Vyacheslav Levandovskiy

Date of Birth:

Feb 24, 1897

Place of Birth:

Odessa, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire [now Ukraine]

Ukrainian and Russian cartoonist and illustrator, one of the founders of Ukrainian animation. Levandovskiy invented and put into production the "automatic pencil" - a device for controlling the frame-by-frame movement of a doll in space. For the first time in Soviet animation, Levandovsky used the so-called "éclair" method, when actors playing human characters are filmed at a normal speed - 24 frames per second, and then the animator, superimposing the captured film frames under his drawings, checks the movement of his animated character in time, of course, making an artistic selection, sharpening the movement. In addition, Levandovsky himself made a movie camera - all parts, except for optics, were made of wood of different species.