The Animation Stand - Text 2
The very principle of this system, which incorporated the animation camera and made it possible to operate it with a crank or, later, with a switch connected to an electric motor, demonstrates the concern for technical stability it embodied. The camera was placed at a precise distance from the drawings, making it possible to frame their entire content, which also made it possible to fix the drawings on the table using a glass plate attached to hinges, which could be lowered with precision onto the illustrations, ensuring the stability of the photographing procedure.[1] In particular, this method was used when the use of celluloid came within greater reach, making it possible to fix both the background and the transparent sheet containing the character in order to achieve the illusion of a single image. As can be seen, the interest of combining these elements lay in ensuring the stability of the drawings when the photograph was taken and the precision with which they succeeded one another, thereby imitating, by breaking it down, the way photograms advance one by one in a traditional camera.
Viewed in this manner, it would be quite tempting to see the animation stand as an apparatus which updated the internal workings of the camera, with the plate on which the drawings were fixed playing the role of the window through which light passes before the shutter does its work. Here the blocking of light is no longer only a mechanical and invisible intermediate stage which lets the film stock advance past the lens without this displacement being perceived by the viewer; it was a decided and conscious phase during which a human operation takes place. In each case, this moment determined the animation of the images: the dark phase created by the shutter constitutes the moment when the brain makes the connection between two slightly different images in order to recreate a conjured movement; while the phase of changing the drawing made possible the same thing, thereby determining the later phi phenomenon. But beyond this echo of one technical process by another, which tends to suggest that “animation [is] no longer a form of cinema. Film and cinema [are] forms of animation,”[2] we must shake this theoretical and above all spectatorial understanding and see once again that the animation stand is much more than a system which makes it possible to “put into photograms” previously-created drawings. It was, rather, an invention which was above all purely practical, arising out of a range of technical constraints which should be recontextualised.
Apart from the problem around the operation of the animation camera, photographing each drawing in order to create the illusion of movement presented the pioneers of animation with questions from the start. When James Stuart Blackton shot the film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906, he made his chalk drawings on a blackboard; because of the board’s vertical position, he could easily place his camera in front of it to record each change in his drawing, which he made as he went along. Things became more complicated when Émile Cohl in France chose to work on sheets of paper when he carried out his first experiments in animating drawings. In order to photograph these drawings, Cohl used a method of his own invention which later, in the United States, would take the name “retracing method.”
Cohl designed a box made up of a wooden frame and a cover of polished glass, inside of which he placed a light source. This light illuminated the drawing placed on the glass from behind, making it possible to photograph it. But the problem with this method lies mostly in the difficulty of holding the drawing upright, because for each image it was necessary to fix the paper using a second glass plate. This required a lot of time. Cohl quickly opted for a different system, placing the backlit box vertically and simply placing the drawing on the glass plate horizontally. The camera was then placed above the box, and the lens, pointing downwards, was operated vertically. Already we can see, in the work of Cohl (whose ambition was not to industrialise his output), that the principle of the animation stand consists above all in facilitating the handling of the drawings in order to optimise the process of photographing them.
