A closer look
CGI makes everything look flawlessly sterile, but in the 1930s, Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker embraced sheer, bloody-fingered insanity. They invented the pinscreen: a massive board pierced with up to a million sliding pins. By pushing them in and out and lighting them from the side, they created haunting, shadowy animations that looked like breathing charcoal drawings. It took months to produce a few seconds of footage, making it the most masochistic animation technique ever conceived.
