CYCLE OF DRAWINGS TO PRODUCE A SCREEN ANIMATION OF A WAVING FLAG.
Flowing water, waves, and rippling on the surface of a stream, are not difficult matters to animate if the artist keeps in mind that the plainest unelaborated line work gives for these elusive pictorial ingredients the most striking effects on the screen.
It is customary, again, for artistic particulars like these to be made in cycles of three or five drawings. The action for this class of subjects is nearly always quick, and so drawings for the purpose need not be numerous.
A water-splash is a detail of a screen animation rather frequently introduced. Animators have adopted a stereotyped way of rendering it. When it is associated with a falling of some unlucky character into the water, it is very effective from a pictorial and a humorous point of view. The succeeding up-rushing column of water, after the splash, is made in the form of a huge mushroom—rather conventional but extremely comical.
In such a particular as a jet of water, a cycle of drawings is also used. In planning such drawings for animation care must be taken that they give in the combined screen illusion a proper one of falling water. The slightest misplacing of succeeding details representing the jet may give an effect of the water going backward. A funny touch is what is wanted in a humorous picture, but, generally, not of this sort.
CYCLE OF DRAWINGS FOR AN EFFECT OF FALLING WATER.
The drawings are repeated, number 1 following number 3.
Imparting an appearance of rain over a scene is produced by having several celluloids with lines indicating this. They would be used in their order as designed during the photography in the usual way.
Falling snow—that indispensable ingredient of the provincial melodrama—is simply managed by spreading, at haphazard over several celluloids, spots of white pigment. A general tinting, of course, over the underlying pictorial composition would add, by contrast of tone, to the illusion.