Caroline Leaf's early films were first introduced to me in High School. They were amazing to watch, because all the images were created under the camera on glass, with sand and later with ink and paint . They were the first non-traditional animation films I had ever seen.
Fast forward, I mentioned Caroline Leaf's work on this blog and recently met her at this year's Annie Awards in LA.
I invited her to write a post about herself and her work. She agreed, and so, here's Caroline Leaf.
As a kid, I don’t remember looking at
cartoons. I don’t think I knew what animation was. But in my last year of college, I took an
animation class. In 1968, liberal arts colleges were beginning to offer film
courses, and film was taught like creative writing, as a form of personal
expression. Film stock and lab processing were getting cheaper, cameras were
getting smaller, it was affordable. At Harvard/Radcliffe, where I was a
student, Derek Lamb, an animator/writer/director who came from London England and
had been working at the National Film Board of Canada, taught the 1 year
course. Since students came from all parts of the university, medical school,
engineering or the business school, for example, we were not expected to be
able to draw. We did pixilation and stop motion and animated cutouts. We did
exercises like moving keychains and giving personality to the movement of dimes
and quarters.
My family has a house near Boston on a beach
with very fine white sand. I remember thinking I could achieve more personality
and story telling if I put sand on the lightbox under the camera, and drew
shapes in the sand. There was no tradition of drawing in sand, so I felt free
to develop my own style. I remember the excitement of seeing my first animated
creature move, the duck in my student film Sand
or Peter and the Wolf.
I developed sand animation. I liked the feel
of my hands in the sand and loved the graphic quality of the images it made.
It’s limitations forced me to be creative.
For example, a pile of underlit sand
has an edge, a silhouette. The edge is where the information about shape,
character and personality is. I was animating silhouette characters. I liked
the economy of sand animation: I could make a film from a bucket of sand and it
cost nothing. I liked the fact that after I shot an image, I erased it and drew
the next one, and in the end there was no artwork left, just the film.
We shot 16mm film, and later, when I moved to
the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, shot 35mm film. I usually worked
for a couple of weeks to accumulate
enough film to make it worth sending to the
lab for processing. Until the film came back from the lab, I couldn’t see what
I had done. There wasn’t instant feedback as there is now with animation shot
digitally.
When I wanted to work with color images, I
tried using colored sand. I sent away for bags of colored sand. But the colors
got mixed and muddy and it was frustratingly slow. I looked around at my
co-workers at the Film Board, and noticed that a medium was added to cel
animation paint to keep the paint flexible so that it didn’t crack off the
cels. I added some of this medium (glycerine) to water based gouache paint,
stirred, and found that it didn’t dry. I could push wet paint around with my
fingers like sand.
I made The Street with paint-on-glass. Again,
I love the imagery wet paint makes.
Here are a few clips from "The Street"
TheStreet (clip01) from
Toondini on
Vimeo.
It’s important to be happy with the graphic
look of an animated image. When the image is a delight, it’s fun to work with
and to sit with for the long hours of making animated movement.
Later, trying to eliminate everything between
me and my animated movement, I got rid of the camera entirely, and scratched
images in the soft emulsion of exposed color film. I made a one minute clip for
MTV scratching into 16mm film. My last animated film, Two Sisters, was scratched into 70mm Imax film.
I like to give workshops for sand animation
or paint-on-glass. It feels good to get young animators excited about direct
under the camera animation. I’ve been teaching animation for animation
directors in an MA program. The teaching is about how to tell a story in film.
It’s about film language, how sound and picture work together, and how to guage
what an audience will understand from the presentation of images over time. I
don’t care what technique the animators use, and they are mostly working with
computers.
After I left the National Film Board of
Canada (1992), wanting to explore the world outside the dark room where I
animated, I began to draw and paint more full time. The compositions became
more complicated and ambitious. I painted with oils and drew with gouache and
ink on paper.
When I animate, individual drawings are
unimportant. It is their displacement in relation to the film frame, the change
between the drawings, that creates perception of movement. These drawings are
line driven and simple. All through my animation years, when animating was my
day job, on the side I was making drawings that did not move. They were quick drawings
from memory of things seen during the day. They were my daily visual diary entries.
I was storytelling about myself.
Early spring on the Lachine Canal
Over time, the figurative element has become
less important, and concerns about mark making, perceptions of space and depth,
the composition of the 2d surface, and perception of content have become interesting.
It is satisfying to explore complex pictorial structures that are not possible
with images designed to move. The painted images have become more abstract.
My animation films and paintings both involve
hard work, discipline, and concentration, even as they are improvisations. I
try to work alittle bit each day. I don’t believe in waiting for
inspiration. For both, I am disciplined
by the goal of making a total work. Even as I enjoy surprising myself with
details in the composition and am happy accidents that occur, I am thinking
about serving the needs of the whole image or the whole film story.
You
wouldn’t think this is an issue, but improvisation easily gets off track from
the main goal. Straight ahead animation shooting film did not let me go back to
make changes. It was tough to be focused on getting it right, not making
mistakes. The work kept me on my toes. Exciting but tiring! Perhaps I burned
out animating like this
Now the paintings are finished in days and I’m on to
another idea. I’m not sitting on a stool in a dark room. I’m in sunshine,
dancing around, looking up close, standing back, turning the picture upside
down, putting it on the floor. I feel lively when I paint.
To see more of my work: carolineleaf.com
The Owl Who Married a Goose 1974
The Street 1976
The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa 1977
Interview 1979
Many thanks to Caroline Leaf for sharing her history, wisdom, animated images and still ones.
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