Thursday 19 December 2019

Christmas Cracker

Here’s an Oscar nominee and a seven-award winner at the 1964 San Francisco International Film Festival, courtesy of the National Film Board.

“Christmas Cracker” was co-directed by Norman McLaren, Gerald Potterton, Grant Munro and Jeff Hale. The NFB site tells us:

This short animation consists of three segments that take a playful look at Christmas: a rendition of "Jingle Bells" in which paper cut-out figures dance, a dime-store rodeo of tin toys, and a story of decorating the perfect Christmas tree. This holiday film received many awards and an Oscar nomination.

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3 comments:

  1. M. Mitchell Marmel20 December 2019 at 01:54

    Interesting. How did they generate 8-bit sounds in 1964?

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    1. Yowp21 December 2019 at 04:39

      I'm not up on synthesizer history, but there must have been enough electronic experiments by then to do it. Certainly Raymond Scott was working with synth sounds in the early '60s.

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    2. Toadette-IAD21 December 2019 at 13:35

      Those synthetic sounds are actually graphical sound, which Norman McLaren created by drawing patterns directly on the film's soundtrack. He used the technique in several other films of his (including the Oscar-winning Neighbours), and demonstrated how it worked in a 1951 documentary short: https://www.nfb.ca/film/pen_point_percussion/

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