The Peg Bar - Text 4
Industrialisation would impose a more stable visual form, but this was only the consequence of the mechanisation sought by its representatives, not an aesthetic outlook. We can see the extent to which the peg bar, far from simply offering a new animation aesthetic, saved a considerable amount of time from the start compared to registration marks, because the already-perforated paper support was attached directly to the drawing table or animation stand without the need to clamp anything down by sight. The photograph of each drawing was thus taken more efficiently, which was naturally a factor in the industrialisation phase that animated drawings went through in the 1910s.
Nevertheless, if we were to decide, in light of McCay’s work, to see in the principle of the peg bar a step towards higher “quality” animation, we should ask ourselves what the criteria are for determining quality. We can see here the way the evolution of cameras of the day was quite clearly echoed in the way animated drawings were perceived: whereas cameras provided increasingly stable systems (metal construction, register pins holding the film in a precise position, as was the case with the Bell & Howell 2709, used in the United States beginning in 1912), animators also submitted to rules concerning stability, as if live-action pictures were a benchmark, a technical model to be followed. In the end, the fact that perforation was, in this precise case, the most practical method for achieving this stability was only a coincidence, in the sense that this method coincided with what could be found in “traditional” film techniques. For a few years longer, however, other methods would be used in competing studios: John Randolph Bray also initially employed a system of registration marks, demonstrating that techniques circulated at the time, giving rise to disputes over who came up with one invention or another.[3] Bray quickly gave in to the principle of the peg bar, but this spread of technical equipment should in no way be seen as a quest for stylistic homogeneity in animated drawings of the period (even though this was a consequence), but rather as the application of a more practical and precise technique in order to establish a completely broken-in system of assembly-line work. This is something which another important invention of the day, the animation stand, also demonstrates.
