Week 2 Blog Post (Dots)

Norman McLaren's Dots is a drawn-on-film. This kind of animation is exactly the way it sounds. The footage seen by viewers are directly drawn on to the films. This means the dots seen in McLaren's Dots were drawn on and then processed. The way McLaren uses this tactic is brilliant and simple. It's almost as if the dots are characters. Each indivivdual dot is characterized with it's own musical note/sound. Some of the dots even transform into stars or splats. As the film goes on the dots get bigger and show more movements, it would twirl around and the melody also escalades and gets faster. The story Dots tells is that, dots are not simple. They can turn into different things and dots can come from different things. It could be a raindrop or the period at the end of a sentence. Dots can produce different tones of music as well. The way McLaren tells this story is almost like a symphany. He took such a simple subject like "Dots" and created a interesting story and art form out of it.