The laws of perspective are to be considered in “animating” an object as it passes across the screen.
The entire matter is one of a different perspective drawing for each position. In the movement of the subject toward the other side a reverse change takes place in the direction of the lines. Generally only a few separate drawings—or cut-outs—are needed to render the screen illusion sufficiently resembling actuality to satisfy the eye.
There is a form of animated cartoon in which the objects, details of the view, and the figures are in white on a black ground. Usually this kind of film is of a comic subject. With the delineations of the characters in a burlesque style and the actions indubitably ludicrous, they provoke a great deal of laughter. Such screen stories, when the figures are well imagined and drawn in an exaggerated way, and the other parts are conformably incongruous and with a unity of ridiculousness and absurdity in story and action, are to be considered as true works of dramatic art.
The principles of perspective are applied in the drawing of birds as well as in the picturing of objects.
The mode, generally, of making these strong black-and-white effects is to have the figures and moving parts of separate units to be arranged under the camera in connection with a simple scene drawn in white, or gray, on a black ground. The figures of animals are made as dummies, with jointed limbs. This makes it possible to put them into the various positions necessary for giving the illusion of life as they are moved about over the background.
These dummies are designed with but little detail and are drawn on a carefully selected white surfaced cardboard or thick paper that gives in contrast with the background good white-and-black negatives. The joinings of these figures or animals, are made with the thinnest kind of wire fashioned into tiny pivoting pins. Sometimes in spite of the artist’s efforts to conceal these wire pivots by placing them where a hooked ink line indicates a fold of drapery, sharp-eyed individuals can detect them on the screen. Where such jointed dummies are used under the framed glass, the wire pivots will not do. Instead, the artist must find some way of fashioning cardboard rivets, or washers, to join the parts of the figures. A thin elastic tissue would do perhaps, as an expedient, to clothe these little dummies and hide the joinings of the cardboard segments.
ARTICULATED CARDBOARD FIGURES.
Here we may note the so-called “trick” titles that are shown in theatres for special occasions, or in connection with the regular films. They add with their liveliness a little variety to the tedium of a long presentation of monotonously toned photographs. In them, the letters make their appearance one at a time, and in most cases they are white on a black ground. The production of these titles with their letters that merrily cut capers all over the background before they come into their orthographic order is a very simple manœuvre. The separate letters, cut out of cardboard, are laid down to be photographed one at a time as they spell the words. Where they are first made to move about in an amusing manner, they are similarly manipulated on the background under the camera by being pushed about as desired and photographed at each change of position.