Time-Split Accuracy - Text 2
As McCay himself described, this principle was thus concerned above all else with controlling the rhythm of the action depicted. In this sense, McCay described his work on Gertie in this way:
when [Gertie] was lying on her side I wanted her to breathe and I tried my watch... to judge how long she was inhaling and how long it took her to exhale. I could come to no exact time until one day I happened to be working where a large clock with a big second dial accurately marked the intervals of time. I stood in front of this clock and inhaled and exhaled and found that, imitating the great dinosaur, I inhaled in four seconds and exhaled in two. [On screen, instead of] the great Dinosaur panting as you would expect, she was breathing very easily. The breathing was shown by the sides of the monster expanding and contracting like a bellows.[2]
As Claudie Collomb has pointed out, “with films playing at sixteen frames per second, McCay calculated that sixty-four drawings were necessary when Gertie inhaled, and thirty-two when he [sic] exhaled.”[3] The goal of the technique was thus to produce more realistic movements.
