«

[rlbell]

It makes me yearn for the ability to ransack the archives at Canada's National Film Board.

The amazing thing is that he does it fast enough to hold your attention between tableaus.

There is a similar style of image making for animated films-- each frame is pressed into a thin sheet of clay, that is backlit. The deeper the impression, the thinner the clay, so the more light that gets through to expose the film. I suspect that clay is used, instead of sand, as the image is much more durable.

Flying off on a tangent, another interesting technique is forming images by pushing in the needles of a large pinboard (a pierced plate with closely spaced holes, each of which has a needle that can be slid back and forth).

Continuing with the tangent and explaining the opening of this post, the NFB animation studio was founded by Norm Maclaren, who saw it as his mission to push the boundaries of animation, in terms of technique. In the past, the NFB has funded all forms of animation, in Canada, and invited foreign animators to give master classes, to spread their techniques. If someone has created moving pictures by photographing a backlit sand table, odds are the NFB has offered some money to spread the technique.

Norm Maclaren invented the animation technique of pixelation, where the film is a sequence of still photographs of live actors. His classic film "Neighbours" won the Academy Award for best animated short. The technique was also used in Mark Jitlow's (sp?) "Wizard of Space and Time", and the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". Another of his more famous films is "Pas de Deux", which features a film of two dancers fed through an optical printer, multiple times, with each time offset by one frame.

Lord only knows how you would find any of these, but two others worth mentioning are "Variations on a Triangle" and "Cosmic Zoom".