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.
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 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.
Comments
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.
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.
"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.