Sand animation

Sand animation is a form of stop motion that manipulates images formed with sand under a camera to create animation. A sand animator will make incremental changes in the sand, taking one frame with each change in order to create a sequence of movement. Sand animation can also refer to a performance in which an artist tells a story through a series of images drawn with their hands in real time using sand, usually projected through a live camera feed and accompanied by music. A sand animator will often use the aid of an overhead projector or lightbox (similar to one used by photographers to view translucent films) to illuminate the sand from behind, manipulating the light coming through the sand to create shading and lines.

History

One of the first documented uses of sand in animation can be seen in the special effects in Lotte Reiniger's film The Adventures of Prince Achmed. While Reiniger is known for her animated silhouette cutouts, she employed Walter Ruttmann on the film to create magical effects with sand and wax underneath her cut-outs.

Using sand as a primary material for animated films was adopted in the 1960s by Swiss animators Gisèle and Nag Ansorge and American animator Caroline Leaf. The Ansorges were running a small commercial film studio near Lausanne, Switzerland and used ground and dyed quartz sand to illustrate the circulating blood in a film about heart disease. They then adopted sand as their primary creative material, premiered their first complete film in the medium “Les corbeaux” (“The Ravens”) in Annecy, 1967, and continued to work with sand until Gisèle's death in 1993.

Caroline Leaf began using sand for animation when she was an undergraduate art student at Harvard University in 1968. She created her first film, ''Sand, or Peter and the Wolf'' (1968), by dumping beach sand on a light box and manipulating the grains to build figures, textures and movement, frame by frame. In the 1970s, Eli Noyes, another Harvard graduate, created the short film ''Sandman'' (1973) and the ''Sand Alphabet'' (1974), which became a feature on the children's educational television program ''Sesame Street''. About the same time Misseri Studio located in Italy produced the A.E.I.O.U. series, which was drawn in wet sand. In 1977, '' The Sand Castle'' by Dutch-Canadian animator Co Hoedeman won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Corrie Francis Parks used colored gels as background elements in the film '' Tracks'' (2003) to introduce vibrant color in what is usually a black and white medium. In 2006, Gert van der Vijver created the series ''De Zandtovenaar'' (''The Sand Magician'') on Dutch national television and since then, animates for the yearly outdoor play '' The Passion''.

Notable artists

* Ferenc Cakó
* Su Dabao
* Svetlana Telbukh
* Co Hoedeman
* Alexandra Konofalskaya
* Caroline Leaf
* Eli Noyes
* Kseniya Simonova
* Ilana Yahav

References

External links

An explanation of how to make animated films with sand animation

Marcos Magalhães' "Animando" at NFB.ca

Caroline Leaf's film ''The Owl Who Married a Goose'' at NFB.ca

Animation techniques
Visual arts media
Performance art
Animation

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