[HN Gopher] Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (Filmed Feb. 13, 195...
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Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (Filmed Feb. 13, 1957) [video]
Author : kristiandupont
Score : 177 points
Date : 2025-03-07 19:06 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| cpeterso wrote:
| You can see one of these multiplane cameras on display at the
| Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio of San Francisco.
| hkchad wrote:
| There is also a display of one in Orlando, I believe at Magic
| Kindgom.
| bnycum wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| lordfrito wrote:
| 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.
| dagmx wrote:
| 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
| nightpool wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| 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.
| dagmx wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| sure https://youtu.be/YGOY4KaLLNw?feature=shared&t=32
| aweiland wrote:
| 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.
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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
| nuccy wrote:
| 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).
| pchristensen wrote:
| This video was fascinating!
| gmueckl wrote:
| 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.
| dTal wrote:
| What's old is new again!
|
| https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepview/compLFMPI/
| dtagames wrote:
| 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| 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
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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.
| dtagames wrote:
| 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-2ee90bd
| b0a...
| layer8 wrote:
| 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...
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.)
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| 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
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| ...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.
| devb wrote:
| It could have been made bigger too. Who cares?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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.
| pchristensen wrote:
| 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.
| eddieroger wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Dali and Disney
| tried to get something together.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| ibaikov wrote:
| 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.
| niteshpant wrote:
| 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
| mkoryak wrote:
| I hope some day someone will look back on me waiting for a GWS
| build and say something similar
| tedunangst wrote:
| Not to be confused with the yellow prism camera.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
| voxadam wrote:
| 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.
| cududa wrote:
| 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?
| marcod wrote:
| Check out this comment on the YT
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIR39KeJMk&lc=Ugx8HYRxBkUrP...
| omnibrain wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| Keyframe wrote:
| 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.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| 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
| havblue wrote:
| 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.
| jancsika wrote:
| 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.
| mjb wrote:
| 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.
| jancsika wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check that one out.
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| > 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
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I absolutely love the background music here.
|
| What's this genre called?
|
| Big Band?
| smitty1110 wrote:
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I actually sample this type of music, I keep the vocals and
| it ends up feeling like lofi.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Why did they go vertical? Would it have been easier going
| horizontal?
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
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