Claire Parker | |
---|---|
![]() Parker at the pinscreen | |
Born | August 31, 1906 |
Died | October 3, 1981 | (aged 75)
Nationality | American |
Known for | Engineering, Animation |
Spouse |
Alexandre Alexeieff (m. 1940) |
Claire Parker (August 31, 1906 – October 3, 1981) was an American engineer and animator. A graduate of MIT, her best-known contribution to the history of cinema is the Pinscreen (Écran d'épingles), a vertically-mounted grid of between 240,000 and 1 million sliding metal rods that are first manually pushed into position to create lit and shaded areas, then filmed frame by frame.[1] While the hand-operated, mechanical Pinscreen superficially shares characteristics with early optical toys like the zoetrope, it is distinguished by being one of the first devices ever to produce animation by reconfiguring a set of individual picture elements, later called pixels. A model with sufficient pin "resolution" can be used to create a Pinscreen animation of photorealistic images, a painstaking process analogous to modern pixel art.
Parker shared directing credits for her films with her husband and collaborator, Russian animator Alexandre Alexeieff; however, the 1935 French and 1937 U.S. patents on the Pinscreen were made in her name alone.[2][3] Alexeieff and Parker's Pinscreen films include Night on Bald Mountain (1933)[4][5] and The Nose (1963),[6] as well as the opening title sequence for Orson Welles' film The Trial (1962). As of 2012[update], the last known original Pinscreen still being used in animation production is maintained at the National Film Board of Canada's main campus in Montreal.[7] A second screen was constructed and put into production in 2018.[8]