You can go see one in person, it sticks through the floor of the Disney Family Museum in the Presidio. There is lots of animation history in that building. If you just wanna see the camera the top part pokes into the gift shop which you don't need admission to go into
Huge recommendation for the Disney Family Museum! It greatly exceeded my expectations, and there’s a lot of focus on Disneys innovations during Walt’s lifetime.
I rode past the museum on a hop on/off bus tour during my first trip to San Francisco, and being a Disney Adult, went back to my hotel and looked up, prioritizing a trip before I left. I was blown away, and have made sure to go back every time I'm in the Bay Area. Highly recommended if you're remotely interested in how Disney went from two brothers to the empire it is today, and special mention if you dig behind the scenes stuff.
...and it's a hunk of steel that must weigh a few tons and is built to withstand an extinction-level disaster. I mean, even for the '30s, it seemed a little bit excessive. I understand it had to be somewhat heavy for stability and all, but I suspect it could have been made more lightweight.
> I suspect it could have been made more lightweight.
Perfection is the enemy of done.
Those are the kind of improvements that happen when many items are made. I suspect Disney only made a few, and thus what was more important was creating a working multiplane camera than lowering its weight.
I also suspect that the weight added a lot of stability which prevented shaking between frames.
It's worth pointing out that Walt was one of the inventors of this camera, as well as all his other roles in making the company's art. Concepts we have today like Photoshop layers and CSS stacking contexts are direct descendants of this invention.
At the point in time the Walt Disney Company patented the multiplane camera, Walt had long since stopped getting his hands dirty with drawing or technology.
The first incarnation: Lottie Reininger/Carl Koch, 1926. Lottie's "Adventures of Prince Achmed" from the same year is the oldest known surviving animated feature, and can be watched in its entirety on Wikipedia.
Other people fooled around with the idea but there's nothing wiki-notable.
1933: while estranged from Disney (it's a long saga), Walt's former star animator and Mickey co-creator Ub Iwerks built a more advanced one.
1934: the ever-inventive Fleischer studios (inventors of the process of 'rotoscoping', where animators trace over live action) took a very different approach to the problem of creating a sense of depth in animation and built their bugfuck insane Stereoptical Camera, which put miniature sets on a turntable, with a place to put animation cels (which, tangentially, were invented back in 1914 at Bray Studios).
1937: Disney's studio put together a seven-layer multiplane camera for Snow White. Walt's name went on the patent.
(When I was a kid dreaming of being in the animation industry in the seventies, Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic was the canonical history of the entire medium, if you're curious about the minutae of long-vanished studios. It's a lot easier to actually see any old piece of animation that you're curious about than it was back then.)
This is a periodic reminder that all innovations happen in iterations. Walt could be credited as a curator of talented production and investor in the mission.
These are definitely techniques that you take for granted, even moreso now with computer animation. I definitely am impressed now when I see scenes like the opening of Sleeping Beauty as the camera zooms in on the inside of the castle. My wife and kids get confused at this point as to what I'm making such a big deal about.
Speaking of techniques-- I remember that Disney's Snow White being a kind of pastiche of different art styles and physics. The Fleischer Snow White, too, with the rotoscoping of Cab Calloway vs. all the bouncy, stretchy characters (all of which IIRC was done by a single animator). All based on practical constraints, I'm sure, but audiences enjoyed it and it's a valid and striking style.
Does anyone still mix clashing styles/physics this way in modern animation? My superficial impression is that if a modern character has a gag where, say, its foot elongates to kick an opponent, it has to be part of a foot-elongating species of animal inside, complete with a 10-page backstory, who lives in a fully worked out Elongation Universe that has its own gaming physics engine and subreddit.
Horton Hears a Who (2008) does a really fun job combining different animation styles to get different effects. It works well in the silly Seuss universe.
> Does anyone still mix clashing styles/physics this way in modern animation
The Spiderverse movies have characters with clashing styles and frame rates sharing the screen, but perhaps it fails your second test because they come from different in-story universes. The design, art direction and animation are great, both movies are a visual feast
I wonder when and why they stopped making films like these. I've been enjoying watching Behind the Attraction and The Imagineering Story on Disney+ with my kids. They are full of these old films of Walt going over their ideas and explaining the things they are and have built. It's a shame that stopped.
Some technologies have been lost, even though they were superior to what is available today. Take, for example, the old “green/blue screen” technique using sodium vapor lamps, used by Walt Disney in film production in the pre-digital era: https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk (12 minutes long, but totally worth it).
The video also highlights how finicky that technique is to work with. Especially when working on film, where you have to wait for the developed dailies to check the quality of the work, any reliability issues with the effects processes compound enormously. Re-shooting scenes days later because the camera or lighting was subtly inadequate is expensive.
They're very neat but if you think about why they were ever made at all its a bit more clear. I think a lot of these are 30s-50s style infomercials. One of my favorites explains how a differential works[1] but its more clearly a Chrysler commercial. Presumably this Disney clip was entertaining enough to have been part of a tv show but could have also been some promotional material.
These days we only get this stuff in recruiting material or SAAS ads.
It’s in Walt Disney Presents at Hollywood Studios. There is a bunch more Disney models and memorabilia inside as well. Feels like a hidden gem because it’s always pretty empty, plus there is even a character meet and greet with little wait.
I feel like movies in the past were so much more technically amazing. I mean, sure they look a hundred times more amazing now, but the amount of human physical effort involved (as opposed to ‘butts in seats’) was immense.
they were but also so are current ones, it's just invisible due to layers of techniques and technologies added over time.
Maybe a good analogy would be microcomputers and home computers of 80's and 90's compared to a modern phone. Latter is absolutely miles ahead in everything but it's standing on giant stacks of work and on the face of it it's a commodity vs maybe what we had before where more artisan approach was needed throughout to get something great out of it.
I never grew up with Disney as a big part of my life so it wasn’t until later that I learned about Walt, and all the folks related to the work at Disney and some of the amazing things they did.
I really didn’t know of all the cool technology and etc they made.
Highly recommend reading through some of the old “E” ticket magazines. There’s some excellent pieces from some of the original masterminds at Disney. There’s creativity they had especially back then was unmatched IMO.
Wow! Incredibly fascinated to see 1957 tech make such fascinating animations! It’s so time consuming. Imagine the patience to take those pictures frame by frame
I'm not a VFX person but that's mind-bendingly amazing. I really love their talk about needing high quality training date near the end of the video. AI is only as good as the data used to train the model.
Good stuff. Back in the day technical innovation and risk taking was an integral part of Disney... I miss those days. How far the house of mouse has fallen.
Sponsoring a paper or two a year at ETH Zurich is not really the same thing as technical innovation and risk taking being an integral part of their company's success.
I don't understand the distinction. Disney Research is inventing new filmmaking and robotics tech, in much the same way as is shown in the post. Why does collaborating with a university negate it.
It’s hard to take someone like you seriously when you look at that page and single out a set of the work, which requires you to ignore the papers that include or are mostly Disney researchers.
I highly enjoy watching these old instructional documentaries even if the tech is obsolete by now. There’s something that makes old tech a lot more graspable as a concept even if you’re not familiar with the technology.
I have mixed feelings because they're charming, but there was only a minute of actual content in there, and it didn't mention complexities like how shots were planned, painting the layers was coordinated, and getting the right focus with the camera.
It's not really obsolete, animation studios (and especially indie) still use the same things. There are those who only use modern tools and digital (which is mostly drawn frame-by-frame as well), but it's more like it's split by the technique used. Watch animation shorts from oscar, there are lots of them that use old stuff.
It's not really a genre, per se. This sort of comes from Opera, and was generally referred to as Incidental Music. Music written specifically to accompany the action on screen or stage. You don't really see albums or collections, because it doesn't generally make sense without the visual context.
It is much easier to get a bunch of stuff precisely arranged and uniformly lit when it is lying flat. Especially if you flatten it out by placing a sheet of glass over it.
With everything standing up on end you're constantly fighting gravity and air currents, as well as problems like background art painted using water-based media that makes the paper it's on want to wrinkle. Much easier to just squish it all flat with gravity's help.
You can go see one in person, it sticks through the floor of the Disney Family Museum in the Presidio. There is lots of animation history in that building. If you just wanna see the camera the top part pokes into the gift shop which you don't need admission to go into
Huge recommendation for the Disney Family Museum! It greatly exceeded my expectations, and there’s a lot of focus on Disneys innovations during Walt’s lifetime.
I rode past the museum on a hop on/off bus tour during my first trip to San Francisco, and being a Disney Adult, went back to my hotel and looked up, prioritizing a trip before I left. I was blown away, and have made sure to go back every time I'm in the Bay Area. Highly recommended if you're remotely interested in how Disney went from two brothers to the empire it is today, and special mention if you dig behind the scenes stuff.
...and it's a hunk of steel that must weigh a few tons and is built to withstand an extinction-level disaster. I mean, even for the '30s, it seemed a little bit excessive. I understand it had to be somewhat heavy for stability and all, but I suspect it could have been made more lightweight.
> I suspect it could have been made more lightweight.
Perfection is the enemy of done.
Those are the kind of improvements that happen when many items are made. I suspect Disney only made a few, and thus what was more important was creating a working multiplane camera than lowering its weight.
I also suspect that the weight added a lot of stability which prevented shaking between frames.
It could have been made bigger too. Who cares?
It's worth pointing out that Walt was one of the inventors of this camera, as well as all his other roles in making the company's art. Concepts we have today like Photoshop layers and CSS stacking contexts are direct descendants of this invention.
At the point in time the Walt Disney Company patented the multiplane camera, Walt had long since stopped getting his hands dirty with drawing or technology.
Wikipedia's page on the multiplane camera is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera
The first incarnation: Lottie Reininger/Carl Koch, 1926. Lottie's "Adventures of Prince Achmed" from the same year is the oldest known surviving animated feature, and can be watched in its entirety on Wikipedia.
Other people fooled around with the idea but there's nothing wiki-notable.
1933: while estranged from Disney (it's a long saga), Walt's former star animator and Mickey co-creator Ub Iwerks built a more advanced one.
1934: the ever-inventive Fleischer studios (inventors of the process of 'rotoscoping', where animators trace over live action) took a very different approach to the problem of creating a sense of depth in animation and built their bugfuck insane Stereoptical Camera, which put miniature sets on a turntable, with a place to put animation cels (which, tangentially, were invented back in 1914 at Bray Studios).
1937: Disney's studio put together a seven-layer multiplane camera for Snow White. Walt's name went on the patent.
(When I was a kid dreaming of being in the animation industry in the seventies, Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic was the canonical history of the entire medium, if you're curious about the minutae of long-vanished studios. It's a lot easier to actually see any old piece of animation that you're curious about than it was back then.)
Disney didn’t invent this technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera#History
And there were various predecessors like for example tunnel books: https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/tunnel-books-art-histor...
If the Wikipedia page[0] is correct, he's more of a refiner than the inventor, no?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera
Walt is the named inventor on the patent[0]. I verified this by asking ChatGPT to do some research[1].
[0] https://patentyogi.com/celebrity-patents/celebrity-patent-wa...
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67cf2195-10dc-8011-bc6b-2ee90bdb0a...
> Walt is the named inventor on the patent
There are countless patents that should never have been granted because prior art existed. This isn't a slam-dunk piece of evidence.
This is a periodic reminder that all innovations happen in iterations. Walt could be credited as a curator of talented production and investor in the mission.
These are definitely techniques that you take for granted, even moreso now with computer animation. I definitely am impressed now when I see scenes like the opening of Sleeping Beauty as the camera zooms in on the inside of the castle. My wife and kids get confused at this point as to what I'm making such a big deal about.
Speaking of techniques-- I remember that Disney's Snow White being a kind of pastiche of different art styles and physics. The Fleischer Snow White, too, with the rotoscoping of Cab Calloway vs. all the bouncy, stretchy characters (all of which IIRC was done by a single animator). All based on practical constraints, I'm sure, but audiences enjoyed it and it's a valid and striking style.
Does anyone still mix clashing styles/physics this way in modern animation? My superficial impression is that if a modern character has a gag where, say, its foot elongates to kick an opponent, it has to be part of a foot-elongating species of animal inside, complete with a 10-page backstory, who lives in a fully worked out Elongation Universe that has its own gaming physics engine and subreddit.
Horton Hears a Who (2008) does a really fun job combining different animation styles to get different effects. It works well in the silly Seuss universe.
Thanks, I'll check that one out.
> Does anyone still mix clashing styles/physics this way in modern animation
The Spiderverse movies have characters with clashing styles and frame rates sharing the screen, but perhaps it fails your second test because they come from different in-story universes. The design, art direction and animation are great, both movies are a visual feast
Previous discussions:
01-jun-2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605831 1 comments
25-feb-2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633366 1 comments
22-apr-2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550779 21 comments
06-apr-2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16768953 62 comments
I wonder when and why they stopped making films like these. I've been enjoying watching Behind the Attraction and The Imagineering Story on Disney+ with my kids. They are full of these old films of Walt going over their ideas and explaining the things they are and have built. It's a shame that stopped.
Some technologies have been lost, even though they were superior to what is available today. Take, for example, the old “green/blue screen” technique using sodium vapor lamps, used by Walt Disney in film production in the pre-digital era: https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk (12 minutes long, but totally worth it).
The video also highlights how finicky that technique is to work with. Especially when working on film, where you have to wait for the developed dailies to check the quality of the work, any reliability issues with the effects processes compound enormously. Re-shooting scenes days later because the camera or lighting was subtly inadequate is expensive.
This video was fascinating!
They're very neat but if you think about why they were ever made at all its a bit more clear. I think a lot of these are 30s-50s style infomercials. One of my favorites explains how a differential works[1] but its more clearly a Chrysler commercial. Presumably this Disney clip was entertaining enough to have been part of a tv show but could have also been some promotional material.
These days we only get this stuff in recruiting material or SAAS ads.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
You can see one of these multiplane cameras on display at the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio of San Francisco.
There is also a display of one in Orlando, I believe at Magic Kindgom.
It’s in Walt Disney Presents at Hollywood Studios. There is a bunch more Disney models and memorabilia inside as well. Feels like a hidden gem because it’s always pretty empty, plus there is even a character meet and greet with little wait.
From watching, it seems this was a clip of a larger presentation. I spent some time trying to find a longer version but had no luck.
Anyone perhaps know what this was from?
Could have been part of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_anthology_television_se...
There must be tons of stuff locked in the Disney vaults to never surface again.
Check out this comment on the YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIR39KeJMk&lc=Ugx8HYRxBkUrP...
I feel like movies in the past were so much more technically amazing. I mean, sure they look a hundred times more amazing now, but the amount of human physical effort involved (as opposed to ‘butts in seats’) was immense.
they were but also so are current ones, it's just invisible due to layers of techniques and technologies added over time.
Maybe a good analogy would be microcomputers and home computers of 80's and 90's compared to a modern phone. Latter is absolutely miles ahead in everything but it's standing on giant stacks of work and on the face of it it's a commodity vs maybe what we had before where more artisan approach was needed throughout to get something great out of it.
I never grew up with Disney as a big part of my life so it wasn’t until later that I learned about Walt, and all the folks related to the work at Disney and some of the amazing things they did.
I really didn’t know of all the cool technology and etc they made.
Highly recommend reading through some of the old “E” ticket magazines. There’s some excellent pieces from some of the original masterminds at Disney. There’s creativity they had especially back then was unmatched IMO.
What's old is new again!
https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepview/compLFMPI/
Wow! Incredibly fascinated to see 1957 tech make such fascinating animations! It’s so time consuming. Imagine the patience to take those pictures frame by frame
I hope some day someone will look back on me waiting for a GWS build and say something similar
Not to be confused with the yellow prism camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
I'm not a VFX person but that's mind-bendingly amazing. I really love their talk about needing high quality training date near the end of the video. AI is only as good as the data used to train the model.
Good stuff. Back in the day technical innovation and risk taking was an integral part of Disney... I miss those days. How far the house of mouse has fallen.
Disney still is highly innovative in the technology space. Perhaps you’re just not familiar with their work?
https://www.disneyresearch.com/
https://youtube.com/@disneyresearchhub?si=6f1K4hWm6Tg6N18E
Sponsoring a paper or two a year at ETH Zurich is not really the same thing as technical innovation and risk taking being an integral part of their company's success.
I don't understand the distinction. Disney Research is inventing new filmmaking and robotics tech, in much the same way as is shown in the post. Why does collaborating with a university negate it.
It’s hard to take someone like you seriously when you look at that page and single out a set of the work, which requires you to ignore the papers that include or are mostly Disney researchers.
sure https://youtu.be/YGOY4KaLLNw?feature=shared&t=32
I highly enjoy watching these old instructional documentaries even if the tech is obsolete by now. There’s something that makes old tech a lot more graspable as a concept even if you’re not familiar with the technology.
I have mixed feelings because they're charming, but there was only a minute of actual content in there, and it didn't mention complexities like how shots were planned, painting the layers was coordinated, and getting the right focus with the camera.
It's not really obsolete, animation studios (and especially indie) still use the same things. There are those who only use modern tools and digital (which is mostly drawn frame-by-frame as well), but it's more like it's split by the technique used. Watch animation shorts from oscar, there are lots of them that use old stuff.
I absolutely love the background music here.
What's this genre called?
Big Band?
It's not really a genre, per se. This sort of comes from Opera, and was generally referred to as Incidental Music. Music written specifically to accompany the action on screen or stage. You don't really see albums or collections, because it doesn't generally make sense without the visual context.
I actually sample this type of music, I keep the vocals and it ends up feeling like lofi.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Dali and Disney tried to get something together.
Why did they go vertical? Would it have been easier going horizontal?
It is much easier to get a bunch of stuff precisely arranged and uniformly lit when it is lying flat. Especially if you flatten it out by placing a sheet of glass over it.
With everything standing up on end you're constantly fighting gravity and air currents, as well as problems like background art painted using water-based media that makes the paper it's on want to wrinkle. Much easier to just squish it all flat with gravity's help.
Leonel