Print Magazine Online has a fascinating article about the history of the animation pegbar complied by the very famous animator J.J. Sedelmaier who’s animated many many of your favorite classic cereal commercials as well as the season premiere of Beavis and Butthead. We interviewed Mr. Sedelmaier a few years ago so you can check that out too here, if you like. Anyway if you’re an animation history nut, you won’t want to miss this!
From the article:
The drawing/image registration process is a fundamental aspect of film animation. If the images that are animated don’t have a shared foundation with each other, the movement that’s created by the animator has no common relationship with the background or the viewer’s point of view—it just doesn’t work. It was John Randolph Bray who established and patented the peg system of registration in 1915. For almost a century, folks working in animation production have used paper, pencils, various designs of lightboxes, and pegged drawing discs to do their craft, and within this world of registration there were several standards. In New York there were pegs by Acme (a small round hole with two thin slots on either side), Oxberry (a small center hole with wider slots on either side), Signal Corps (close to Oxberry but closer to three round holes) and Fleischer/Famous/Terrytoons (three round holes). California/Hollywood seemed to hover in the world of Acme, but Disney (which switched over to Acme 20 years ago) had paper that was also punched with two sets of holes—one for the animator and one for the Ink and Paint Department. This allowed for less stress/damage on the holes and thus better registration. It’s only been within the past decade that this conventional process and this sort of equipment has proven to be on its way out.
You can read the entire article here.
