Claire Parker

American engineer and animator

Alexandre Alexeieff

(m. 1940)

Claire Parker (August 31, 1906 – October 3, 1981) was an American engineer and animator. A graduate of MIT, her best-known contribution to the history of cinema is the Pinscreen (Écran d'épingles), a vertically-mounted grid of between 240,000 and 1 million sliding metal rods that are first manually pushed into position to create lit and shaded areas, then filmed frame by frame.^[1] While the hand-operated, mechanical Pinscreen superficially shares characteristics with early optical toys like the zoetrope, it is distinguished by being one of the first devices ever to produce animation by reconfiguring a set of individual picture elements, later called pixels. A model with sufficient pin "resolution" can be used to create a Pinscreen animation of photorealistic images, a painstaking process analogous to modern pixel art.

Parker shared directing credits for her films with her husband and collaborator, Russian animator Alexandre Alexeieff; however, the 1935 French and 1937 U.S. patents on the Pinscreen were made in her name alone.^[2]^[3] Alexeieff and Parker's Pinscreen films include Night on Bald Mountain (1933)^[4]^[5] and The Nose (1963),^[6] as well as the opening title sequence for Orson Welles' film The Trial (1962). As of 2012^[update], the last known original Pinscreen still being used in animation production is maintained at the National Film Board of Canada's main campus in Montreal.^[7] A second screen was constructed and put into production in 2018.^[8]

References

^ Furniss, Maureen (December 1998). Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. Indiana University Press. pp. 54–57. ISBN 978-1-86462-039-9. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
^ Neupert, Richard (2011). French Animation History. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-9257-9.
^ "Apparatus for producing images - US2100148A". Google Patents. Retrieved 13 June 2022.
^ Alexander, Vincent (21 October 2022). "20 Spooky Stop-Motion Classics To Get You In The Mood For Halloween". Cartoon Brew. Archived from the original on 22 October 2022. Retrieved 27 October 2022.
^ "A Night on Bald Mountain [Original title: Une nuit sur le mont chauve]". IMDb. Archived from the original on 4 August 2022. Retrieved 27 October 2022.
^ Alexeieff, Alexander; Parker, Claire. "Le Nez (Short 1963)". IMDb. Archived from the original on 28 October 2022. Retrieved 27 October 2022.
^ Blair, Iain (4 June 2012). "NFB pushes Canadian artists in edgy direction". Variety. Archived from the original on 20 September 2021. Retrieved 5 June 2012.
^ Mello, Marie (28 August 2018). "Justine Vuylsteker embraces the magic of pinscreen animation". NFB Blog. Archived from the original on 25 December 2021. Retrieved 4 March 2021.