Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video] | Hacker News Reader

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

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163 pointsmadethemcry62 comments

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 likes and subscribes.

For example, compare Mythbusters first season vs the last. Another example is “The secret life of Machines”; amazing BBC series on how things work.

I love old videography so much. I could watch highly technical instructional videos like this all day without fatigue. Such a great pleasure. Thank for sharing this!

The Secret Life of Machines is available here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/index.html

If you're ever in Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, Tim Hunkin (the presenter) has his "Under the Pier Show" on the pier. Well worth a look. http://underthepier.com/

If you like old instructional videos and documentaries, the Internet Archive has a bunch of them, particularly in the Prelinger Archives.

Here are a few favorites...

Private Life of a Cat (silent): https://archive.org/details/PrivateL1947

Back of the Mike: https://archive.org/details/Backofth1938

How a Watch Works: https://archive.org/details/HowaWatc1949

Using the Bank: https://archive.org/details/Usingthe1947

One of my favourites is this 1953 explanation of the workings of mechanical analog computers used by the US Navy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

I was going to link this. I think we should seriously consider how the skill to produce such clear and didactic explanations to complex concepts has seemingly degraded nowadays.

Specifically I wonder: who was making these videos? how where they trained? where they attached to the different unit or was it a dedicated group that was commissioned by the different units?

Wow these are really great thanks for sharing. Heres a couple of others that I like.

Differential Steering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI

Turbo Encabulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o

One of my favourite old education films, on the Stirling engine:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqIapDKtvzc

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFfMruoRMGo

Watching such videos makes me wish for a modern explanatory videos done in the same old style, content-rich and distraction-minimizing. Sounds like a niche nobody is willing to cover for some reason.

Related, I have similar feelings for textbooks. When I was still in school, my grandfather used to give me books for learning English and German that were from somewhere around 60s - 80s. I vastly preferred them to modern books we used in school. The old books were content-rich and created to support learning, including self-learning. The modern ones waste space with pictures, and seem purposefully designed to not allow for self-learning, and instead requiring a teacher (with a companion book).

Both old instructional videos and language textbooks are my go-to example of how market pressures can lead to destruction of actual value in the process of maximizing sales.

Try "Essence of Linear Algebra" by Grant Sanderson (3 Blue 1 Brown). He has more topics in the same "contemporary vintage" style.

I agree with your observations. Even though we also have to consider that this video and the text for it was probably written or edited or at least administered by Walt Disney himself. You can see that Mickey is kind of communicating with Walt Disney on the video. That means the cartoon on the video was made just to show this piece of technology. I think we can say that this video is a way to show the technology of Disney at that time. It's kind of an advertisement for a big coporation.

On the other hand Youtube videos are made by people trying to make a living through those videos. None of these Youtubers can have the resources and motivation compared to Walt Disney himself to shoot a scene which can be watched and enjoyed even after 71 years later because your videos has to be produced quickly.

Another obvious tell is that the two technicians operating the multiplane camera have absolutely zero stage presence when they are demonstrating the actual operation. It is plain as day that they have practiced their lines, and not for very long.

But thats ironically how I knew they were the actual technicians, and not paid actors who have no clue how cameras or human vision, or any of these subjects actually work.

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 that occurred from Germany to both the US and Soviet Union as the spoils of victory.

Mid Century Design is even an acknowledgement of this concept, in my opinion.

Transistor - 1947 (William Shockley)

Helical structure of DNA - 1953

Maser, precursor to the Laser - 1953

Polio Vaccine - 1955

Fairchild (William Shockley) loses control of the Fairchildren, and many of the definitive titans of the tech industry pull off the first silicon valley disruption - 1957

The wealth, and easing of human suffering that were precipitated by these 5 events, over 10 years are seemingly peerless in human history.

A formidable contender would be Special relativity, airplanes, radio, and Ford's assembly line all came out of the first decade of the 20th century.

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.

PBS has a great documentary on the Fairchildren called "silicon valley"

I believe thats on HBO ;)

Old technical writing is the same. Check out this camera repair manual from the 80s: https://www.dropbox.com/s/36tlkpnrsbmszar/nikon_fe-fe2.pdf?d...

Clear, easy to understand. A patient person without any prior knowledge of cameras or tools could follow the instructions in here and completely disassemble and reassemble the camera as well as troubleshooting any problems with it.

I think the reason is A) there was no internet! These books and TV shows were as good as it got. No googling if you have any questions.

B) They had to appeal to a lot of people. Now the audience is bigger and everything is more niche. General TV has deteriorated to news entertainment, sports, and reality shows, because that is all anyone who watches TV now is interested in.

I was shocked at how good this segment from the "glory days" of TV was: https://youtu.be/eDw5Y8qSmBk

It's interesting and well researched. They spent plenty of money doing locations etc. Network TV just isn't this good anymore.

> the "glory days" of TV

Thanks for that, I really enjoyed it!

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.

(Not that I necessarily disagree with you, just to point out this is a state of the art instruction clip with extremely high production value, not just some random youtube video.)

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.

This video kinda reminds me of the Apple WWDC video I'm watching atm - no distractions, trained / practiced speaker, very well prepared with autocompleting code snippets, minimal code, simple / to the point presentation, etc.

Those people got paid to inform. Youtubers get paid to be seen.

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.)

> Film is 24fps, not 25.

25 fps in European TV, though. Ask Wikipedia for "PAL Speedup" for a fun consequence of this.

For the example of Mickey walking, they can paint 16-20 frames and loop it over and over. The moving background hides the fact that the animation is being reused.

Back then they still held to the belief that humans could make rational decisions given proper factual information.

Then can all of psychology barreling in, and marketing lapped it up like like rats do sugar-water. End result was that the mentality changed to the masses being dangerously unstable beasts, with only marketing knowing whats best for everyone.

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.

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 weekend and greatly enjoyed.

What struck me most about the camera is how big it is -- it's not just in the gift shop, it stands through the center of the museum, two or three stories tall.

The Walt Disney Family Museum in SF is indeed amazing! Notably, there are many fascinating things to see on the technology behind animated films and the EPCOT concepts.

It is also worth noting that it is run by 501(c)3, not directly affiliated with the Walt Disney company.

I second this recommendation. I've been there and saw that camera, as well as the one at Disney Studios in LA. I think the third of the original three cameras from Snow White is at Disneyland Paris, so if I'm ever in France I'll have to make a stop to see it!

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!

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 his film L'Idee (1932).

Ub Iwerks invented the multiplane camera with movable layers to create parallax and zooming [1] which created immersive depth. It also saved on budgets, tedious background animation and allowed animators to focus more on the character cels, the star of the show.

The first multiplane camera, using movable layers of flat artwork before a horizontal camera, was invented by former Walt Disney Studios animator/director Ub Iwerks in 1933, using parts from an old Chevrolet automobile. His multiplane camera was used in a number of the Iwerks Studio's Willie Whopper and Comicolor cartoons of the mid-1930s.

Fleischer Studios (Popeye/Betty Boop) also made one or copied in 1934 [1]

The technicians at Fleischer Studios created a distantly related device, called the Stereoptical Camera or Setback, in 1934. Their apparatus used three-dimensional miniature sets built to the scale of the animation artwork. The animation cels were placed within the setup so that various objects could pass in front of and behind them, and the entire scene was shot using a horizontal camera. The Tabletop process was used to create distinctive results in Fleischer's Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Color Classics cartoons.

William Garrity took Ub Iwerks invention further and that iteration was used in many large successful movies they made [1]

The most famous multiplane camera was invented by William Garity for the Walt Disney Studios to be used in the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The camera was completed in early 1937 and tested in a Silly Symphony called The Old Mill, which won the 1937 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. Disney's multiplane camera, which used up to seven layers of artwork (painted in oils on glass) shot under a vertical and moveable camera, allowed for more sophisticated uses than the Iwerks or Fleischer versions, and was used prominently in Disney films such as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and The Jungle Book

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera

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

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...

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 tricking me ?

Regarding that MultiPlane Camera. I never though about the parallax effect in those old movies and just dismissed it with "well they just draw it frame by frame". Watching this was a real eye-opener.

> Or is this simple nostalgia tricking me ?

It is. Both are labor intensive, and esp. with 3d graphics it rests on the shoulders of giants, with a lot of elementary work in the field being done by Pixar; not just for movies but for games too. Check out Pixar's list of publications; look at the ones at the bottom (time-wise), where they lay some groundwork in realistic lighting, reflections, shadows and such back in the early 80's: http://graphics.pixar.com/library/index.html

The feeling and texture of the stop-motion animation or hand drawn animation is not matched by the computer animation. Since we can feel the materials, labor and the natural features of such animations. As a result, we feel more connected.

Computers are the other hand isolated from us by their very nature. Resolution, details and other things are higher and better, but they are not natural. So it feels more distant from us.

Because of the same reasons I use a mechanical watch, because I can feel the materials, labor and naturalness of the device.

edit: Fixed some grammatical errors.

Oh yes you're right. The feeling of texture and natural imperfection is a big part of my feelings.

I love to spot the shortly being animated parts of an animation movie. Those parts always show a slightly different coloring so that you know that something is happening soon.

I bet this is coming from the classic layering shown with Mickey at the beginning in the video.

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.

You have to listen to him no longer than 2 minutes, to realize it doesn't matter how good of a drawer Disney was; first and foremost he wan an engineer!

Just listen how he explains the problem with the Moon, and then goes to explain solution. Clear cut: problem we faced, and solution we applied. That's where genius of people (and financial success) like Mr. Disney comes from.

This guy might have been put in Lockheed's Skunkworks labs with the task to design a solid rocket booster, and he would be just fine.

Walt Disney did not invent the multiplane camera personally. He is just the narrator here, probably working from a script. He was a visionary though and understood how technology like this could aid storytelling.

I'm pretty sure Jobs wasn't designing PCB boards or touch screens himself; he had whole team of people doing it for him. Very sure Musk wasn't sitting by CAD desktop and draw engines himself, although involved I am sure he didn't engineer it all himself, he had teams of people doing it for him. I think you missed my point.

This makes me fonder of the parallax website effects. By that I mean those done for creative purposes suitable to the website content, such as a game or digital art. I don't mean the needless visual distraction of everyday websites trying to look impressive.

I particularly like the side-scrolling forest in this film. Computer generated 3D forests can look great, sure, but missing from the aesthetic of CGI forests is that painterly illustrated look which adds warmth and atmosphere.

This is technology that has a clear benefit over the old. The effect that is shown from Bambi is a huge leap forward. Current 3D movie technology has not been as big a leap for me. Whenever I watch a 3D movie I always think that it would have been mostly the same in 2D and it would have been more comfortable to watch the movie without the glasses/headset. The effect of the multiplane camera however lifts the scene to a completely new level without the comfort disadvantages.

Also, this might be one of the best informational videos I have seen in a long time. The ease with which the issues and solutions are explained shows us that the producers of this video understand the domain very well.

I watch movies in 2D exclusively, including the big Marvel features. I have watched my fair share of 3D movies, but never noticed it except when the crew went out of their way to include a scene where a sword blade comes very close to the camera for a split-second. I'm not paying extra charge for this. Plus, with 3D, if you're not in the center of the room, you will have weird distortions because the separate images do not match the perspective from your location.

Interesting how none of the workers in the video use gloves to handle cels and glass plates. I would be afraid of leaving visible fingerprints.

I noticed that too, but then figured the area being photographed is well and truly inset from the edges, allowing by design the handling of the glass.

Very interesting and well done video.

This made me think of Uridium on the good old C64, for the reason of parallax scrolling.

Oddly enough last week I showed this video to my 9 year old daughter who has a passing interest in animation and she understood the technology clearly.

That fact alone means that we have to step up our game in modern technical documentation.

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.

"Walt, are you aware of how much money you can save if you just did some ray tracing? This is crazy."

Seriously, though. Despite having seen this video before, I am glad it is posted again.

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.

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.

Now all Magic Leap needs to do is put two of these babies on your face and...

Ub Iwerks invented the multiplane camera with movable cameras and parallaxing/zoom [1]

Ub Iwerks is the same guy that created/drew Mickey Mouse[2] and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, two cartoons that got Disney animation going.

American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, who co-created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse. The works Iwerks produced alongside Walt Disney went on to win numerous awards, including multiple Academy Awards

Iwerks was instrumental in getting Disney started. Walt was the Steve Jobs and Ub was the Woz.

Even though Ub and Walt were best friends, Iwerks pretty much got effed over by Disney and later left to go to MGM to make Flip the Frog [3] and other animations.

It is sad most people don't know Ub Iwerks created Mickey Mouse and parallax via the multiplane camera tech/machine and many other things, nor his impact on animation and animation technology.

Ub Iwerks son, Don Iwerks [4], later worked at Disney and on 20,000 leagues under the sea, and some other neat stuff and is a Disney Legend member. Like his dad he later went to start his own thing in Iwerks Entertainment after 35 years at Disney.

In 1954, Iwerks got a camera technician position for the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, starring Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre. He would spend the next 30 years driving film innovations for the Disney company. Notable contributions include the first 360 film techniques, 360-degree camera, and first Circle-Vision 360 film, America the Beautiful, and developing the process for creating seamless live action shots with animated backgrounds.

In 1985, after nearly 35 years at Disney, Don left to form his own company called Iwerks Entertainment. Iwerks became a leading developer of special films, special venues, and virtual reality theaters throughout the world.

Ub Iwerks really should get more respect as he created early Disney and it wouldn't have happened without him probably. Typical doer that ended up getting effed over and should be more recognized for the guy that created Mickey Mouse and Disney tech, he just didn't have the business prowess that Walt had.

Despite a contract with MGM to distribute his cartoons, and the introduction of a new character named “Flip the Frog”, and later “Willie Whopper”, the Iwerks Studio was never a major commercial success and failed to rival either Disney or Fleischer Studios.

He did attract the legendary Chuck Jones[5] to work with him though, Chuck went on to create some of the best animation and cartoons ever with WB.

Newly-hired animator Fred Kopietz recommended that Iwerks employ a friend from Chouinard Art School, Chuck Jones, who was hired and put to work as a cel washer.

Ub would probably hate what Disney has become but he was instrumental in helping create the magic of the early days.

If Ub was alive today he'd probably be making adult swim/cartoon network type cartoons or stuff like Pixar made pushing tech limits. His granddaughter made the documentary 'The Pixar Story'[6]. The Iwerks family and legacy towards animation/movie tech should be more known, especially Ub.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_the_Frog

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Iwerks

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Jones

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pixar_Story

That looks like a lot of work to make a movie, all hand drawn.

It's an enormous amount of work.

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