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Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

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Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#51

Post by mseebach »

fermienrico wrote: post #5

Old instructional videos so much more informative than today’s. They’re so simple. Clear narration, simple animations, music is appropriate and minimal. They don’t overload our senses in the way modern videography does. It seems to me that everything today is optimized for the highest cognitive load - sort of similar to the “loudness war” in music, but for videos. Popular videos on YT are optimized for clicks and lik…

I wonder how much of this is due to a significant understanding of the underlying principles, that simply weren't present at the time? Today, especially in this community, we have an almost intuitive understanding of layers and parallax etc. My first thought on seeing the title was "uhh, mechanical parallax, neat!" and I was actually a bit disappointed that the machine could be "programmed" to move the planes automatically. This device can not have felt obvious to many people, at all, in 1957.

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#52

Post by drawkbox »

bwang29 wrote: post #3

I can't imagine how painstaking it is to do every frame through the panning camera backdrop, and the amount of work gone through the planning phase. It definitely seems like Disney invented interesting technologies back then.

If you think about it this came about through laziness and to lower budgets, same deal with great programmers, programmers shouldn't want to do repetitive lazy work but innovate it away. Tedious work becomes a pain on time and budgets, so you innovate to do it faster/better.

Animators didn't want to draw all the backgrounds slightly moving and this allowed re-use and new innovations to make movies faster. This allowed animators to focus on the character cels and making characters look better, the main focus.

The multiplane camera with movable layers for parallaxing directly led to some of the best early Disney movies (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and The Jungle Book) and helped their budget as well as made them look better. Plus at the time, it was actually an improvement that animators welcomed to speed up their tedious work.

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#53

Post by pcwalton »

madethemcry wrote: post #6

I can only imagine how much work is put into modern 3D animated movies and that it's far from being easy or quick to produce. On the other side, if I look at the creation process of hand-drawn animation movies and the involved physical man labour, which is so vastly different from labour in front of a computer, that makes it so much more worthy as a memory than any modern animation movie. Or is this simple nostalgia…

It's definitely a lot more labor-intensive, and expensive, to do traditional 2D animation than 3D animation. Cost savings drove the industry switch to 3D as much as anything else.

I mean, think about the time and effort needed to physically paint every cel, just to name one of many labor-intensive processes.

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#54

Post by jadell »

grkvlt wrote: post #43
olavk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair this clip is produced by the Disney studios, master storytellers at the height of their craft. The Mickey Mouse animation seems to have been produced specifically for this clip, and hand-drawn cell animation is very labor intensive, even if it seems simple. Just realize that every frame has been drawn on paper, inked on celluloid and painted by hand. In short, this clip has been very expensive to produce.…

Although the voice acting is terrible - the engineers speaking about what they are doing are incredibly stilted and unnatural: "Yes Bob. I was moving it the. Wrong way. I am moving it. In the correct direction. Now. Bob. Thank you."

Probably because they're engineers and not actors. It's actually very difficult to read scripted lines in a natural sounding way, especially if it's phrased in a way you wouldn't normally speak.

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#55

Post by Aloha »

drawkbox wrote: post #50
samastur wrote: post #15

Camera itself was actually invented by Lotte Reiniger and then improved (and patented) by Disney. Source (and more about Lotte Reiniger): https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/the-animation-genius-youve-...

That was the predecessor not the multiplane aspect of it with moving layers, definitely inspired it. Lotte mostly just used it to swap out colored backgrounds on her silhouette cel style to adjust placement and color. A predecessor to the multiplane camera was used by Lotte Reiniger for her animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Berthold Bartosch, who worked with Reiniger, used a similar setup in hi…

You said what I came here to say - "this really should be called Ub Iwerks' multiplane camera"

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#56

Post by chaostheory »

samastur wrote: post #15

Camera itself was actually invented by Lotte Reiniger and then improved (and patented) by Disney. Source (and more about Lotte Reiniger): https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/the-animation-genius-youve-...

Credit actually goes to either Ub Iwerks or Max Fleischer

https://www.theymadethat.com/things/ep2/multiplane-camera

Lotte's innovation was a predecessor: https://www.theymadethat.com/things/nj9/multiplane-silhouett...

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#57

Post by egypturnash »

majewsky wrote: post #37
patsplat wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple matter of hand painting hundreds of frames of Mickey Mouse for a throw away illustration

Possibly thousands. With 25 fps, a thousand frames is just 40 seconds worth of film, and the Mickey sequence was longer than that.

Less than you think.

Film is 24fps, not 25. You generally shoot everything “on twos”, which is to say that you expose a single drawing twice, for an effective frame rate of 12fps.

There are places you go on ones. Fast motions, motions that need to be ultra-smooth. Ideally you also shoot pans on ones, and the walk cycles you use on top of pans are drawn to match. But you can get away with doing them on twos.

If you watch the sequence you can also see several places where Mickey is performing the same action over and over. When he’s walking to the side it’s the same eight or sixteen drawings shot in a loop. When he’s standing there’s twirling his tail, that’s its own set of repeated drawings. The part where Mickey turns and walks off into the distance might be another couple of 8-drawing cycles that were photomechanically scaled up and down, then manually inked and painted.

It is also quite possible that only part of this sequence was done to match up with Walt’s narration; easy enough to start with parts made for a short. Even without that there’s realistically only about 10s of unique drawings here, if you shot them one after another on twos.

You can get by with less drawings, too. My experience is that 10fps is as low as you can go and still have the capability of smoothish motion. You can go lower; Asian animation typically uses a LOT fewer drawings for most of a show than the high-frame-rate work of a 50s Disney piece. And then you get one sequence where they blow the budget, with complex characters (who require like 4x the work to draw a single frame compared to Mickey) moving around.

(I used to work in animation.)

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#58

Post by egypturnash »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #4
bwang29 wrote: post #3

I can't imagine how painstaking it is to do every frame through the panning camera backdrop, and the amount of work gone through the planning phase. It definitely seems like Disney invented interesting technologies back then.

Nerd me wants to yell, "Walt, drive all the planes with stepper motors and you can record/playback sequences from a computer!" Or better still, "Digitize all the artwork for each plane and composite them in a computer!" Seriously though, it is amazing what patience and ingenuity can accomplish.

Nerd you should look into what computers were like in the nineteen-fifties. But nerd you will be pleased to know that people started doing both of these things as soon as possible; modern 2D animation tools let you have as many planes as you want, and work with both assets drawn in the physical world and ones drawn directly into the computer.

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#59

Post by replicatorblog »

robbiet480 wrote: post #2

If you are interested in this or anything Walt Disney, I _strongly_ recommend visiting the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio of San Francisco ( https://waltdisney.org/ ). It even has an original MultiPlane camera in the gift shop! I also recommend taking the Walk In Walt's Disneyland Footsteps ( https://disneyland.disney.go.com/events-tours/disneyland/wal... ) guided tour at Disneyland which I just did this w…

If you live in SF and are interested in the history of entrepreneurship, definitely get out to the Presidio and tour the museum.

Even if you're not a Disney fan, it tells the story of an entrepreneur in one of the most dynamic ways imaginable, from a faux recreation of his boyhood living room in Marceline, MS to his apex as creator of a global brand.

There is a cinematic feel to the design of the museum itself. Highly recommend!

Re: Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]

#60

Post by flyingcircus3 »

varjag wrote: post #26
flyingcircus3 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a second order to this effect, I've noticed a general "clumping", so to speak, of timeless machines and designs in general, that seem to originate in the late 1940s, and the 1950s, likely due to the unprecedented rise in the United States overall fortunes, after WWII. It's almost like John Kennedy "tricked" us to thinking that he initiated the US involvement in the space race, instead of the natural IP transfer th…

Aside from space programme which descended from V-2 on both sides, can't think where the U.S. advancements were based on German ones. The effects of Operation Paperclip were limited and didn't leave a lasting impact otherwise. In fact the victory achieved over Third Reich was based in massive industrial superiority.

Start with the Manhattan project, and work backwards from there. Operation Paperclip may have been a failure, but that was after the war. Any modern electrical engineer's professional lexicon is dripping with the names of the titans of our field. I assume the same is true for physicists, because we electrical engineers stand on the shoulders of physicists every day.

But don't take my word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...

This article describes the letter that Leo Szilard wrote to Albert Einstein, in 1937, which Einstein essentially put his existing scientific prowess behind as an appeal to expertise, and forwarded it on to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In it, he enumerates some of the latest discoveries Enrico Fermi has been finding in Uranium. The letter simply supposes that if these scientists in the US are discovering the possibility to induce a chain reaction in Uranium, it is a safe bet to assume that the Germans were "peer reviewing", if you will. Another factor Einstein lays out is all of the known key Uranium deposits around the world: Czechoslovakia and The Congo, among others.

Einstein/Szilard have the foresight to deduce that the Germans stopping all public sales of Uranium in Czechoslovakia, along with the very short human network from those Czechoslovakian Uranium mines to the German leadership, is extremely compelling circumstantial evidence that Germany has already started their Manhattan Project, and have all the benefits of incumbency behind them.

How did the US close the loop faster than the Germans? We hired Hungarian refugees fleeing Europe, who ran absolute circles around the rest of the known universe in Mathematics. Any modern student of mathematics can easily recite their names:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside...

And then in its usual cosmic sense of humor, the universe brought Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem back around the eternal golden braid, and brought us the Cold War.

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