DVD releases of movies from the Xerox era

[blackcauldron85]

^ You're welcome! There is definitely contradicting information out there. Sleeping Beauty- Michael Barrier's book + Mindy Johnson's book have differing info. (But maybe SB used Xerox for both.) Robin Hood -- DisneyProductionCels.com is not an official source. So they could be incorrect about the paint used for the backgrounds. I don't have time this morning, but I'll try and do some research later about Robin Hood's backgrounds!

[blackcauldron85]

I looked through most of my books that include Robin Hood, and could find no info on the backgrounds. I'm not giving up, but I wanted to let you know that I did make an attempt!

[Rumpelstiltskin]

I appreciate your dedication and efforts (just don't feel obligated).

Again, the problem with information on the net is that you don't always know who or what to trust. Even some of the nine old men could sometimes mix things up.

While both cel paintings and paper art over the animation cels could be used for foregrounds, in addition to painted glass in multiplane shots, some more work probably went into the paper. Found the part about Snow White:

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/9aa/9aa225.htm

For some scenes the production background may have included overlays because the character action occurred behind certain elements, such as the left pillar in the foreground of Snow White's wishing well. The overlays were executed on separate pieces of watercolor paper with the same materials and techniques employed in the production backgrounds. Once completed, the overlay was carefully trimmed from the watercolor paper and attached to a clear sheet of celluloid the same dimensions as the production background. A background artist worked in this manner on up to five backgrounds at one time, which aided the visual continuity of color from background to background.

As many as 729 different backgrounds were required for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The color schemes and overall tone had to be carefully planned and followed from background to background for there to be visual uniformity in the final film. Transparent watercolors, however, have the inherent liability of being unalterable once they are on paper. If an animator, working from the final layout tracing, decided that more time or space was needed for the action at hand, he would add it. The drawing would then go back to layout, where it might be altered. This could also necessitate a change in the background, which had been painted from the same original master layout. A finished watercolor background often had to be discarded.

Wonder what happened to the discarded watercolor backgrounds.
I don't know if one can alter an oil painting later on (I have never painted). If you can, it could partially explain why watercolors were used so rarely.

If fading lines in the APT-process would be more like a challenge than an obstacle. Remember that Ub Iwerks used a long time to succeed in adapting Xerox for animation. The first movie had much thicker and rougher lines than later movies, and it was only possible to do it in black at first. Later colors and a softer outlook was introduced. For the APT-process, it was all a matter of chemistry. So I am convinced they would have succeeded have they given it a second chance and a few more years (but by then CAPS had taken over).

[blackcauldron85]

^ Neat find! When they say "watercolor paper," does that refer to a special paper best used for watercolor paint, or do they mean the paper with the painting already painted on it?

You're welcome, and I don't feel obligated- I like a good Disney research challenge. I figured the books might have the most accurate info, but you're right that people may remember differently over time. I haven't finished but I've started looking on Andreas Deja's site about RH backgrounds, but no luck so far.

If APT was created at any other time other than the production of TBC, maybe they'd have tweaked it, but that process just added to their frustration working on that film. I think I may have briefly paraphrased it above, but they also attempted using polyester cels, but those had challenges, too. That film had challenge on top of challenge; and with so many attempts at technical innovation...any other film, maybe they'd have tried again with APT!

[Rumpelstiltskin]

I think they refer to the type of paper:

Prior to applying any paint to the watercolor paper, the background artist soaked the paper with water, blotted off the excess, and stretched the wet piece of paper to a flat surface. Once dry, the paper remained flat, regardless of how many washes of watercolor the background artist applied.

The books are probably more accurate generally speaking, I just had an example with Frank Thomas in mind and how he remembered the process of adding red cheeks to Snow White: https://web.archive.org/web/20000510124 ... rouge.html

I can't remember you mentioning anything about cels made from polyester, but it sounds interesting. Just wish someone could solve the challenges even today, so it can be confirmed that these new ideas could really have represented a new direction for animation before the digital revolution.

(Regarding Disney experts; in addition to Andreas Deja, the ones I can think of right here and now is Floyd Norman, Jim Korkis and Michael Barrier.)

[blackcauldron85]

^ Whoa, that article was really neat- Helen saved the day!!! I wonder if Frank just wasn't aware of the process, since he wasn't the one working on it, and the article said they did try applying the makeup directly to the cel, so maybe he wasn't updated on the final process!

I have Floyd's and Michael's sites bookmarked; Jim writes for MousePlanet, and I have that bookmarked, too, but idk if he has his own site. Great recommendations- I will try including them in my research! Thank you

[blackcauldron85]

http://jimhillmedia.com/resized-image.a ... 2D00_2.jpg

^ from http://jimhillmedia.com/columnists1/b/f ... udios.aspx

An original cel from this Disney motion picture. It's one of the "Cauldron Born." A cel shot in negative to be "burned" into the film

APT?!?!

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Yes, in those early days there was a lot more experimentation at the studio. Walt wanted to push animation in new directions, and one of the major reasons why he was starting to lose much of the interest in animation later on was because of limited budgets, so he had to take shortcuts and could no longer experiment in the same degree. After Sleeping Beauty and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, it was probably just nostalgia and loyalty that stopped him from closing the studio. Imagine in Steven Spielberg was told after Jurassic Park that from now on, he had to return to stop motion dinosaurs and men in rubber suits.

Today it is mostly software and to some degree hardware tools. That can be interesting too, but the old way of doing thing still has something special to them.

Posted before, but doesn't hurt to do it again:

https://www.mouseplanet.com/11595/Disne ... en_OConnor

For the "Trees" segment in the compilation film Melody Time (1948), it was O'Connor who decided to use frosted cels with the pastel images rendered right onto the cel to help preserve the integrity of the original story sketches. Each cel was laminated in clear lacquer (to preserve the pastel from smudging off) before being photographed by the animation camera to give a distinctive look that had never before been done.

O'Connor's design of the "Pink Elephants" sequence in Dumbo (1941) was much cleverer than many animation fans suspect. In the era before computers, pretty much everything was done by hand.

The color gradations of the Pink Elephants were painted on a background sheet and the elephants were left transparent areas on the cels placed over the background. The rest of the image on each cel was painted black.

What appears to be the changing color of the Pink Elephants is actually the background, and what appears to be the black background is actually painted on the cels. The colors of the Pink Elephants appear to keep changing, without the need to delicately duplicate color on each individual cel.

O'Connor also came up with using black velvet on the floor for a multiplane camera shot because that way there were no specks on the black and no "graying out" so there was a "perfect" black for the first time.

And I agree, what Floyd Norman says sounds like a cel from the APT-process.

[blackcauldron85]

I never cared much for the Trees segment, but that's pretty neat and makes me want to take a closer look.

Pink Elephants is such a visual feast- it really was ingenious.

[blackcauldron85]

I'm watching 101D bonus features (on Movies Anywhere, so from a mixture of the Blus/DVDs), and there are some examples of cel overlay. But I'm posting because Burny Mattinson said (in the "New Tricks" featurette) that in Sleeping Beauty, the dragon sequence used Xerox. (We've had the conflicting info before.) Also, though, James Baxter, in the same featurette, said he feels bad for the inkers who would have been out of a job, but IIRC, the Mindy Johnson book said no inkers were out of a job, that many were trained on Xerox.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

I only have the DVD with some extra material. I've read the part about how the dragon was made with Xerox as well. It should probably be possible to find out by studying the cells, which means only a few handful people have the opportunity to check. And some of the inkers should still be around, being bale to share what happened to them.

Not sure if I have mentioned it before, but John Lasseter said he was so blown away by the Tron test because of how one could make a 3D background without a multiplane camera (and then he and Glen Keane made a test of Where the Wild Things are). But the way they made the cars in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, using white physical models with black lines, should also have been possible to do with buildings and backgrounds. Build a street and some white buildings with black lines, film it from different angels, and use Xerox to print it on cels. It would have created a 3D effect, even if it would have required some work. Perhaps it could be used to make an animated version of Rendezvous with Rama.

[blackcauldron85]

But the way they made the cars in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, using white physical models with black lines, should also have been possible to do with buildings and backgrounds. Build a street and some white buildings with black lines, film it from different angels, and use Xerox to print it on cels. It would have created a 3D effect, even if it would have required some work. Perhaps it could be used to make an animated version of Rendezvous with Rama.

That's a super neat idea that you have!! I wonder if computers didn't exist if that innovation would have been created? (And I had to look up what Rendezvous with Rama is; I've never heard of it. Was Disney or another animation company interested in making that, but it would have been too technologically hard, or you'd just liked to have seen it in animated form?)

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Considering the Xerox era in the animation industry lasted about 30 years, and Disney was prictically the only one who fused a modest amount of CGI with cel animation from the mid-80s, it is a bit surprising that they didn't make more use of the potential it offered. Building miniature models of buildings and other objects was and to some degree still is common in live action like Star Wars, and always in stop-motion, so its not like there wasn't anyone who didn't have the experience. They could even have animated a room with furniture that way. After all, they tried to do it by hand in Three Orphan Kittens in 1935.

Rendezvous with Rama is a classic science fiction novel by Arthur "2001: A Space Odyssey" C. Clarke. It doesn't sound like Disney's cup of tea, but Ron W. Miller did made some unusual decisions regarding live action Disney movies in the late 70s and early 80s, so why not an unusual animated feature?

I was thinking about it because it would probably be easier to do than for instance The Jungle Book, with dense vegetation, rocks, cliffs and crumbling ruins. In Rendezvous with Rama it's mostly clean geometrical shapes and smooth surfaces. Which would fit the technology well. The Xerox process allowed you to increase or decrease the size of objects. And there was already a way to make smaller models look huge in live action, like the scene with The Great Machine deep inside the planet Altair 4 in Forbidden Planet. By combining these things, and adding things like backlight animation, the result could have been impressive.
The novel by Clarke would have been very challenging to do as live action in those days due to technical limitations and weak computers. Doing it as animation instead in this pre-CGI era would have been easier. And hopefully attracted moviegoers interested large scale sci-fi.
Walt Disney once said that the great thing with animation was that anything was possible, unlike live-action. This is less true today because of CGI, but it was still every true some decades ago. Especially if given the required budget.

[blackcauldron85]

By combining these things, and adding things like backlight animation, the result could have been impressive.

Were there any animated films that used a similar process at all?

https://youtu.be/26b7uqZcXAY (skip to 10:04)-- Not Xerox, but a neat technical film technique used for Mary Poppins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_vapor_process

[Rumpelstiltskin]

If there was, then I'm not aware of them.

Saw the last part of the video. So it is impossible today to replicate the prism used in the camera? I find it amazing that it should be that hard.

Found this info about Donald and the Wheel (1961) which use both the Xerox and the sodium vapor process:

http://2719hyperion.blogspot.com/2009/11/

Largely absent from the animation history books is the further exploration of xerography in Donald and the Wheel, which made its way into theaters a mere six months following the release of Dalmatians. Its eighteen month production schedule certainly crossed over with those of both Goliath II and Dalmatians.

An exhibitor's kit for Donald and the Wheel, though steeped heavily in PR prose, provided this generally informative background on the film's technical accomplishments:

Walt Disney scores another entertainment first with his Technicolor cartoon featurette, "Donald and the Wheel." Using the revolutionary Xerox and Sodium Screen Processes together for the first time, Disney and his director, Ham Luske, combine real people and objects in the same perspective as animated characters and objects.

Telling the story of man's greatest invention, the wheel, required illustrations of many types of wheels and cogs, sometimes highly technical in nature. Instead of having an animator draw them, Disney had color film taken of wheels and transferred them to the screen with the Xerox Process.

For example, when a scene called for an illustration of the wheels used in a cotton gin, Eli Whitney's original invention was photographed and transferred to the screen.

With the Sodium Screen Process, Disney technicians were able to reduce a beautiful, auburn-haired ballerina to the size of Donald Duck and place her on a phonograph record with him.

The Sodium Process uses two films exposed simultaneously through the same lens, one sensitive to the Sodium screen, the other not. When the two are combined, a perfect silhouette is achieved, which is then superimposed on a master print.

[blackcauldron85]

^ Whoa, great find! Why is this short never mentioned, but Goliath II is?!

A little more info here:
https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/w ... heel-1961/

[Rumpelstiltskin]

It is strange that when the process is mentioned, it's only the live-action features which use animation, and never includes the Donald featurette (just like The Prince and the Pauper, as already pointed out, is never mentioned with regard to the combination of CGI and cel animation. Or Mickey's Christmas Carol and the APT-process).
I suspect that shorts are usually ignored when we talk about technologies used in features. Goliath is probably remembered because it was the first full work with Xerox (unlike Sleeping Beauty, where it was only tested in a few scenes).

Nice picture of the tiny ballerina.

There is one sentence in my previous post that I don't quite understand, assuming the author understood the process right:

"Instead of having an animator draw them, Disney had color film taken of wheels and transferred them to the screen with the Xerox Process."

The Xerox process was only in black and white at first, and this would only chenge with The Rescuers when a few new colors were added, and finally full colors in the 80s. So why use color film?

A litte more about the sodium vapor process (where once again Donald is excluded):

https://catalogimages.wiley.com/images/ ... xcerpt.pdf

Petro Vlahos perfected the traveling matte system while working at the Motion Picture Research Council. This process originally used sodium vapor lighting on a set with the actors well in front of it. Petro’s system was different from that of the British, who were forced to use didymium filters on all the lamps (which cost them two stops of light) plus a sodium absorption filter on the camera (resulting in another lost stop of light). This system was cumbersome and costly and produced results that were inferior to Petro’s process.

Upon learning of the British attempts at a sodium vapor lighting system’s development, Petro made a trip to England and met with Ub Iwerks of Disney, who bought Petro’s multi-coated prism from him in 1959 and started producing films for Disney using this technology. Ub then went on to perfect the camera used to shoot the traveling matte shots for several Disney feature films.

When I interviewed Petro Vlahos recently (Figure 1.7), he stated that even though Ub has been mistakenly credited with inventing this process in several instances, and has even received awards for the technology, Ub “took no part in the development, invention, or testing of the system which includes the multi-coated prism, but he did use it and made it popular in several films.”

However, Ub Iwerks did perfect the production process using Petro’s multi-coated prism in a three-strip Technicolor camera, which was dubbed “Traveling Matte Camera #1.” In Figure 1.8, Ub is shown with the camera and the front is opened to reveal the prism, of which only one is to be reported to ever exist—the original that he originally bought from Petro Vlahos.

Some of the earlier Disney films that Iwerks was responsible for, using this process, were The Absent-Minded Professor, The Parent Trap, Mary Poppins, and Pete’s Dragon. Alfred Hitchcock borrowed Iwerks from Disney to supervise the special effects in his 1963 production of The Birds.

It's a little sad that after computers were introduced, much of these older tools and techniques became obsolete.

[blackcauldron85]

Good catch about the color film used on the Donald short! Poor Petro...

Yeah, when watching that clip about the Mary Poppins filming, my husband wondered why they couldn't have continued with the technology. There were so many innovations created that haven't been used again.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

One example is the lightsabers in Star Wars. I haven't checked it myself yet, but I read an article where it was mentioned that the original analog effects used to create the lightsaber glow looked better than the digital glow. I'm guessing the most important reason is money.

I suspect the color film referred to is the machine made up of wheels. But that's stop-motion. The question is if it is filmed as normal stop motion, of if it is some sort of cutout animation, using flat objects cut out from color pictures.

[blackcauldron85]

I looked through most of my books that include Robin Hood, and could find no info on the backgrounds. I'm not giving up, but I wanted to let you know that I did make an attempt!

Maybe not quite what we're looking for, but:

https://animationguildblog.blogspot.com ... art-i.html

CF: The animators work with the layouts?

AD: The animators work with the rough layouts, and after the rough layouts are proven with the animation in running black and white tests, the animation is cleaned up or whatever is necessary and the layouts are cleaned up. In Robin Hood, as in other pictures that we've done, like The Aristocats but not The Jungle Book, we use a Xerox line for backgrounds as the characters also do. We receive a cel print (which is called the CL) and we also get an illustration board with the cleaned-up layout, transferred in Xerox upon it.

Now this would be what a cleaned-up layout looks like and this is the blue sketch. Are you familiar with any of these?

CF: We’ve just seen some of them in the Morgue.

AD: Well, these blue sketches are just sort of a rough resume of the beginning and the end of an action that occurs in the scene, so it gives us an idea about scale and about who's going to be in the scene and where they're going to be and what type of rough action they're going to have.

CF: This is done in layout, is it?

AD: This is done either by layout from the animation drawings or it's traced from the drawings by someone specifically who does this sort of thing. Typical start and finish of action. So it's a guide, more or less, for us. And until we get the color models for each one of these scenes, we have a rough [idea of] how this scene must be painted to support it.

Now, this is the illustration board that we work on and this is what's known as the CL. Then the reason for this is, quite often after this is painted, the Xerox lines on the background are painted out and lost. You know we work with thin, wash-type poster color. It's a thin watercolor, some of it opaques out because of necessity when making changes here and there. So, with the CL over the background, we can replace those lines that are important and remove those that interfere with action or depth.

One might just want the lines only in the foreground where the characters who have the black lines will contact it. So, that's why we have the cel. And we can remove lines where we don't want them, to push it back, back in the distance. We can remove lines with a material that is like a solvent. So all the layouts are dished up like this for us.

Most are this size [10 ½” x 14 1/2”]. It is a 6 ½ field size. It is generally the format that we all work with. On occasion we have a special situation that will call for a larger size like the exterior of this church, or interior of the same church. Those are called 10 field.

The reason for that is the characters are small in the scene. Now if they were animated for a scale that would work on a 6 ½ field, they'd be infinitesimal, very difficult for the animator to work that way. So everything revolves around the convenience of the animator, because it's a very difficult thing to get these characters to move properly without the lines becoming huge when blown up on the screen. On rare occasions we've gone bigger than that, but only for an extremely special thing.

And more here:

https://animationguildblog.blogspot.com ... t-iii.html