Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

McLaren is talking about film the way a musician talks about chords: not as a story-delivery device, but as an instrument you can play directly. The phrase "same bit of film" is the tell. He is insisting on the materiality of cinema, the strip as a physical surface that can be marked, layered, and overworked until it starts behaving like fabric or percussion. "Drawing or exposing" collapses two regimes of image-making - animation and photography - and treats them as equally malleable gestures. That collapse is his quiet rebellion against the idea that film must obediently record the world.

The key word is "patterns". Patterns imply repetition, rhythm, and structure; they also imply abstraction, a move away from character and plot toward sensation. When McLaren says "two or more", he's pointing to the creative payoff of interference: overlay creates not just addition but interaction, the visual equivalent of syncopation. Harmony here isn't prettiness; it's alignment across layers, the moment when separate systems lock into a shared pulse. "Textual effects" is a slyly expansive phrase, hinting at texture, yes, but also at text-as-writing: film as a surface that can be inscribed, scratched, and authored frame by frame.

Context matters: working in the mid-century experimental tradition (and inside institutions like the NFB), McLaren helped legitimize non-narrative animation as serious cinema. This line reads like a craft note, but it's really a manifesto for handmade modernism - an argument that new feelings can be engineered out of old machinery by treating the medium itself as the subject.