Senin, 28 November 2011

Beginning of Computer Art



During the 1960s, a few large American computer companies provided equipment to a number of experimental filmmakers. In 1966 IBM set up a research program and hired John Whitney, who made films like Permutations (1968). A few years earlier, Stan VanDerBeek had started to make Poem Fields (1964–70) using the Beflix language devised by Kenneth Knowlton, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. His experiments were among the first real films made using computer animation. They are abstract films conceived in the pure "underground" spirit.


But they cannot be said to mark the beginning of computer art. American Ben P. Laposky had actually made the first electronic abstracts in 1952; then, in 1960, Germans Kurd Alsleben and William A. Fetter made the first synthetic images on a computer.


At the NFB, starting in the 1960s, computers were used for experimental films. Bernard Longpré (Test 0558, 1965) and Pierre Hébert (Around Perception, 1968) were pioneers. In neither case, however, did the computer actually generate pictures. For Around Perception, Hébert used the computer to create random juxtapositions of shapes cut out of paper.


It was not until 1971 and Metadata, by Peter Foldès, that computer graphics arrived. Foldès, a Hungarian filmmaker who had worked in France, Great Britain and the United States, went on to make Hunger (1974), a film denouncing overconsumption, in which the filmmaker continued the technical research he had begun with Metadata.


In 1981 Pierre Moretti made Graphic Variations on Telidon as a test to illustrate the graphic possibilities of Telidon, a videotext system supported by the Canadian government. In the 1980s, on the initiative of producer Robert Forget, the NFB produced animated segments for Transition (Colin Low, 1987, in stereo) and Emergency (Colin Low and Tony Ianzelo, 1988). For Emergency, Doris Kochanek's animation was transferred to Imax film, a first.


At the same time, Forget produced If Only ... (Marc Aubry, 1988), in which computer animation techniques were applied at some stages of the traditional animation process. Once the animator had done the key drawings on paper, they were digitized and the in-betweens were computer generated. Similarly, inking and painting were also done by computer. Aubry's film showed how the computer could increase the number of layers of images without running up against the density limitations and handling problems inherent in cel animation. In the years following the film, in fact, the entire animation industry gradually shifted to computer processes for these stages. Among the large number of films illustrating this technological shift are Overdose (Claude Cloutier, 1994), The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg (Paul Driessen, 2000), Flux (Chris Hinton, 2002), Noël Noël (Nicolas Lemay, 2003) and Stormy Night (Michèle Lemieux, 2003).


In 1989 Marc Aubry and Michel Hébert made Anniversary, for which they used 3-D computer graphics. Along with Mirrors of Time (Jean-Jacques Leduc, 1990), this was the NFB's foray into the field. Other films followed, such as La Salla (Richard Condie, 1996), Cuckoo, Mr. Edgar! (Pierre M. Trudeau, 1999) and Showa Shinzan (Alison Reiko Loader, 2002). Chris Landreth's Ryan, a documentary on animator Ryan Larkin, completed in 2004, is the acme of composite imagery.


In the 1990s, the computer became one more tool in the hands of filmmakers using traditional techniques. By the end of the decade, most animators were using computers one way or another to make their films. The role of computers became more general and diverse. For example, for La plante humaine (1996), Pierre Hébert digitized his direct-on-film etched images and did the painting by computer. John Weldon, for The Hungry Squid (2002), developed "recyclomation," an ingenious way of working with puppets, photographs and simple software applications. For L’Éternel et le brocanteur (2002), Michel Murray combined live action, photographs and digitized images to create an amazing science-fiction world. Some animators, like Nicolas Brault (Antagonia, 2002), also draw directly on a graphic tablet.


The constant desire of NFB artists to experiment and innovate technically can be seen in the use, for instance, of Imax's SANDDE (Stereoscopic Animation Drawing Device) system, which makes it fairly simple to draw animated films in relief. Munro Ferguson (Falling in Love Again, 2003; June, 2003) and Paul Morstad (Moon Man, 2004) have successfully used this system, developed by Roman Kroitor.


Pinscreen



In the early 1930s, engraver Alexandre Alexeïeff, a Russian émigré living in France, decided to go into filmmaking. Wishing to make films with an aesthetic faithful to the line and shading of his engravings, he invented a new type of device: the pinscreen.


The pinscreen consists of a white screen pierced by hundreds of thousands of pins that can slide back and forth, each in its own hole. When lit from the side, each pin casts a shadow, and when all the pins are pushed out, there is total darkness. But when pins are pushed in, their shadows are shorter, and the black become grey. When pins are pushed all the way in, they do not cast shadows and the white screen can be seen.


In 1933 Alexeïeff, with the help of his partner Claire Parker, completed Night on Bald Mountain. In 1943, exiled in North America, Alexeïeff and Parker made En passant for the NFB, where they had been invited by Norman McLaren, a great admirer of theirs.


NFB animators continued to be interested in the pinscreen, and in 1968, musician Maurice Blackburn, one of McLaren's regular collaborators, made a brief foray into directing with a short experimental film titled Ciné-crime. For this film, with its extremely complex concrete soundtrack, he used a smaller version of the device.


In 1972 Alexeïeff and Parker were invited back to the NFB. By this time, the NFB had acquired a full-sized pinscreen, and the two artists gave workshops to train a group of filmmakers. McLaren seized the opportunity to shoot a documentary, Pinscreen.


Their visit had a major impact on the future of the process. It had long been thought that the pinscreen would die with its inventors, but then Jacques Drouin decided to use it for his films. In 1974 he made Trois exercices sur l'écran d'épingles d'Alexeïeff. Then, two years later, he came out from under Alexeïeff’s heavy shadow to express his own tone and style with Mindscape.


After the success of Mindscape, Drouin introduced a technical innovation when he coloured his images by filtering his light sources in Nightangel (1986), co-directed with Czech Bretislav Pojar. This film marries two techniques, as Pojar's puppets play out a story against changing pinscreen backgrounds. Drouin continued his aesthetic research in his next three films: Ex-child (1994), A Hunting Lesson (2001) and Imprints (2004).

Pixillation



Norman McLaren coined the term pixillation for the stop-motion animation technique that consists in shooting, one frame at a time, characters or objects whose movements are controlled entirely by the filmmaker. He used this technique in Neighbours (1952), a powerful antiwar fable, then in A Chairy Tale (1957) and Opening Speech (1961), two films in which the story turns on the refusal of an everyday object (a chair and a microphone) to behave as expected.


The origins of pixillation go back to the "trick films" using special effects that marked the early years of filmmaking. Examples are some of the tricks of Georges Méliès, the famous El Hotel electrico by Segundo de Chomon (1905) of Spain and Le mobilier fidèle by Roméo Bosetti of France (1912).


More than any other animation technique, pixillation is closely bound to reality. The interaction of actors and objects in a three-dimensional setting introduces a series of references to reality. This has an influence on the choice of subjects dealt with in films that use this technique. It is no accident, for example, that McLaren made his most political works with this process.


Robert Awad made judicious use of the technique, in combination with others, in his parodies of documentaries, The Bronswik Affair (co-directed by André Leduc, 1978) and Amuse-gueule (1983). Yet it was Leduc who made most frequent use of pixillation at the NFB. In three films—Tout écartillé (1974), Monsieur Pointu (co-directed by Bernard Longpré, 1975) and Chérie, ôte tes raquettes (1976)—he explores the technique's potential for fantasy.


The theme of Tout écartillé and Chérie, ôte tes raquettes is the frenzy of the modern world, a theme that Roland Stutz explored further in his Taxi, illustrating a song by Claude Léveillée, a film that exploits the speeded-up effect obtained with pixillation.