AnimatekoPRO will begin with lectures by Pierre-Luc Granjon and Michele Lemiux and a round table discussion dedicated to this year’s pinscreen retrospective, at which the curators of this year’s retrospective, Jean-Baptiste Garnerro and Sophie Le Tetour, will talk about the interesting aspects and methods of working with this technique.

 

Masterclass Pierre-Luc Granjon

10:00, Old Power Station

Pierre-Luc Granjon was born in France in 1973. He studied at the Applied Art School of Lyon. In 1998, he began his career in animation in the studio Folimage, as a character designer and animator for the television series Hilltop Hospital. During this time, he made his first two stop-motion films, A Little Adventure (2001) and The Other Kids’ Castle (2003) followed by two cutout paper films The Child with No Mouth (2004), and The White Wolf (2006). With Antoine Lanciaux, Granjon has also directed and written four 26-minutes puppet films. He went on to make short animations in various techniques, including The Dog (2018), and The Night Boots (2024) made on an Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen. The latter has been awarded at many festivals, including Animateka 2024 and Annecy 2025.

 

Masterclass Michèle Lemieux

11:30, Old Power Station

Michèle Lemieux is an illustrator and animation filmmaker who has taught drawing and illustration at UQAM’s School of Design for over 30 years. Since the late 1970s, she’s worked on 15 illustrated books for young people, including Stormy Night (1997), which was adapted to the screen in 2003 at the NFB. In 2006, Lemieux was introduced to the Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen during a workshop given by Jacques Drouin at the NFB. She was to become the artistic heir to this unique animation tool—there are only two in operation in the world today. She has made two short films using the pinscreen: Here and the Great Elsewhere (2012), which won a number of awards, and, most recently, The Painting (2024).

Lemieux has participated in group exhibitions in Europe, North America, South America and Japan, and her work has received retrospectives in France, Austria and Canada.

 

Panel: On this year’s retrospective – Pins and Screens

13:00, Old Power Station

Join us for a panel discussion on this year’s retrospective, where its curators Jean-Baptiste Garnero and Sophie Le Tetour (CNC) delve into the history, fun facts, and methods of pinscreen animation with the attending filmmakers.

A pinscreen is a white screen filled with thousands of pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows. The further the pins protrude, the darker the screen becomes. The technique is extremely labour intensive but enables a rich graphic image. Alexandre Alexeïeff (19011982) and his wife Claire Parker (1906-1981) are the pioneers of the pinscreen. They invented it in the 1930s with the aim of recreating the velvety blacks of mezzotint engraving in the medium of animation. The pinscreen contains thousands of movable pins embedded in a frame, which can be pushed or pulled back usi ng various tools to create relief designs. With precisely designed lighting, these images blossom in a rich array of grey tones which, when photographed frame by frame, produce animated works that are unique to the medium.

The retrospective brings together (nearly) all films made in this animation technique to date. Complementing this wealth of cinema are some of the key documentaries that introduce the pioneers and shed light on the history of this inspiring form of animation. Special thanks go to Jean-Baptiste Garnero and Sophie Le Tétour of CNC, France for their assistance in putting this programme together.

 

News