South Shields-born animator Sheila Graber takes an amusing look at the history of time and timekeeping, from the dawn of time to the dawn of digital watches, inspired by a jazzed-up Mozart track by Waldo de los Rios. Planets revolve around the sun in the earth’s solar system. Father Time stands on planet earth. Title: Marking Time [over Father Time (Chronos) standing on earth as day turns to night] The moon revolves around earth. Father Time marks off phases of the moon’s single orbit...

South Shields-born animator Sheila Graber takes an amusing look at the history of time and timekeeping, from the dawn of time to the dawn of digital watches, inspired by a jazzed-up Mozart track by Waldo de los Rios. Planets revolve around the sun in the earth’s solar system. Father Time stands on planet earth. Title: Marking Time [over Father Time (Chronos) standing on earth as day turns to night] The moon revolves around earth. Father Time marks off phases of the moon’s single orbit around earth on his scythe and describes a synodic month averaging 30 days. Observing the seasons of a tree he calculates 360 days in a year, carving his figures into the trunk of a tree. Then he crosses out the figure realising it is not correct. Father Time turns to astronomy. He measures the path of a star, until the sun appears over the horizon. He is puzzled. He calculates the path of the star in relation to the sun back from 4251 BC to 4250 BC. Writing on a manuscript, he alights on the answer he thinks is correct: 365 days and a quarter. He creates a sundial and measures the path of the sun to mark time. The sun rises and hides behind a cloud. He marks time on a burning candle. Rain falling douses the flame. He takes a conical flask with measurements to catch the water and an egg timer. He throws away the egg timer and finds a hole in his flask. He hauls a bucket from a well using a winch, but lets it drop as he reaches for his conical flask. Father Time has an idea. He begins to construct a giant mechanism with cogs and interlocking wheels. Swinging from this contraption, he pulls down a cover, a box with the face of a clock. Father Time watches from a ledge above the face of the clock as its hands turn. A mechanical knight appears from a door and hits him with a mallet, but not at the correct time. Father Time sees stars and hits on the idea of a swinging pendulum. A swinging pendulum to regulate the speed of the gears is added to his grandfather’s clock. A tidal wave hits the grandfather clock and Father Time creates a wind-up mantel clock. A fast montage of pendulum clocks and mechanical watch designs through the years follows until quartz crystal and electronics replace the old mechanism, and the watch face is a numeric display: the first analog watch to keep track of hours, minutes, and seconds as well as days, months, and years, and no winding up is required. The sun begets a baby bearing a sash with Einstein’s famous equation: E=mc². The theory of relativity is born and paves the way for the digital age. Credit: Produced by Sheila Graber