#pinscreen my beloved...

[torchturtle]

Woh last month of college is a lot

[canmom]

Annecy photodump 2 - museums

On Sunday, before the festival began, I went to a few of the museums around Annecy! Starting with the Palace de l'Îsle, then on to the Chateau d'Annecy and the Museum of Animated Film!

Probably the most iconic Annecy Building, it is presently a museum to both the building's own history and the industrial history of the town, which flipflopped countries a few times before becoming an industrial centre after the French rev. The Palace itself has been at various points a mint, a courthouse and a prison.

The museum is mostly captioned in both French and English. The industrial history gets a bit dry, but the downstairs section on the history of the building itself is cool.

My ticket got me into the castle too so I went up this absurdly picturesque little path...

...to be rewarded with the town skyline. Probably not quite as the dukes of Savoy saw it.

The castle doesn't tell you a lot about its own history for the most part, but it does have a couple of art galleries.

I saw a version of Peter Brueghel the Elder's Massacre of the Innocents - though apparently there's a whole bunch of different versions and this one might not be the real one? Art history is funky.

Much of the lower floor of the gallery had these big romantic nature paintings. And when I say big these are really fucking big, like very much 'this would be the whole wall if we weren't in a literal castle' big.

One thing that is really interesting to me here is that the panorama with its cylindrical projection seems to actually predate panoramic photography. Although I can't say whether this is strictly a cylindrical projection, the insanely wide aspect ratio seems to suggest it would be.

Here's a closeup, showing how a tree breaks down into individual dabbed brushstrokes which suggest the texture of leaves without getting lost in noisy detail - the 'painterliness' so beloved of shader designers. It's fascinating seeing these paintings up close like this!

I'm fairly sure this kid is a chimneysweep? Unfortunately I managed to frame this photo so the painting gets perfectly bisected by the corner of the glass box. I'm not quite sure the relationship of the sculpture and the painting.

They also have a bunch of furniture from the castle, if you like wooden boxes. They built things well chunky back then.

The upper floor of the castle was devoted to contemporary pieces. I don't seem to have taken many photos of these, but here's a bike wheel with bits of broken glass which look like mountains when a projector shines through them:

Later in the week I would go to the Museum of Animated Film! It's a bit of a walk from the town centre but well worth the trip. They had various 1800s-era gadgets that form the precursors to animated film...

...though sadly in the low light of the museum, not all my photos came out good. It's remarkable how well these devices work though! The narrow 'shutter' created by the slots works perfectly to make the images appear animated rather than spinning around. Also the illustration quality, and even general sense of motion, is remarkably sound! Like honestly they could give today's animators a run for our money!

The rest of the museum had production materials showing the full range of different animation techniques: storyboards, key drawings, cels, backgrounds, stop motion puppets, pinscreens etc. They covered the history of animation pretty damn well - go figure, it's the animation museum in Annecy of all places.

They also had a special exhibit on showing drawings from Regina Pessoa, whose films I saw as part of the Portugese animation block. These are so cool to see up close. I'm still not entirely sure what techniques she used to make this film, its style is unique.

(My main camera didn't do great in here due to the low light, but I'm learning how to control ISO to get that exposure time under control. My phone actually did a lot better.)

One thing I didn't manage to photograph was the intro panels to the museum where they defined animation. After various definitions based around e.g. constructing frame by frame, they eventually resorted to a negative definition - animation is basically any film that isn't live action. It was pretty funny reading them struggle to pin down such a broad but intuitive concept.

Next up: more movie related stuff!