Claire Parker
Parker at the pinscreen
Born(1906-08-31)August 31, 1906
DiedOctober 3, 1981(1981-10-03) (aged 75)
NationalityAmerican
Known forEngineering, Animation
Spouse
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, 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]

Further reading

References

  1. ^ 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.
  2. ^ Neupert, Richard (2011). French Animation History. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-9257-9.
  3. ^ "Apparatus for producing images - US2100148A". Google Patents. Retrieved 13 June 2022.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ "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.
  6. ^ Alexeieff, Alexander; Parker, Claire. "Le Nez (Short 1963)". IMDb. Archived from the original on 28 October 2022. Retrieved 27 October 2022.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ 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.
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