The Brunch Table

Just read today that animator Pedro Lopes is creating a computer simulation of a famous early animation device, Alexeieff and Parker’s Pinscreen. The original was basically a giant version of the little pinscreens you can stick your hand into a at a Spencer’s Gifts (or your local equivalent). You used brushes, sticks, and other tools to coax the pins into position, and then snapped a frame of film.

The pinscreen was too expensive and too complex to be widely adopted, but Alexeieff and Parker produced some amazing work on the device at Canada’s Film Board, including an adaptation of Gogol’s “The Nose” (it’s a pity that there don’t seem to be any stills on the net).

But, as Lopes points out, a much-overlooked value of the machine is that, in the 1930s, it caused its users to start thinking of graphics in terms of pixels. (As far as I can tell, his pinscreen emulator isn’t merely an array of one-bit dots, but a 3D physical simulation, taking into account light sources, shadows, and the inevitable nudging of nearby pins.)

A couple days ago, my stepbrother and I sat down with a vintage Nintendo to appreciate the classics. He’s twenty, five years younger than me, which might explain why he gave up on it before I did–he couldn’t forgive the old games for punishing the player’s mistakes with replay time (go back to the beginning of the level when you die, and begin all over again when you lose).

It occurred to me–that trick, handy for extending the life of a product, was leaning pretty heavily on the games’ late-eighties novelty. What I took as a fact of life, my stepbrother considers as appealing as a malfunctioning VCR. Er, DVD player.