The Animation Stand - Text 3
By extension, Cohl could now use the retracing method in a much simpler manner, because it became possible to draw directly on the horizontal glass plate, as one would on a table. The lighting enabled him to see the lines of the previous sketch through the drawing sheet, on which he could base himself to create each new illustration. This method would afterwards be taken up and developed by the entire animated drawing industry, simply by separating the drawing and photography stages and by using the peg bar, which made it possible to replicate precisely on the animation stand the same position of the drawing on the animator’s drawing table without the need to draw directly beneath the camera in order to ensure that the drawings were properly aligned.
In the 1910s, each studio had its own animation stand, which was often jury-rigged out of the elements mentioned above. There was no standard model, as the industry was still in the development and discovery phase with respect to technology and techniques. One must wait until the late 1920s for there to be businesses providing complete set-ups, marketed under the names “animation station” or “animation stand,” or banc-titre in France. We can find traces of Bell & Howell and E. Leitz models, advertised in trade journals in 1932 and suggesting the existence of earlier models[3]. Later even more stable and multi-purpose models would be on offer; these made it possible to create various kinds of trick effects and credit sequences (the animation stand camera could operate frame by frame, but also in a traditional manner).
