Lynn Smith

It's one drawing after another. I can't go back and correct them. - Lynn Smith

(December 30, 1994, St. Paul, MN) - A half-hour visit with animator Lynn Smith reveals the frustrating truth about her method. Smith's "straight-ahead" style means she's working without a net: "When you work directly under the camera," she says, "if you do make a mistake, you have to sometimes start all over at the beginning." Smith and her work are the focus of METHOD, the fourth and final program in the Independent Television Service series ANIMATED WOMEN, now available for public television broadcast.

In Program Four of ANIMATED WOMEN, the filmmakers catch Lynn Smith both at work in her home studio and in a sleek 1950s diner that, like Smith herself, used to reside in Boston but relocated to Montreal. The vintage diner evokes the setting of her animated story-collage Pearl's Diner (1993).

A sad country song comes on the jukebox of an old-fashioned '50s diner. The usuals - a drunk in the booth by the door, truckers at the counter - coax their favorite waitress, Pearl, to pour them another hot cup of coffee. But everything in this diner, from the tiles on the floor to the nose on a character's face to the coffee pot in Pearl's hand, is cut from an old magazine and pieced together.

The idea for the film was originally suggested by a chance meeting with a waitress friend of a friend, who mentioned that she thought two people were using her restaurant as a romantic rendezvous. That offhand comment overheard in 1972 sparked Smith's amazing animated artwork, composed of thousands of paper cutouts - one of her few works for and about adults.

Producer Patty Wineapple has tried to suggest the scope of Smith's intricate process. "Lynn has magazines from the year one," Wineapple says. "She has a huge filing system, and she cuts out features of faces, and she cuts out skin tones, different kinds of objects."

"I love the collage stuff," says Smith, "because it has all the gradations of color, and all sorts of intricacies I couldn't bother to make. It's all there." For her work-in-progress featured in the program, though, Smith relies on a totally different, deceptively simple methodology. To illustrate the children's poem in SANDBURG'S ARITHMETIC, she draws in gradations and intricacies with what she calls "high-class crayons" on acetate. The medium has "a nice feel to it. I can scrape it away or rub it away with a tissue or my finger, depending on how thick it is."

Like Pearl's Diner, SANDBURG'S ARITHMETIC (1994) took a while to come to fruition. (Smith describes herself as "a plodder.") Her interest in Carl Sandburg's poetry goes back nearly 35 years. When she was a teenager, she wrote to the poet and asked his permission to make a children's book of "Arithmetic," a poem that gently reminds children that numbers are all around them, essential and alive. Smith enclosed sample drawings. Sandburg wrote back with his enthusiastic approval.

But Sandburg died before Smith's book could reach completion. She felt disappointed, but never forgot their correspondence. Years later, as a professional animator, she returned to the poem and decided to make Sandburg himself a character in an animated film version.

"You actually see him at the beginning of the film in his little studio in Flat Rock, North Carolina," she says. "I did a lot of drawings and tests and tried to figure out a drawn character that would work for him - very old with white, white hair. When I wrote to him, that was about the age that he was."

Smith was very excited to discover that the poet had left a recording of himself reading "Arithmetic." "When I heard his reading," she says, "well, you could have scraped me off the ceiling, it was so beautiful and musical. It's almost like he's singing the lines."

Although all the ANIMATED WOMEN use different styles, series director Sybil DelGaudio and series producer Wineapple decided to focus on method in Lynn Smith's piece because the methods she's used in her work have varied widely from cutouts to something as different as drawing under the camera, where, says DelGaudio, "it's about drawing and erasing, drawing and erasing the image."

"Let's say it's a bird," the director explains. "She has to draw the bird, then erase what she's drawn while she redraws the bird in a slightly different position. So what happens - and this is one of the reasons her work takes so long - is that the artwork really disappears."

The technique of cel animation, what you might see in a Disney movie, for example, would permit changes, but Smith, like other animators profiled in the series, claims she doesn't care for the flat look of standard cels. "I just like the look of the crayon animation under the camera," she says. "It has a kind of an extra life.

"There's a kind of energy, a positive feeling about certain things that are happening in life, and I want to capture that," she says.

ANIMATED WOMEN is a three-part public television series produced by Side-Kicks Productions (Patty Wineapple, producer; Sybil DelGaudio, director) for the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Review Tapes, Photographs, and Interview Opportunities are Available. Contact ITVS