New Cartoon Camera Combines Drawings And Photographs


A REAL car with a flesh-and-blood driver rolls sedately along a busy city street.
Careening behind it, a caricature of an Indian in a speeding jallopy performs antics that would whiten the hair of a traffic cop. Trick photography produces animated movie cartoons of this novel sort, combining hand-drawn characters with natural backgrounds, in the studio of Paul Terry at New Rochelle, N. Y.
In making the 6,000 separate cartoons that go into a typical 500-foot animated film, the artist uses a special procedure. Each figure or object is drawn on top of an opaque silhouette, of black or white pigment, applied to a transparent sheet of celluloid. Hold it up against the, light, and you will see only the black outline of a figure; by reflected light, its details appear. So each cartoon receives the illumination of a pair of spotlights, from above, while a stop-motion camera photographs it. Meanwhile the opaque cartoon effectively blocks out the unwanted part of a real movie scene, which is projected from below through the transparent part of the celluloid. The rest of the background automatically is photographed with the cartoon, giving a composite picture. For each succeeding frame, the same procedure is used, after cartoons and background scenes have been shifted.