Camera Makes Whoopee

This experimental short film by Norman McLaren is a playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the retina of the eye, McLaren engraves pictures on blank film creating vivid, percussive effects.

An experimental film in which both sound and visuals were created entirely by Norman McLaren drawing directly upon the film with ordinary pen and ink. The main title is in eight languages. Rereleased with multilingual titles in 1949.

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

The NFB's 13th Oscar®-nominated film.

In this short film, a chair, animated by Evelyn Lambart, refuses to be sat upon, forcing a young man to perform a sort of dance with the chair. The musical accompaniment is by Ravi Shankar and Chatur Lal. This virtuoso film is the result of a collaboration between Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra.

This short documentary is a film about a film. In 1961, Norman McLaren produced a record of New Yorkers watching his short animation New York Lightboard in action in Times Square. The film within this film was produced as a promotion of travel and tourism in Canada. New York Lightboard Record depicts the reactions—awe, confusion, amusement—of onlookers and passersby.

Two short Norman McLaren films in which animation technique is employed with live actors. In the first, entitled On the Lawn, a male dancer waltzes to synthetic music. The second is a fast march, In the Backyard, accompanied by an old-fashioned calliope.

Norman McLaren a dessiné à la plume, directement sur la pellicule, non seulement les images de ce film, mais aussi les sons. Ce procédé lui a donc permis de se passer de caméra et d'appareil d'enregistrement. Le titre est inscrit en plusieurs langues. (Titres multilingues ajoutés en 1949.)

A film fantasy of dancing music and dancing colour. To "Listen to the Mocking Bird" played by an oldtime fiddler, brilliant patterns ripple, flow, flicker and blend. Norman McLaren, painting on film, translates sound into sight.

In this short animation film, the "boogie" is played by Albert Ammons and the "doodle" is drawn by Norman McLaren. Made without the use of a camera, Boogie-Doodle is a rhythmic, brightly coloured film experiment.

Isle of the Dead, by the nineteenth-century painter Arnold Boecklin, is the subject of this McLaren film experiment. The spectral island wakes to mysterious life, flickers in an ethereal light and fades again into the dark--the whole effect heightened by an interpretive musical score by composer Louis Applebaum. (Award: Salerno.)

In this early film Norman McLaren shot crystal formations through a low-power microscope, using polarized light with the lower part of the picture masked off. The film was then rewound and a scene of dancers was filmed.