It’s amazing how much those pictures look like frames from early computer rendered 3D movies.
Dolls Replace Drawings in Film Cartoon
THOUSANDS of carved wooden dolls give a three-dimensional effect to a new type of animated-cartoon film developed by George Pal, Hungarian photographic expert. Instead of using pictures drawn and photographed in sequence to provide movement, the new cartoon-film technique employs numerous doll figures carved and painted to represent the various movements and facial expressions of a single cartoon character. As many as thirty different carvings of one figure may be photographed in sequence for one simple change in a facial expression.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
A Famous Fairy Tale Is Brought to the Screen as the Pioneer Feature-Length Cartoon in Color
By ANDREW R. BOONE
BEHIND the black walls of an air-conditioned Hollywood studio laboratory, the shutter on a strange eight-deck camera flicked open and shut the other day, exposing the last of 362,919 frames of color film. At that instant was completed the first feature-length motion-picture cartoon ever created, one requiring more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings. Also, at that moment, depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in “live action” pictures, sprang into being for cartoons.
Both the giant camera and the picture had their beginnings in a decision made four years ago by Walt Disney, famed creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to produce a feature based on a well-known folk tale. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a movie version of Grimm’s famous fairy tale filmed by the multiplane camera, is the result.
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Freak Movies Easy with New Amateur Camera
A NEW sixteen-millimeter movie camera now places the professional’s bag of tricks in the hands of the amateur. Fade-outs, double exposures, animations, and enlarged close-ups are only a few of the unusual shots that can be obtained merely by pressing buttons.
Besides lens turret and slow-motion shutter, this new product of the Eastman Kodak laboratories in Rochester, N. Y., has a number of other improvements not found on the ordinary high-grade home movie camera. A crank that runs the film through the camera backwards, an accurate, geared film footage indicator, a unique focusing device, and a shutter that can be opened or closed while the camera is operating are important features.
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Engineering the Magic Carpet’s Flight
Problems in Mechanics that Make the “Movie” Engineer’s Profession Recall the Magician’s Miracles
BUILD me a magic carpet on which I can ride; a flying horse like Pegasus and arrange a set so that I can disappear in a whirlwind.”
The “boss” of the moving-picture lot, without more ado, walked out of his chief engineer’s office, leaving that hard-working individual the three problems which he mentally added to the score or more of similar commands he had executed since the actual “shooting” of the scenes in the huge spectacle had begun months ago. For the engineering staff of the larger moving-picture producers is used to facing and conquering problems that for sheer unusual-ness are perhaps unrivaled.
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Panorama an a Giant Screen
SIGHTSEEING “trips” to America’s beauty spots have been conducted right on the Chicago Railroad Fairground with a projection system that makes color pictures of Niagara Falls seem so real that you wonder why you can’t feel the mist on your face. Kodachrome transparencies are projected on the screen five at a time and, so perfectly aligned are the individual pictures, that the effect is of a giant, natural panorama.
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Odd Designs on Film Turn to Music
SYNTHETIC music is being produced in a German film studio by reversing a familiar process. When artists sing and orchestras play “before the talkie microphone, their music is recorded, in one standard method, as a wavy black line upon the sound track of the film. What would happen if an artist were to draw arbitrary shapes, imprint them on sound film, and run it through a reproducer? A German technician, Oscar Fischinger, recently tried the experiment with startling results. A series of concentric circles, drawn in a strip and photographed upon sound film, imitated an electric bell. Eye-like spots reproduced a bassoon, and a pattern of dots sounded like a xylophone.
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Drawing Animated Cartoons for the Movies
MAKING laugh-creating animated cartoons for the movie screen in which grotesque clowns, misshapen animals, and caricatured people with funny faces and funnier habits go through their pen-and-ink performances requires not only skilled drawing by artists who “cast” the parts but careful work by the camera operator as well, to insure each scene its proper sequence on the reel. Unlike the studios where the dramatic plays are acted out, the animated cartoon is made up on an ordinary drawing board amid the familiar implements of the ink craftsman. And at times the creator of the characters is called upon to take
part in the play, performing with a group of the queer figures that seem to be balancing on pencils or bobbing about on top of a desk or table. When such human characters are combined in an animated cartoon with “sketched” characters, the exposures are made in two sections.
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Prehistoric Monsters Roar and Hiss for Sound Film
THIS remarkable article tells you how the ingenuity and skill of motion picture directors solve the hard emblem of putting on the screen the forms and noises of animals that have been extinct thousands of centuries
by Andrew R. Boone
FROM the slime of tropical mud flats, the ghost voices of prehistoric monsters have reached the screen. Hisses and grunts of the pterodactyl and brontosaurus; roars from a tyrranosaurus, largest of the dinosaur family; groans and roars of an imaginary giant ape are reproduced by mechanical contrivances.
Kong, the ape, crashed through the heavy growth of an unknown forest, uttering fierce growls and beating his breast in rage. As the scene unfolded in silence before a small group of us in a tiny projection room, the studio sound experts discussed ways and means of re-creating his awful voice and the solid thumps of clenched hands against the massive chest.
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Marionettes Go Hollywood
By PHILIP BAILEY
MARIONETTES in the guise of chorus girls and movie stars dance and strut before a starlit background in one of the most novel scenes ever devised and filmed in Hollywood. Cleverly carved and costumed by skilled craftsmen working under the direction of Russell Patterson, famous artist, the puppet entertainers were accompanied in their marionette musical comedy by a curious symphony orchestra made up of weird animated instruments that played themselves.
Most of the dummy performers, which are featured in the recently completed film “Artists and Models,” are about three feet high, with bodies shaped from sponge rubber and hinged moving parts carefully carved from wood. Each marionette was operated by a maze of invisible strings manipulated by groups of operators working out of the camera’s range on platforms built above the stage.
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High-Voltage Magic
By Eugene M. Hanson
WHEN THE mad scientist in the movies pulls the switch and his fantastic machinery begins to hum and glow, causing flashes of man-made lightning to leap and crackle around the room, you can be fairly certain that Kenneth Strickfaden is somewhere in the picture.
Ever since he created the electrical effects for “Frankenstein,” Strickfaden’s genius has been in great demand among motion-picture producers when spectacular laboratory trickery can be made to fit into the plot.
Strickfaden not only created the effects for “Frankenstein,” but also doubled for Boris Karloff in sequences which called for million-volt sparks playing over his body.
Since then, he has added his wizardry to “Son of Frankenstein,” “Bride of Frankenstein,” and the other sequels; the “Buck Rogers,” “Flash Gordon,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “Chandu,” and “Fu Manchu” features—altogether more than 50 movies in the last 15 years.
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Before the web and cable news made them ubiquitous you actually had to order your “year in review” roundup on film.
Own Castle Film’s “NEWS PARADE OF THE YEAR”
Momentous events of 1946! Filmed ’round the world as history Was made! The greatest and most dramatic news stories packed into one thrilling reel of authentic movies —now yours to own and treasure in future years. This tenth annual Castle Film, now world famous, is a “must” for every home-movie projector owner. A complete motion picture in one reel of all the year’s most important events! Order yours now!
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• Atomic Bombings at Bikini!
• Great Turf Classics!
• War’s Aftermath
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