Dots

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d’Atlantis, musique électroacoustique et cinéma archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, first quarter 2012.

In 1941 McLaren continued his experiments with the optical sound technique by modelling the music of Dots. Having no budget to record instrumental music, he undertook, as he had already experimented with for Book Bargain, to “paint the sounds” (tiny lines and shapes) with brush and pen directly onto the soundtrack of the film stock. This allowed him to reconnect with his aspirations as an animation filmmaker, at a time when he dreamed of mastering every phase of the making of the cinematic material.

See Norman McLaren’s documentary Pen Point Percussion (1950) on the technique of painting sound onto film