Acquired
01:32:43 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:32:43] S1: Yep. By this point, as they're heading into Snow White, this had become a real scale production process. I mean, it wasn't quite like an assembly line. This is still art here, but it's a lot closer to Henry Ford than it is to Picasso and his studio. [01:33:00] S0: Right. At least you do need to sort of synchronize and coordinate teams and make the highest use of the most valuable scarce resources, stuff like that. Yep. So then there's ink and paint. So let's talk about inkers. Back in 1914, Earl Heard had invented a concept known as cel animation, c e [01:33:18] S1: l Yep. [01:33:19] S0: Where you would draw with ink on the front of a piece of transparent plastic or cell in the business, short for celluloid. And that way, you could keep redrawing just the character in each frame, and the background could stay static. That essentially made animation possible at all in 1914. You could imagine if you had to just redraw every line on every frame every time. One, it would look crappy because things would sort of wiggle all over the place when the film was actually playing. But, two, it just was economically infeasible to draw every line every time. [01:33:52] S1: Yeah. It was not scalable. [01:33:54] S0: So it had evolved since then where there were now armies of people who were almost exclusively women at this point in history who would literally duplicate every line that the animators drew on paper with pencil, and they would trace over their entire drawing with ink on cell. Every single frame. [01:34:12] S1: Yes.
01:34:12 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:34:12] S1: Yes. [01:34:12] S0: So what you would see on screen in a film is actually not the direct work of an animator, but it's the painstaking work of an inker who traces over the animator's line on the transparent celluloid instead of on paper. [01:34:24] S1: Yep. And then the inkers would flip the cells over and pass them off to the painters. [01:34:33] S0: Yes. So this is how they get color in. You want your outlines on the front so it it masks any colors that sort of overflow out of, you know, the dwarf's shirt or Mickey's shoe. And then on the back, that's where you do your painting. You put all the colors on. And, David, what you were referring to is is you and I, did did some painting on a pre inked Mickey Mouse. [01:34:57] S1: Hey. We we did a little bit of inking on the front side. Yeah. [01:35:00] S0: Ink inking is harder than painting. Painting is forgiving. Yeah. But Disney has this room with thousands and thousands of colors of handmade on-site paint that is a production facility for paint color and applying that color to animation cells. [01:35:16] S1: It used to be called the Rainbow Room. Those colors, that paint went into Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland.
01:35:16 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:35:16] S1: It used to be called the Rainbow Room. Those colors, that paint went into Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland. [01:35:26] S0: Thousands of people each making thousands of drawings. It multiplies fast. So then you've got your special effects layer. So like Tinkerbell's wings use effectively spray paint, like a a little paint gun so it can be partially translucent or the dwarf's glasses or sparkles or in another thing in special effects is like water effects. What if you wanna make it look like there's a little bit of a ripple in the water or some depth of field on some leaves that are closer to the camera? So before any of this inking and painting, which was super expensive and time consuming, they would do something called a pencil test where they would take the pencil sketch drawings on paper and put them all through the camera so the animators and Walt could look at the rough action and see if it felt right, see if it had the right physics, correctly represented each character's tone and emotions. It's almost like a higher fidelity prototype than the one that we first talked about that came out of the story meetings is a way to catch things that weren't working before you got all the way to full fidelity. Then camera. This is, like, the coolest part of the [01:36:31] S1: whole thing. Multiplane. This is incredible.
01:36:31 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:36:31] S1: whole thing. Multiplane. This is incredible. [01:36:34] S0: So Disney and Bill Garrity took the idea of a multiplane camera that had existed before Disney. Ub Iwerks actually built one of the first advanced multiplane cameras back in '33 while he was away from the company doing his own thing using parts from an old Chevy. Yes. Yes. And then Walt rehired iWorks later to come back and lead within Disney. Yep. Like process improvement for how we do animation. So Disney created the first one to be used in a feature film. It is unbelievably cool. It has an entire massive room to itself. There's a team of operators to make it work. You had to climb a ladder to get all the way to the top. So here's how it works. There's a still frame photo camera mounted on the top of this thing pointed straight down. [01:37:22] S1: Yeah. It's like, what, probably 15 feet tall?
01:37:22 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:37:22] S1: Yeah. It's like, what, probably 15 feet tall? [01:37:25] S0: That feels high. Ten, twelve. Yeah. But something like that. There were up to seven planes that you could use. So you've got these horizontal planes between the floor and where the camera is mounted, you know, up 12 feet in the air. Typically, with the character on the celluloid almost all the way close to the top of the camera, unless you had, like, special effects or some foreground obscuring the character or something like that. And then all the elements of the background at various sort of different depths away from the character are painted on panes of glass and paper below that. And you'd want the background broken out onto multiple panes so you could do things like a parallax effect if they were sort of panning by. Or if you wanted to do, like, an establishing shot to zoom in on a subject from far away, you could progressively, in every single photo that the camera took, every frame, bring the panes of glass closer to the camera at different calculated rates. So the distance between the planes could be adjusted to really sell the the animation. David, you and I saw one of these in the corporate archives in Burbank. You've actually seen two of the three that exist. Right? [01:38:29] S1: Yes. Yes. One of the other ones is at the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio in San Francisco, which is an incredible museum and resource that informed a lot of this episode.
01:38:29 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:38:29] S1: Yes. Yes. One of the other ones is at the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio in San Francisco, which is an incredible museum and resource that informed a lot of this episode. [01:38:39] S0: Worth calling out, this is a photo camera, not a movie camera. So it would just photograph one frame at a time, and then all the technicians would adjust all the knobs and layer placements for the next frame. So when you look at the level of invention required to create a multiplane camera and operate it, you kinda start to understand how these guys in the animation department could evolve into Imagineers. [01:39:01] S1: Yes. [01:39:01] S0: Like, this there's a lot of physicality involved in animation that I don't [01:39:06] S1: think I really understood until diving into this process. You know what? What's happening at Disney isn't just the intersection of art and commerce. It's the three way intersection of art and commerce and engineering and always has been. [01:39:21] S0: Yep. I think that's right. Alright. So that's the animation process. Yeah. That is why this is such a giant difficult undertaking to create something like Snow White. [01:39:28] S1: Absolutely enormous undertaking. So when all is said and done, it takes 1 and a half million dollars of investment over three years of studio work to create Snow White. Remember, this is at the same time as Disney is making short cartoons for, like, I don't know, $2,030,000 dollars. And even that is way above what anybody else in the industry is spending.