Working Equipment - Text 1
Despite its simplicity and immediacy, often vaunted by those who have practised it, in particular Norman McLaren and Pierre Hébert, drawing on film animation requires special equipment enabling animators to mitigate the inherent difficulties of the technique. According to McLaren, nine different steps were required to produce this kind of film:
- Recording the music or soundtrack.
- Marking each note and each bar on the music track.
- Numbering each image on the film stock.
- Transcribing and numbering the notes in a simplified musical score (indicating the length of these notes in terms of images).
- Copying the notes and indications of their length onto raw film stock.
- Placing the film stock in a specially-designed device.
- Drawing on the film stock.
- Making prints.
- If the film is in colour, making a series of separation negatives.[1]
It is apparent that such a list cannot apply to every form of drawing on film animation: what about films with no music? Films in black and white? Films with etched sound? As can be seen, McLaren’s steps are valid only for particular situations — posing directly the question of establishing an instruction manual for the technique — and, as a result, for each of these steps different methods and equipment can be put in place. It is even more important to take this diversity of approaches into account given that the seventh step is, according to McLaren, the principal one, “where in ordinary cinema the entire procession of filming and equipment of every description is found.”[2] This step thus constitutes in large part the film’s visual identity. Here, the technical environment of the drawing can completely determine its precise lines, and thus give rise to singular results on screen. The first variation is that of the base on which one works. A base method appears to have been privileged regularly, in particular by McLaren, as we can see in the following images.
