Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video] (opens in new tab)

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

A simple matter of hand painting hundreds of frames of Mickey Mouse for a throw away illustration

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.

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.

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!

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!

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 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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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 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.

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.

It's an enormous amount of work.