Norman McLaren by Panhia Yang

26Feb10

Norman McLaren was born on April 11th, 1914 in Stirling, Scotland. He was a Canadian resident and was bisexual. He was most well-known for his work from the National Film Board of Canada. Some examples of his work are Neighbours and Pas De Deux. He got into cinematic techniques when he was at the Glasgow School of Arts. He also experimented with synthetic sounds and later made his sound effects by scratching the edges of the film with various markings and the projector would interpret those as sounds. He used people in his animations. McLaren won many awards even international. He died on January 27th 1987.

I think it’s interesting how he merged together human actors into his stop-motion animations. I personally think it’s a bit weird because it just seems to make more sense if you just decide to film it. But his ideas for the people in his films are quite creative and I can see why after watching that it does look better the way it was made. I also liked his use of repetition like in the film Canon. In my opinion, I think it would be difficult to redo steps just like the previous one. It would require lots of time and I would probably give up before the finishing.

Watching McLaren’s work inspires me to find motivation to complete current and future tasks.

Link for short film Neighbours:

· http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5d5_1218242740

Sources: Wikipedia, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Live Leak