay. In fact with his film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) McCay inaugurated a method he would call – without patenting it – “the McCay split-system.” His idea was to draw the two extremes of a movement (its beginning and end), and then to draw an image of an intermediate phase (dividing the movement into two parts). After that, he would break each of these two parts into two equal phases, with the idea of repeating the procedure as often as was necessary. In this way, McCay could obtain precise movements which he orchestrated according to a pre-planned timing. The term used by McCay to describe the central drawing was the “split drawing.”[1]
