This short film shows how 'Pinscreen' works. Demonstrated by Alexeieff and Parker to a group of animators at the National Film Board of Canada, 1972.
'Pinscreen' Animation makes use of a screen filled with movable pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows. The technique has been used to create animated films with a range of textural effects difficult to achieve with traditional cel animation.
The 'pinscreen' device is a white screen that consists of thousands and thousands of pins in small holes. Light shines from the side of this platform causing each and every single pin to cast its own shadow. Each pin, being able to slide easily back and forth through the holes, can cast different shadows. The white screen becomes darker the farther the pins are pushed out. The more the pins are pushed in, the lighter the screen becomes, giving a grayish tone and eventually an all white screen again. The original 'pinscreen' by Alexeieff had 240,000 pins, this form of animation is extremely time consuming and difficult to execute, rendering it the least popular method of animation.
Several computer programs have been made with the goal of simulating the images generated by a physical 'pinscreen'. One of the advantages of using digital 'pinscreen' animation is the recovery of images. With the traditional 'pinscreen', there as no way to recover a previous image except for creating it all over again with no guarantee of precision, with digital 'pinscreen', the same image can be retrieved and altered without having to recreate.
