technique
Pinscreen animation
Stop motion
Definition
Pinscreen animation is a stop-motion technique in which each photographed frame is formed not by a puppet or a drawing but by an image embossed into a large pinboard: hundreds of thousands of retractable steel pins are pushed to different depths and raked with angled light, so their shadows render continuous tones from black through grey to white rather than a hard-edged outline. The board is reshaped by hand between exposures the same way clay or sand is reshaped in other under-camera techniques -- the difference is that what gets "posed" from frame to frame is a field of light and shadow rather than a physical object's silhouette.
Overview
Alexandre Alexeieff, a printmaker and engraver, and his creative and life partner Claire Parker invented the pinscreen in their own Paris studio between 1932 and 1935; Parker held the patent on the device. Alexeieff had built his reputation on engraving's tonal range of blacks, whites, and the gradations between them, and the pinscreen was built to animate that same visual language rather than the flat line work of cel animation. Their first pinscreen film, A Night on Bald Mountain (1933), demonstrated the technique's affinity with the French First Avant-Garde: dense, dreamlike tonal imagery built from symbol and mood rather than a cartoon's clean contour (NFB, "3 Keys to Understanding and Appreciating Pinscreen Animation").
The mechanism scales the labour of stop motion to an unusual extreme. A production board carries on the order of 240,000 individually retractable pins; an animator pushes pins into position with a specialised tool to sculpt one frame's image, photographs the board, nudges the relevant pins again for the next pose, and repeats -- with twenty-four photographs required for a single second of finished film (NFB, "Animation Techniques: Pinscreen"). Jacques Drouin's Mindscape needed 10,800 separate pin designs to produce roughly seven minutes of screen time, a ratio that explains why the technique has never been a production-line tool: it rewards patience and a printmaker's eye far more than it rewards throughput.
That labour cost has kept pinscreen animation one of the rarest instruments in the medium. Alexeieff and Parker built and operated it themselves for decades; when Claire Parker died in 1981, the National Film Board of Canada's Jacques Drouin became the technique's principal working practitioner, animating with it for roughly three decades on films including Mindscape and Imprints before his retirement. Michele Lemieux subsequently took up the same board for Here and the Great Elsewhere, continuing an unbroken practical lineage that the NFB itself frames as running through only a handful of animators in the technique's entire history (NFB, "3 Keys to Understanding and Appreciating Pinscreen Animation"; NFB, "Animation Techniques: Pinscreen").
Workflow
- Home the pinboard and confirm the light source's angle -- shallow, raking light is what lets pin depth read as tone, so the rig is set before any animation begins.
- Sculpt the frame's image by pushing individual pins to depth with a dedicated tool, working from a reference sketch or the previous frame's photographed state.
- Photograph the board once the image is set, using the same framing and exposure as every other frame in the shot.
- Adjust only the pins that need to move for the next pose or the next stage of a dissolve between images, leaving the rest of the board undisturbed.
- Repeat pose-and-photograph across the full frame count -- twenty-four exposures per second of finished film -- checking developed or played-back frames periodically to confirm the tonal range is reading as intended before committing further pin work that would be costly to redo.