Colored Pictures

On Wednesday February 26th, 1936, three and a half years after Flowers and Trees, a representative of the Technicolor company named Lee Prentice explained the Technicolor process to the Class on Color Composition led by Phil Dike.
Here is the transcription of the talk, which not only explains the process of development and imbibition printing, but also notes which color timing corrections are available at which level...A note: I love three-strip Technicolor, but I think it is worth noting that what you filmed normally was not what showed up on the screen. A clear example is Mary Poppins, where the costumes were designed by Tony Walton to look a certain way on film by not making them that color in real life. Thus, it was a severe mistake by the producers of the Anniversary DVD to correct the colors to look like the real surviving items, however well meant. (I hope they will be showing a film print at the Mary Poppins Sing-along at the El Capitan today!)
Another example: in the 1967 live-action musical The Happiest Millionaire, the characters wear seemingly light blue sweaters. In real life, they were neutral grey. (Though several were later dyed in colors for the Passamaquoddy sailors in Pete's Dragon.)
I seem to remember that in the Disney animation dept., a lot of research was done to map out how colors would show up on film, especially in this period where Snow White was beginning to take on color. I recall something about wall-charts after lots of tests.
Conclusion: there is more to Technicolor than meets the eye!

Appleseed and the Calls

Here is a little story I found in an insert to the The Littelest Outlaw (1955) pressbook, pertaining Walt Disney's family's "ties" to Johnny Appleseed, advertizing the re-release of the 1948 Melody Time sequence. Perhaps pure movie-hype conjecture, but still...

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Homework...

Here are three pages, each belonging to one of the Layout Training Courses given at the Disney Studios in November and December of 1936. The courses are found on Michael Sporn's Splog Course 1 (Tom Codrick) and Course 3 (Charles Philippi) with an additional lecture by Phil Dike here, and on this blog Course 2 (Ken Anderson), with 2 pages for Michael's additional lecture here.

The pages here are "problems" to be solved in the classes, dealt out on or before the day of the classes. They may be interesting to do before reading the courses, as they may expose some of the key elements in the lectures better than reading them "cold"...

Three Little Wolves Exposure

Since I put up prod. US34 (originally S32) Three Little Wolves a week ago, I thought it would be interesting to show this original 1935 exposure sheet by Bill Roberts, of scene 78(crossed out)/80, where the wolf is shot out of a cannon through the clouds in the end.

We see the sound written as waveforms, the animation drawing numbers exposed on the left and the camera info on the right, beginning with a camera shake as the cannon goes off, starting and ending on a 4 3/4 Field center. See my comparison chart if you want to see the actual sizes in normal ACME sizes. The P*231*1 refers to Punch 231, Take 1, the take of the cannon sound.

It is a bit of a curious exposure sheet, as the form itself basically is comprised of two simpler sheets without Dialogue or BG columns, which did not prevent it being used as a normal exposure sheet.
It is marked 12X-sheet, and in contrast to the normal 8X-sheets, this has markings for each 12 frames as well as footage markings.

It is also curious because it doesn't "fit": in the film, the cannon is fired in sc.78 and the wolves flee in sc.80, with a close-up "take" scene inbetween. None of the scenes fit this sheet in length...

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Prod. RM15 - The Whalers

Following a question on the GoldenAgeCartoons forum, here is the draft for this classic short featuring Mickey, Donald and Goofy.

Directed by Dave Hand and Dick Huemer (IMDb) with music by Albert Hay Malotte, it was released 8/19/1938.
Animated by Ed Love, Marvin Woodward, Art Babbitt, Frank Oreb, Robert Leffingwell, Louie Schmidt, Lee Moorehouse, Al Eugster, with scenes by Josh Meador, Eric Larson, Preston Blair and Milt Schaffer...

Early Walt in Close-Up

Here is a close-up of the center of Walt.[sic] Disney's Laugh-O-grams business card as described on Didier Ghez' blog. We see Walt working away at his drafting table. On one sheet seems to be a cat.
I enhanced it to make the faint colors stand out more clearly...

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Prod. US34 - Three Little Wolves

I thought it nice to end the year with a bang, albeit a little one. Originally prod. S32, the number of Three Little Wolves was changed to US34 to let Broken Toys have a Christmas release. If you find S32 here, it was what was on the bar sheet and the draft.

Directed by Dave Hand, assistant director Jack Cutting, story by Bill Cottrell, Joe Grant and Bob Kuwahara (Feb. 1934-May 1935 - Outline 4/10/1934). Music by Frank Churchill. Layout by Ferdinand Huszti Horvath, backgrounds by Mique Nelson and animation by Norm Ferguson, Fred Moore, Eric Larson and Bill Roberts.
It premiered in front of Chaplin's Modern Times at the Dallas Majestic, 4/18/1936, and can now be found on Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies (2001). It was the first Disney picture held over for a second program at Radio City Music Hall. (Thank you, Russell Merrit and J B Kaufman!)

Three Little Wolves is timed in a classical "start slow, speed up, fast climax, slower ending" pacing, as you can see by this timeline:

I really hope this stuff is studied, as I feel it is just as important to know how this works now, as it was when the films were made...

Check the timing on this annotated film:


Again, for good measure, the draft, from 1/13/1936.Well, I'm 45 today. To everyone a Happy New Year, from myself, and from everyone at A. Film in Denmark, Estonia, Latvia and Germany!

[Addition 03/31/2015: I removed it from YouTube because they find it infringes the song "R3tric-Black Is Night", sound recording administered by: Believe Music. Go figure. YouTube should fix their automatic recognizer instead of threatening strikes.]

Woman Power

Here is a bit about a lady assistant director at the Disney Studios during Victory Through Air Power (rel. 7/17/1943, exactly 12 years before the opening of Disneyland)... She is NOT mentioned in IMDb!

In July 1946, Ms. Selck shared room 2C-6 with Jack Hannah.
Beulah Mae "Bee" Selck was born 6/5/1908 and passed away 11/23/1981...

Prod. 2266 - Lend A Paw

Though not stricktly a Christmas film, it is very much in the spirit of Christmas, and thus I thought it fitting for this day. It also caters to those of you who like the later shorts, so everybody wins.

This 1942 Oscar winner, a remake of UM10, Mickey's Pal Pluto, was directed by Gerry Geronimi, and released 10/3/1941. This draft predates that by more than eight months, 1/18/1941 - in other words, it was animated before the strike and released after it.

We find animation by George Nicholas, Ken Muse, Nick Nichols, Bill Sturm, Eric Gurney, Norm Tate, Chick Otterstrom, Morey Reden and Emory Hawkins. Layouts by Bruce Bushman.

Prod. UM8 - Mickey's Xmas Picture

...otherwise known as Mickey's Good Deed. Because Michael Sporn mentioned it favorably in his blog, I thought it was a good time to have a look at the draft. I really like these Black and White Mickeys, too - this one animated by Johnny Cannon, Ben Sharpsteen,
Les Clark, Frenchy de Trémaudan, Tom Palmer, Hardie Gramatky, Dick Lundy, Gerry Geronimi, and the last scene by Norm Ferguson.
Ben Sharpsteen is credited for an awful lot of scenes here - so I suspect he was supervising junior animators, who went uncredited.

Also directed by Burt Gillett, it was released 12/17/1932.
Music by Bert Lewis.Merry Christmas to all !!!

Prod. CM4 - The Fire Fighters

This draft is the earliest complete one I have with animator indications. (If anyone has page 1 of Touchdown Mickey...)
It was animated in the months after Ub Iwerks left the studio, one of the first films for Columbia. Ben Sharpsteen, Norm Ferguson and Dave Hand had not been with the studio for many months when they animated their scenes...

Directed by Burt Gillett, released 6/20/1930.
Available on Disney Treasures DVD "Mickey Mouse in B&W."

Prod. CM21 - Mickey's Orphans

Directed by Burt Gillett, this draft of 12/5/1931, the release date is four days later. Animation by Dave Hand, Joe D'Igalo, Jack King, Norm Ferguson, Gerry Geronimi, Tom Palmer, Hardie Gramatky, Ben Sharpsteen, Johnny Cannon and Dick Lundy.

This film is simple, yet charming and a bit odd. Why would Mickey even give saws and hammers to the orphans?
Available on Disney Treasures DVD "Mickey Mouse in B&W."

A thing I wondered about: in Neil Gabler's book on page 169 he writes of the first Leica Reels, and the note says: "Ben Sharpsteen, Answers to Questions submitted by Dave Smith, Sept. 1964." Is this Dave Smith the archivist, already then? I should have read it earlier, as I was sitting next to him at the Disney Legends ceremony...
[Update: it was obviously a typo: a later note says Sept. 1974]