Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, John, I'm Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? Recently, the Walt Disney Company held its D twenty three conference, which celebrates all things mouse House and serves as a huge publicity platform for the company. It's actually a heck of a thing. Disney is one of the few companies out there that can actually charge people admission to come and sit through a whole lot of marketing. It's kind of the opposite of how this normally goes. Because normal companies spend bucket loads of cash in order to advertise to people. Disney can charge people to come and watch advertising. There's more to it than that, but not a whole lot more. Now I am being a little cheeky and a lot reductive, But anyway back to the point. One of the many projects the company featured was the upcoming release of a live action version of their take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And while I could certainly go off on a rant about how the words live action have been used to describe stuff that is largely computer generated. What I really wanted to do was talk about Disney's first Snow White feature, the one that came out back in nineteen thirty seven. That's boggling, right, Like, we are less than a decade and a half away from that film hitting its one hundred year anniversary. Now, the story behind Disney's desire to do a feature length animated film and the challenges that the company faced at that time are legendary. Back in the day, my dear friend Ariel Casten and I did a whole episode in a show called Business on the Brink all about Disney and the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, because there was a real chance that this project would have bankrupted the company. But one thing in particular about the film that I wanted to talk about today was a piece of equipment that the company developed primarily in order to make a feature length animated film a real possibility, and it was an invention called the multiplane camera. Now, to understand why the multiplane camera was a cool invention to start with requires that we go a little bit further out and talk about animation itself. Now, as I'm sure you're all aware. Animation is the illusion of movement, and really all films, as in movie, shot on film, arguably all films period, but specifically shot on film, they are animation. It's not hand drawn animation or computer animation, but it is an animated sequence of pictures, or at least the illusion of animation. When you watch something on film, what you're really watching is a series of illuminated photographs that are shown in quick succession. Quentin Tarantino has a great way of describing this. You can find him in interviews talking about the magic of cinema and why cinema is a fantasy from the get go. Like just the fact that you're watching something that looks like it's moving, that alone is a fantasy before you even get to the subject matter. Even if you're watching a documentary, you're still engaged in a fantasy because nothing is actually moving as far as those images are concerned. Instead, it's a series of photographs, and when you play those photographs back at a fast enough speed the standard for films is twenty four frames per second, then the sequence appears to show a moving image, but again, the image itself is not moving at all, at least not on the screen inside the projector yes, you've got stuff that's moving. You've got film that's being pulled so that a lamp shines through it, and a shutter blocks the transition from one picture to the next. But our human eyes don't pick up on all of that. We see what appears to be a magical moving image in front of us. Now. In cartoon animation, this effect is achieved by photographing a series of drawings so that when those photographs are played back at the proper speed, we get what appears to be a moving but drawn image. In the basic animated short, you typically have a static background image. While you have to draw and redraw the character images to create the illusion of movement, the background can remain the same until you have a change of scene. So you might draw a larger background image than can actually fit into the frame. It might be wider than the camera frame is, but that gives you the option to have characters travel and to move the background image slightly between shots so that the characters look like they're actually going somewhere. But otherwise the background can be static. So let's say we have a character juggling in the foreground and we are using a background of like a circus tent. So you would draw the juggling character on a piece of celluloid, which is a clear sheet of plastic like material, and the character would be solid right, You wouldn't be able to see through the character, but the rest of the sheet is transparent, so that means when you lay it on top of the background, you can still see the background through the sheet. And you lay the celluloid or sell on the background, you clamp it down so it doesn't move around. You take a photo, you unclamp the cell, You take the cell off the background, and you move it to the side. You grab the next cell with the same foreground character drawn in a slightly different position. You clamp that down on the background. You take that photo, you unclamp it, You remove the cell, move it to the side, and so on. You repeat this over and over and over. It's a painstaking process, but it does allow for the animation. For the animation of a cartoon character, well, what Disney wanted to do was to make a system that would allow for more dynamic and realistic backgrounds, particularly when you're talking about backgrounds and camera movements. See in the real world, you could have a camera. You could have a set, or you could be filming on location and you move the camera around, everything in that area is going to behave more or less realistically, unless you're filming on a set where you're using a backdrop and the backdrop is causing issues that could actually be a problem. But when I'm talking about realistic with animation, I don't necessarily mean photo realistic. I don't mean that you would think, oh, I'm looking at a photograph. Rather, the backgrounds would behave properly so that with the connection of camera movements, the background would behave in a way similar to what you would experience if you were to move through a real physical space. Now, let me give you an example that Walt Disney himself gave in a short film where he talked about this potenticular challenge. So in animation, just like with live action filming, it is possible to zoom in on a particular spot, to use a camera and to increase the focus so that you're zooming in on one part of the frame. But with a static background, you're zooming in on a static image. That means everything gets bigger no matter where in the background it happens to be So if your background is for say a nighttime scene, and you know in your background you have a path going up a hill and there's a building on the hilltop, and there's a moon hanging over the building in the far background. When you zoom in, all the different elements of that background get larger, Right, the bushes you have in the foreground, the pathway, the building, the moon, they all get bigger as you zoom in. And that's not really how things work in the real world. If you were physically walking on a path going up a hill at night and the moon's hanging in the air, things that are close to you would get larger as you approached. Things that are a bit further away would also get larger, but at a slower rate you wouldn't notice it as much. And things that are very very far away, like the moon, would seem to remain the same size. It didn't matter how far you walked. The moon would not appear to grow larger in the sky. But how do you do that with animation, Well, you could draw a whole series of backgrounds, and you could swap the backgrounds out between shots so that the moon would remain the right size as the camera would appear to zoom in, so you would actually draw the moon a little smaller for like the next shot, so when the camera does zoom in, the moon appears to remain the same size. That would just mean you'd be swapping out backgrounds left and right, with each background having different proportions than the others, and you would have to factor in like, all right, well, how much larger should I make the foreground objects versus the background? That would be a huge headache. It'd be a ton of work, it would be very difficult to replicate, it would be in readibly expensive. So that's kind of a non starter. So Disney and his team came up with a solution. What if you were able to break the background up into different planes, different elements, So some of the background would be closer to the viewer or the camera. Some elements would be closer to the camera. That would represent stuff that would be near us the viewer, some large stuff in the background be much further away from the camera. Therefore, it wouldn't change as much if you were to zoom in, and actually they did something much more clever than zooming in, or if you were to do a tracking shot, like if you were to make stuff move past the camera, you could do it so that the stuff that's closer is moving at a faster pace than the stuff that's further away. And you just had to figure out a way to achieve this goal, and they did, and I'll talk about that after we take this quick break. So how would you achieve this effect of being able to have elements in the foreground move at a different pace than stuff in the background, or to get larger while the stuff further away doesn't change as much. Well, that would be the multiplane camera. So at its most basic level, this camera is really a system and it consists of a series of frames of background. You have the bottomost frame that's the far background. This is the solid piece of background. It is the furthest back you get. And then above that you would have a sheet of clear material like plexiglass or even glass, and on this you would have elements of background that are slightly closer to the camera than the far background. You go up a frame, you have the same sort of thing, another clear sheet with elements of background. Maybe you'd call this the mid ground, and you might have a couple of sheets that and then close to the camera in the foreground, you would have yet another sheet that would have elements of background, and this would make a vertical system. You would position the camera above all these frames and point the camera downward, so it's a vertical system. Each frame could be moved independently. You could raise or lower the frames so that rather than actually zooming the camera, you're bringing elements of the background closer to the camera and allowing to have the effect of a zoom through a landscape. You could also move things laterally so that you could have a tracking shot that goes say left or right or right to left, and have the elements that are closest to the camera move at a faster pace than the stuff that's much further away. It all replicates camera motions in the real world, but in the context of an animated film. And it was really clever, like being able to think, how can we make an anime film behave in a way that we are used to based upon the films that are shot in the real world, and not just have it be flat and only two dimensional, So this would give the film a sense of dimensionality. Now you can watch a really good demonstration of this from Disney himself. The company created a short film demonstrating the use of the multiplaying camera back in nineteen fifty seven. You can find copies of this on YouTube. You could just search Disney Multiplane camera and it'll pop right up. It includes an explanation of how the system can create panning shots by moving these various planes horizontally across the camera's view. Between them, you get some goofy scripted exchanges between Disney engineers who are working on shooting a sequence. It doesn't come across as natural at all, but it does illustrate how the system works. You also get a sense of how truly enormous the multiplaying camera was because it was quite big, and so sometimes the backgrounds that these animators were using they'd be several feet long in order to have lots of landscape to play with when you were doing things like panning, because you would physically, you know, turn a little crank and move the entire frame a little bit over. You'd be able to do that over and over and over again. You wanted to have a wide enough background to work with so that you didn't run out of background before your character has finished, you know, traveling across the frame of shot. Obviously This system required lots of fine tuning and careful adjustments during filming. Each element needed to be controlled precisely between shots to create the proper effect. If you have a character casually strolling through a field, you wouldn't want the dandelions in the foreground to be whizzing by the character like he was the flash who just realized he was late to the Justice League softball game. Likewise, if you have a character racing down a city street, you wouldn't want the trash cans and lamps in the foreground to just creep by and thus destroy the illusion. The multiplaying camera allowed for some effects that just had not been seen in animation before. Bill Garrity served as the lead technician on this project, and actually the first use of the multiplane camera wasn't on the feature film Snow White. The first Disney project that was released using the multiplane camera was a Silly Symphony animated short titled The Old Mill. Now, whether the technical achievement played a part or not, the Old Mill did earn Disney an Academy Award AKA and OSCAR for Best Animated Short Subject, and the multiplaying camera would get its own Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in nineteen thirty eight. The multiplane camera would become an important component behind the scenes on films like Pinocchio and Bambi. There are three of the original multiplane cameras on display today, so you can actually see one of the original multiplane cameras in one of these three locations. Two of them are in California in the United States. One of them is at the Walt Disney Animation Studio that's in Burbank, California. That's part of the Los Angeles area. The other one is in the Walt Disney Family Museum that's actually in San Francisco, California. The third original multiplaying camera is out in Paris, France at Disneyland Paris. The site Waldisney dot org even has a guide on how you can build your own multiplane camera system using stuff like plexiglass and compostable drinking cups, which is pretty cool. Like if you wanted to make your own animated short using a very similar system to what Disney is, just much more low tech, like it would require a lot more hands on work, but you could achieve the same effects. They explain how to do it, and to me like that's super cool. Like, if you decide I'm going to try and do an animated short, and I'm on top of that, I'm going to do this multiplane approach so that I have more depth to my shot, you can totally learn how to do it. I think that's awesome. Bill Garritty, the guy behind the original multiplane camera, was inducted into the Disney Legends program in nineteen ninety nine. It's kind of like Disney's own Hall of Fame. Sadly that meant it was a posthumous award. Garrity passed away on September sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, but it is nice that the company recognized his contributions. As I've said on other podcasts, Snow White could have sunk the Disney Company if it had not been a success, and I think Garretty's work was one of many important factors that ultimately contributed to the feature being a hit and kind of cementing Disney's status in Hollywood history. Anyway, that's a quick look at an influential piece of technology, the multiplane camera, and I do recommend you go and check out how you could make your own version, even if it's just to learn more about how it works, because I think getting a look at how you could build one yourself really teaches you the basics of the principles behind it, and that's more effective than any podcast would be. But I hope you enjoyed this short episode. I hope you are all doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, John, I'm Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So? Recently, the Walt Disney Company held its D twenty three conference, which celebrates all things mouse House and serves as a huge publicity platform for the company. It's actually a heck of a thing. Disney is one of the few companies out there that can actually charge people admission to come and sit through a whole lot of marketing. It's kind of the opposite of how this normally goes. Because normal companies spend bucket loads of cash in order to advertise to people. Disney can charge people to come and watch advertising. There's more to it than that, but not a whole lot more. Now I am being a little cheeky and a lot reductive, But anyway back to the point. One of the many projects the company featured was the upcoming release of a live action version of their take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And while I could certainly go off on a rant about how the words live action have been used to describe stuff that is largely computer generated. What I really wanted to do was talk about Disney's first Snow White feature, the one that came out back in nineteen thirty seven. That's boggling, right, Like, we are less than a decade and a half away from that film hitting its one hundred year anniversary. Now, the story behind Disney's desire to do a feature length animated film and the challenges that the company faced at that time are legendary. Back in the day, my dear friend Ariel Casten and I did a whole episode in a show called Business on the Brink all about Disney and the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, because there was a real chance that this project would have bankrupted the company. But one thing in particular about the film that I wanted to talk about today was a piece of equipment that the company developed primarily in order to make a feature length animated film a real possibility, and it was an invention called the multiplane camera. Now, to understand why the multiplane camera was a cool invention to start with requires that we go a little bit further out and talk about animation itself. Now, as I'm sure you're all aware. Animation is the illusion of movement, and really all films, as in movie, shot on film, arguably all films period, but specifically shot on film, they are animation. It's not hand drawn animation or computer animation, but it is an animated sequence of pictures, or at least the illusion of animation. When you watch something on film, what you're really watching is a series of illuminated photographs that are shown in quick succession. Quentin Tarantino has a great way of describing this. You can find him in interviews talking about the magic of cinema and why cinema is a fantasy from the get go. Like just the fact that you're watching something that looks like it's moving, that alone is a fantasy before you even get to the subject matter. Even if you're watching a documentary, you're still engaged in a fantasy because nothing is actually moving as far as those images are concerned. Instead, it's a series of photographs, and when you play those photographs back at a fast enough speed the standard for films is twenty four frames per second, then the sequence appears to show a moving image, but again, the image itself is not moving at all, at least not on the screen inside the projector yes, you've got stuff that's moving. You've got film that's being pulled so that a lamp shines through it, and a shutter blocks the transition from one picture to the next. But our human eyes don't pick up on all of that. We see what appears to be a magical moving image in front of us. Now. In cartoon animation, this effect is achieved by photographing a series of drawings so that when those photographs are played back at the proper speed, we get what appears to be a moving but drawn image. In the basic animated short, you typically have a static background image. While you have to draw and redraw the character images to create the illusion of movement, the background can remain the same until you have a change of scene. So you might draw a larger background image than can actually fit into the frame. It might be wider than the camera frame is, but that gives you the option to have characters travel and to move the background image slightly between shots so that the characters look like they're actually going somewhere. But otherwise the background can be static. So let's say we have a character juggling in the foreground and we are using a background of like a circus tent. So you would draw the juggling character on a piece of celluloid, which is a clear sheet of plastic like material, and the character would be solid right, You wouldn't be able to see through the character, but the rest of the sheet is transparent, so that means when you lay it on top of the background, you can still see the background through the sheet. And you lay the celluloid or sell on the background, you clamp it down so it doesn't move around. You take a photo, you unclamp the cell, You take the cell off the background, and you move it to the side. You grab the next cell with the same foreground character drawn in a slightly different position. You clamp that down on the background. You take that photo, you unclamp it, You remove the cell, move it to the side, and so on. You repeat this over and over and over. It's a painstaking process, but it does allow for the animation. For the animation of a cartoon character, well, what Disney wanted to do was to make a system that would allow for more dynamic and realistic backgrounds, particularly when you're talking about backgrounds and camera movements. See in the real world, you could have a camera. You could have a set, or you could be filming on location and you move the camera around, everything in that area is going to behave more or less realistically, unless you're filming on a set where you're using a backdrop and the backdrop is causing issues that could actually be a problem. But when I'm talking about realistic with animation, I don't necessarily mean photo realistic. I don't mean that you would think, oh, I'm looking at a photograph. Rather, the backgrounds would behave properly so that with the connection of camera movements, the background would behave in a way similar to what you would experience if you were to move through a real physical space. Now, let me give you an example that Walt Disney himself gave in a short film where he talked about this potenticular challenge. So in animation, just like with live action filming, it is possible to zoom in on a particular spot, to use a camera and to increase the focus so that you're zooming in on one part of the frame. But with a static background, you're zooming in on a static image. That means everything gets bigger no matter where in the background it happens to be So if your background is for say a nighttime scene, and you know in your background you have a path going up a hill and there's a building on the hilltop, and there's a moon hanging over the building in the far background. When you zoom in, all the different elements of that background get larger, Right, the bushes you have in the foreground, the pathway, the building, the moon, they all get bigger as you zoom in. And that's not really how things work in the real world. If you were physically walking on a path going up a hill at night and the moon's hanging in the air, things that are close to you would get larger as you approached. Things that are a bit further away would also get larger, but at a slower rate you wouldn't notice it as much. And things that are very very far away, like the moon, would seem to remain the same size. It didn't matter how far you walked. The moon would not appear to grow larger in the sky. But how do you do that with animation, Well, you could draw a whole series of backgrounds, and you could swap the backgrounds out between shots so that the moon would remain the right size as the camera would appear to zoom in, so you would actually draw the moon a little smaller for like the next shot, so when the camera does zoom in, the moon appears to remain the same size. That would just mean you'd be swapping out backgrounds left and right, with each background having different proportions than the others, and you would have to factor in like, all right, well, how much larger should I make the foreground objects versus the background? That would be a huge headache. It'd be a ton of work, it would be very difficult to replicate, it would be in readibly expensive. So that's kind of a non starter. So Disney and his team came up with a solution. What if you were able to break the background up into different planes, different elements, So some of the background would be closer to the viewer or the camera. Some elements would be closer to the camera. That would represent stuff that would be near us the viewer, some large stuff in the background be much further away from the camera. Therefore, it wouldn't change as much if you were to zoom in, and actually they did something much more clever than zooming in, or if you were to do a tracking shot, like if you were to make stuff move past the camera, you could do it so that the stuff that's closer is moving at a faster pace than the stuff that's further away. And you just had to figure out a way to achieve this goal, and they did, and I'll talk about that after we take this quick break. So how would you achieve this effect of being able to have elements in the foreground move at a different pace than stuff in the background, or to get larger while the stuff further away doesn't change as much. Well, that would be the multiplane camera. So at its most basic level, this camera is really a system and it consists of a series of frames of background. You have the bottomost frame that's the far background. This is the solid piece of background. It is the furthest back you get. And then above that you would have a sheet of clear material like plexiglass or even glass, and on this you would have elements of background that are slightly closer to the camera than the far background. You go up a frame, you have the same sort of thing, another clear sheet with elements of background. Maybe you'd call this the mid ground, and you might have a couple of sheets that and then close to the camera in the foreground, you would have yet another sheet that would have elements of background, and this would make a vertical system. You would position the camera above all these frames and point the camera downward, so it's a vertical system. Each frame could be moved independently. You could raise or lower the frames so that rather than actually zooming the camera, you're bringing elements of the background closer to the camera and allowing to have the effect of a zoom through a landscape. You could also move things laterally so that you could have a tracking shot that goes say left or right or right to left, and have the elements that are closest to the camera move at a faster pace than the stuff that's much further away. It all replicates camera motions in the real world, but in the context of an animated film. And it was really clever, like being able to think, how can we make an anime film behave in a way that we are used to based upon the films that are shot in the real world, and not just have it be flat and only two dimensional, So this would give the film a sense of dimensionality. Now you can watch a really good demonstration of this from Disney himself. The company created a short film demonstrating the use of the multiplaying camera back in nineteen fifty seven. You can find copies of this on YouTube. You could just search Disney Multiplane camera and it'll pop right up. It includes an explanation of how the system can create panning shots by moving these various planes horizontally across the camera's view. Between them, you get some goofy scripted exchanges between Disney engineers who are working on shooting a sequence. It doesn't come across as natural at all, but it does illustrate how the system works. You also get a sense of how truly enormous the multiplaying camera was because it was quite big, and so sometimes the backgrounds that these animators were using they'd be several feet long in order to have lots of landscape to play with when you were doing things like panning, because you would physically, you know, turn a little crank and move the entire frame a little bit over. You'd be able to do that over and over and over again. You wanted to have a wide enough background to work with so that you didn't run out of background before your character has finished, you know, traveling across the frame of shot. Obviously This system required lots of fine tuning and careful adjustments during filming. Each element needed to be controlled precisely between shots to create the proper effect. If you have a character casually strolling through a field, you wouldn't want the dandelions in the foreground to be whizzing by the character like he was the flash who just realized he was late to the Justice League softball game. Likewise, if you have a character racing down a city street, you wouldn't want the trash cans and lamps in the foreground to just creep by and thus destroy the illusion. The multiplaying camera allowed for some effects that just had not been seen in animation before. Bill Garrity served as the lead technician on this project, and actually the first use of the multiplane camera wasn't on the feature film Snow White. The first Disney project that was released using the multiplane camera was a Silly Symphony animated short titled The Old Mill. Now, whether the technical achievement played a part or not, the Old Mill did earn Disney an Academy Award AKA and OSCAR for Best Animated Short Subject, and the multiplaying camera would get its own Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in nineteen thirty eight. The multiplane camera would become an important component behind the scenes on films like Pinocchio and Bambi. There are three of the original multiplane cameras on display today, so you can actually see one of the original multiplane cameras in one of these three locations. Two of them are in California in the United States. One of them is at the Walt Disney Animation Studio that's in Burbank, California. That's part of the Los Angeles area. The other one is in the Walt Disney Family Museum that's actually in San Francisco, California. The third original multiplaying camera is out in Paris, France at Disneyland Paris. The site Waldisney dot org even has a guide on how you can build your own multiplane camera system using stuff like plexiglass and compostable drinking cups, which is pretty cool. Like if you wanted to make your own animated short using a very similar system to what Disney is, just much more low tech, like it would require a lot more hands on work, but you could achieve the same effects. They explain how to do it, and to me like that's super cool. Like, if you decide I'm going to try and do an animated short, and I'm on top of that, I'm going to do this multiplane approach so that I have more depth to my shot, you can totally learn how to do it. I think that's awesome. Bill Garritty, the guy behind the original multiplane camera, was inducted into the Disney Legends program in nineteen ninety nine. It's kind of like Disney's own Hall of Fame. Sadly that meant it was a posthumous award. Garrity passed away on September sixteenth, nineteen seventy one, but it is nice that the company recognized his contributions. As I've said on other podcasts, Snow White could have sunk the Disney Company if it had not been a success, and I think Garretty's work was one of many important factors that ultimately contributed to the feature being a hit and kind of cementing Disney's status in Hollywood history. Anyway, that's a quick look at an influential piece of technology, the multiplane camera, and I do recommend you go and check out how you could make your own version, even if it's just to learn more about how it works, because I think getting a look at how you could build one yourself really teaches you the basics of the principles behind it, and that's more effective than any podcast would be. But I hope you enjoyed this short episode. I hope you are all doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.