Movies: Paint on film

In this extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and colour, of jazz music played by the Oscar Pe...

Early Abstractions is a collection of seven short animated films created by Harry Everett Smith between 1939 and 1956. Each film is between two and six minutes long, and is named according to the chronological order in which it was made. The collecti...

Lye edited together “swing” versions of the popular Lambeth Walk (including Django Reinhardt on guitar and Stephane Grapelli on violin), combining them with a particularly diverse range of direct film images, scratched as well as painted. He was part...

For Kaleidoscope, which was sponsored by Churchman Cigarettes, Lye animated stenciled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented by cutting out some of the shapes so that the light of the projector hit the screen directly. As in Colour Box Lye...

In 1944 Lye moved to New York City, initially to direct for the documentary newsreel The March of Time. He settled in the West Village, where he mixed with artists who later became the Abstract Expressionists, encouraged New York’s emerging filmmaker...

Tigre is an experimental film with animation applied directly onto film....

This joyful short animation features a dancing hen that transforms into an egg. The film was made without a camera by Norman McLaren, who drew directly onto 35 mm movie stock with ordinary pen and ink. Colour was added optically....

An experiment in pure design by film artists Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart. Lines, ruled directly on film, move with precision and grace against a background of changing colors, in response to music specially composed for the films....

Direct animation on 35mm....

Portrait of a catastrophe, these are times of fire....

Each portrayed painter produced an experimental animated short film to be featured in this film. A short film by Herbert Seggelke....

An intimate look at cinematographic creation, this visual essay shares with us secrets of the legendary Canadian animator Norman Mclaren and his personal view of filmmaking....

Abstract film set to electronic music....

Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented ...

One of Rimmer's early 2000s video works which he made by hand-painting 35mm film, running it on a flatbed viewer, and shooting it off the screen with a video camera to then subject it to further manipulation....

A film about uncanny valleys and the space between. Painted 16mm film undergoes a monstrous transformation becoming neither analog nor digital....

"This is the second film of the Anomalies Cycle. It is a hand Painted and manipulated film. I also used the technique of bleaching and batiking of the film emulsion. The footage was then step printed on a J-K Optical Printer. Although similar in styl...

Handmade, direct animation film using rubber based masking material and colored dye. Rhthmic colored linear patterns of abstract grids move in syncopation to the allegro from the Brandenburg Concerto #3 in G Major by J.S. Back. Inspired by the handma...

Christopher Becks’s Pan of the Landscape uses gorgeous Brakhage-like painting on film to un-Brakhage-like ends: spectacular skies combine with the slow, mechanical movement of a silhouetted form to produce a biting melancholy, as if Becks is mourning...

"Leiberg embarks on a search for the interaction between painting and improvised music, tinkering with sound collages sets language and sounds against each other (...) Leiberg works with real-movie sequences and uses his pictorial color and form voca...