The Peg Bar - Text 2
The peg bar’s technical principle consists, as André Martin has written, in applying to “every drawn element the same mechanical perforation as a peg bar, which ensures identical positioning of every phase of the movement on the animation or camera table.”[2] This easily prompts a comparison with the technical principle of the traditional camera. By making it possible to fix the drawings precisely on a support in such a way that they all line up and can be superimposed, conformity is achieved from one image to the next, inviting us to see in the technique a kind of imitation of the photogrammatic regularity of the film strip. Whereas the stability of the film stock depends in part on the perforations which delineate it, the stability of the drawings also rests on perforations, clearly echoing the claws of the camera mechanism. And yet this observation has a particular orientation, because while one of the goals was truly to stabilise the images to ensure fluid projection without jerkiness, similar to the projection of animated photographs, this perforation system was not the only one in play in the early 1910s. In fact it was not so much a question of imitating the film stock as it was of optimising the phase in which drawings were placed underneath the camera so that it would be as simple and as practical as possible.
Before Barré’s principle was arrived at, drawings were already being produced which employed registration marks. Initially, this requirement was met by several possible methods, depending on the animator. In his early work Winsor McCay, for example, used sheets of paper cut with a paper cutter and whose corners were blocked by brackets. Then, for Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), he created a system of registration marks, using crosses placed in the four corners of the drawings which functioned like the corners of an invisible frame on the rice paper to suggest the edges of the image.
