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Alexandre Alexeieff is most famous for inventing pinscreen animation with his wife Claire Parker. You know those neat little pin-art frames you can get? It's like that, times a thousand.



A pinscreen is basically a plain screen filled with thousands of tiny pins. A light is shone from the side, causing each pin to cast it's own shadow, the extent of which depends on how far it's pushed forward. The original pinscreen used by Alexeieff had 240,000 pins, each individually manipualted using specialised tools. Each frame was photographed, and the images were then merged to create an animation. Pretty cool, but also incredibly time-consuming and expensive, and pinscreen animation has since fallen out of fashion.



Alexeiff also illustrated a number of books, and his work in this arena evokes that same shadowy inscrutability that pinscreen animation creates. These are from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe:


 
 
 

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