Well, fall is here and with it the fall semester at CMU. Once again, the College of Art and Media graciously invited me to teach the History of Animation. This year, I did a number of things differently, foremost among them was starting my revisions in April.
As we've moved the class from a 300-level to a 200-level, there are more freshmen and sophomores taking my class. The rationale was to get this information to potential animation students as early in their academic career as possible--providing them a much larger toolkit of knowledge and skills at a time when it would provide them the most options for projects in their future classes. So a lot of my supporting material is geared towards teaching them about techniques: how Joan Gratz invented claypainting, how the multiplane camera works and its evolution into the CAPS system at Disney, what a "setback" camera setup is. Things of that nature.
To that end, I scoured eBay to find some interesting visual aids for the class, most notably a vintage Magic Lantern (around 100 years old) and a Chromotrope from the 1800's. Am still looking for an affordable phonograph in order to play some of my Edison Amberol cylinders in class. Playing the music on MP3's just doesn't have the same feel to it.
Of course, there was some housekeeping that needed to be done. Years ago, I purchased Moustapha Alassane's DVD so I could show his film Bon Voyage Sim. Downside is that they didn't include subtitles for 'Sim'. So I had the dialog translated into English. Should resolve a lot of those "I don't understand what's going on here" comments.
And as I continue to locate and purchase the highest quality prints of these films to show my students, this year I bought a used Laserdisc player. Showing the Harmon and Ising film Tale of the Vienna Woods has been on my list of things to do. But the only copy I've ever found is on a four disc LaserDisc set. So, before plunking down the cash on the Happy Harmonies LD set, I had to make sure I had something to play it on. Thank you again, eBay.
The class still isn't where I want it yet. Future plans include building working scale models of Max Fleischer's setback camera and Disney's multiplane camera... as well as a working model of Oskar Fischinger's wax-slicing machine... and possibly an easily portable setup whereby I can show a "hologram" projection of Hatsune Miku... but those are projects for a future class.
Best part of starting all this work early is that I now have a little extra time on my hands. So I'm going back and watching some films that are on my 'to do' list, like Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Bambi, Fantasia, some of the Noveltoons and Happy Harmony shorts, and the old Alice Comedies that Walt Disney produced back in Kansas City.
* * *
