Printing and Distributing the Film - Text 2
But this use of an optical or digital camera is not necessarily a mere printing stage. The use of the optical camera makes it possible to double the animated image.
Apart from the production of a negative, [Pierre Hébert explains] the fundamental operation carried out with an optical camera is to double the images, because I record doubled images twelve times per second and not twenty-four. There are three reasons for this. First, when drawing on film stock, you quickly reach the limits of fine registration and in general you can’t really profit from the greater precision theoretically possible with twenty-four frames per second animation. Second, doubling lets each line appear twice in exactly the same spot, giving more perceptual solidity to the drawings. And third, the work goes twice as fast.[9]
While it has not been adopted by everyone, it is no less the case that this way of creating drawing on film animation involves the paradoxical use of a camera during the laboratory stage of production. “It is thus not correct,” Hébert writes, “to say that drawing on film animation is done without a camera.”[10] While this stage may give rise to additional cost, Hébert emphasizes that it is a “routine operation”[11] which in the end is not very expensive, which undoubtedly accounts for its use in the production of artisanal films at the NFB (which Hébert described at the time in 1979).
Finally, animators had to think in technical terms about the film stock to use for prints of the film. With respect to black-and-white films in particular, high contrast film was preferred for the negative before making positive prints. The reason for this was the need to make a strong distinction between the drawn line and the ground, which is achieved by means of a strong contrast between black and white. This accounts for the importance of carrying out exposure tests when making the negative. Pierre Hébert indicates that it was important to “supply technicians with an image which included both large surfaces and very fine lines close to one another [and to ask] that an exposure test be carried out to cover the possibility of exposing the film from one extreme to the other.”[12] He adds: “it was very important that all the work be done with the same optical camera as that with which the test was carried out, because the results varied from one camera to another.”[13] The approach changes if the film was envisioned to be in colour, however. In that case, the images were coloured using different kinds of ink, for example, and prints were made on colour film stock, which in general had better contrast than black-and-white stock. It was thus not necessary to use high-contrast film stock to make exhibition prints. All these variations, as tiny and subtle as they may be, are a good indication of the way technical matters were seen at the NFB, meaning above all as a site of artistic experimentation.
