The Animated Film Camera - Text 1
There is a fundamental reason for the technical difficulty presented by the animated drawing: its creation depends not only on cameras, which come into play almost at the end of the production chain, but rather on a variety of apparatuses and actions which, interconnected as these are, tend incidentally to “imitate” the way so-called “traditional” cameras function. In this sense, the reason why historical sources do not always make it possible to identify the kinds of cameras used to record the drawings, which quite often were classical camera models modified to function with a hand crank – taking one picture with each turn of the crank to make frame-by-frame animation possible – may be a lack of interest, or rather a desire to shroud this phase of the recording in silence in order to emphasise prior creative actions, which more specifically make up the animated drawing’s main technical elements. Nevertheless, it is of interest to take this as our starting point in that it reveals the need to mechanise each of these stages, including that based, precisely, on a mechanical device, whose sole remaining human element, the turning of the crank, will be the object of attempts to dispense with it.
The basic problem involved in creating an animated drawing is found in the “filming” phase: how to record frame by frame using a device which was not conceived for that? In truth, the fact that the earliest film equipment was based on the use of a crank did make it possible, at least in theory, to expose only one frame at a time on the film stock. The crank made it possible to control movement, and thus for the person operating the device to decide not only to vary the speed but also to stop and restart the film stock’s advancement. For films based on a precise parsing of movement, however, it was better to come up with little tricks so that stopping on each image was not left solely to the dexterity of the operator and to ensure that the number of exposures was exactly the same for each image. In the process, production was optimised (no risky or imprecise gesture; a minimised procedure) even as, at the same time, this is what made it possible to obtain fluid and regular movement which did not “jump” from one position to the next.
We can easily take note of the lack of a device specifically designed for this work, which could then be discussed in the context of film technology in the years 1900 to 1910. In fact the earliest animators did not invent so much as they adapted pre-existing devices, which they simply extended with a mechanism making it possible to regulate the speed at which the crank turned. While it is possible to speculate and suppose for example that the John Randolph Bray studio may have shot its films with a Bell & Howell 2709 (model no. 19) camera[1], the earliest cameras used by James Stuart Blackton for his animation experiments (Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, 1906; Lightning Sketches, 1907), or by Winsor McCay in films such as Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912), remain a mystery. Undoubtedly, it would have been a camera model used at Vitagraph, the company where these two animators worked.
