Acquired
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.
01:39:28 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[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. [01:39:57] S0: This is $35,000,000 inflation adjusted. And, yeah, movies are, like, $300,000,000 budgets today. But imagine nobody's doing that, and you have the first idea to create an animated movie. You're like, I'd like $35,000,000 of budget to make that. [01:40:13] S1: Right. When Roy said that he was worried it was gonna bankrupt the studio, like, was being the rational one here. They have to take out a whole series of loans from Bank of America in order to finance production even with all the money they have coming in from the flywheel and consumer products and the Mickey Mouse Club, etcetera. Ben, as you were saying, all the art and the work that goes into it, 2,000,000 sketches and 250,000 finished drawings and cells go into Snow White. This is at a scale so beyond what anybody else in the entire entertainment industry is doing. Gabler in his book uses the analogy of it was like a Gothic cathedral in animation. That is, like, the only kind of analogy that makes sense here. [01:41:01] S0: They staffed up to 750 studio artists and did three years of nonstop work on production. [01:41:07] S1: Yep. Incredible.
01:41:07 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[01:41:07] S1: Yep. Incredible. [01:41:09] S0: They actually went so far as to hire actors to play each of the roles Yes. And put them in full costumes so they could film them for inspiration, just so the animators could watch and see the natural motions so it would look as lifelike as possible to sell the illusion. This is so much different than animating a cartoon mouse. The massive investment in all the little details just to make the viewer buy in emotionally to these characters. My favorite one of these little tidbits is that the actress who played Snow White even wore a hair helmet since the drawn character's proportions were actually pretty different than a real life woman so that they could kinda get a sense from watching the test footage how the character moved around in the world. [01:41:53] S1: Yeah. I mean, you made the point a few minutes ago, Ben, that Walt Disney wasn't doing this because he was some capitalist. I think he really did recognize the incredible flywheel business model that he had sort of accidentally created and leaned into it. But, like, that's not gonna motivate him to film a whole live action version in costume just so that they can make sure they get the spirit right. Like, this is art that they're creating. An obsession with quality. Absolutely. So the movie finally premieres in Hollywood on 12/21/1937. And, I mean, it's one of the greatest films ever made. The Academy Awards creates a special Oscar for Snow White, a special [01:42:37] S0: award. Because they didn't think it could be eligible for best picture. [01:42:40] S1: Right. Right.