Departures of note

Claire Parker, an MIT-trained engineer, invented the Pinscreen, a vertically mounted grid of between 240,000 and 1 million sliding metal rods that are manually pushed into position to create lit and shaded areas, then filmed frame by frame. The device was one of the first to produce animation by reconfiguring individual picture elements, later called pixels, making it a mechanical precursor to modern pixel art. The 1935 French and 1937 U.S. patents on the Pinscreen were filed in her name alone, even though she shared directing credits on the films made with it.

Parker collaborated with her husband, Russian animator Alexandre Alexeieff, on Pinscreen films including Night on Bald Mountain (1933) and The Nose (1963), as well as the opening title sequence for Orson Welles' film The Trial (1962). The painstaking process required manually pushing each rod into position for every frame, a technique analogous to modern pixel art. As of 2012, the last known original Pinscreen still in production use was maintained at the National Film Board of Canada's main campus in Montreal, and a second screen was constructed and put into production in 2018.