Drawn on film animation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Caroline Leaf's Two Sisters (1991), an award-winning short which uses drawn-on-film animation

Drawn on film animation (also known as "direct animation", or "animation without camera") is an animation technique where footage is produced by creating the images directly on film stock, as opposed to any other form of animation where the images or objects are photographed frame by frame with an animation camera.

1 Techniques
2 Animators and Films
3 Books
4 External links

[edit] Techniques

There are two basic methods to produce animation directly on film. One starts with blank film stock, the other one with black (already developed) film. On blank film the artist can draw, paint, stamp, or even glue objects. Black film (or any footage) can be scratched, etched, sanded, or punched. Any tool the artist finds useful may be used for this, and all techniques can be combined endlessly. The frame borders may be observed or completely ignored, found footage may be included, any existing image might be distorted by mechanical or chemical means.

35mm film is preferred, but direct animation is done on 16 mm or even Super 8 as well. Because of the tedious technique most films of this kind are quite short. Many films of this kind feature a prominent soundtrack, and a lot of those are made exactly in sync with music. Since the sound strip on 35 mm film is optical, it is possible to create synthetic sound as well as images.

The first and best known practictioners of drawn on film animation were Len Lye and Norman McLaren, who produced numerous animated films using these methods. Their work already covered the whole span between storytelling and totally abstract animation. Other filmmakers in the 1960's expanded the idea and treated the film stock more and more radical towards destruction, up to the point where a film was treated beyond any possibility to survive projection. Some artists made this destruction a statement, others went back one step and copied the original work film strip to get a projection copy.

Direct animation is a very cheap way to produce a film, it can be done on film strips right out of the garbage bin. This might explain its popularity among film students world-wide. Norman McLaren wrote a short illustrated introduction "How to make animated movies without a camera" which was originally published by UNESCO in 1949.