Pure Beauty

Pinscreen animation short made for the NFB's "Chants populaires" series of French-Canadian folk songs. En Passant illustrates the song "Et moi je m'enfouiyais."

Arrested for an unnamed crime, Josef K. is trapped in a surreal bureaucratic maze where justice is unknowable and guilt is assumed.

Alexandre Alexeïeff illustrated the song "Et moi je m'enfouiyais" (En passant) using the pinscreen technique. Norman McLaren illustrated "C'est l'aviron" using drawings on a fixed background, with the characters pasted in as they were drawn.

A hat advertisement for Sools by animators Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff.

This retelling of Sleeping Beauty, recreated through stop motion animation, is centered on lithe Prince Charming, who leaps and bounds through our storybook set. Film commissioned by a wine company.

A study in pins of a man who loses his nose which becomes a personality in its own right.

Mussorgsky's composition is the soundtrack for this pin-screen animated take on night and wild things. A scarecrow blows down, clouds move by quickly. Beings take shape; a town appears, animals flee, and a horse gallops by. A child looks on. Monsters run and float by: the phantasmagoric is everywhere. A woman's figure tumbles through space. A clash ensues. The horse falls. Goblins take control. The night and its denizens are relentless. Forms appear and become grotesque. Will dawn and calm ever come?

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.

An abstract animation made for Cocinor.

An animated short film by Alexandre Alexeieff.

Experiments with composite pendulums; study of variations in pendulum measurements resulting from changes in physical parameters such as frequency or the size and shape of the solid objects.

An animation made for Radio Löwe

The Pinscreen is a tool that was created in the 1930s to make animation films. Although it no longer provides any technical advantages, a handful of animation directors still use it. This film explores why it is so important to create something handmade with constraints, in a time when everything is turning towards instantaneous digital technology.

An abstract animation made for Osram.

This documentary is a portrait of the animator of Le Paysagiste, from his childhood in Eastern Quebec to his career at the NFB. Trained at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Drouin became in some ways the heir to Alexandre Alexeïeff when he began working with the Alexeïeff-Parker pinhole screen in 1974. Recounting his relationship with the filmmaker and inventor, coming back with lucidity and precision on the whole of his own filmography, Jacques Drouin delivers here a precious testimony on creation. Enriched with numerous excerpts and unpublished images from the filmmaker's personal archives, Jacques Drouin en relief is both the adventure of a lifetime and a valuable lesson in cinema.