Disney museum renders animation innovation

ft.com/techblog

June 28, 2009 11:21pm

by Chris Nuttall

Pixar, Dreamworks and LucasArts are major data crunchers in the Bay Area, with their studios using vast ranks of servers to render the latest animations and special effects. But there will soon be an opportunity here to reflect on animation technology before the computer dominated.

The new Walt Disney Family Museum, in San Francisco’s Presidio national parkland, will not open until October, but, in a media preview tour this week, we were introduced to innovations such as the 13-feet-high Multiplane Camera and the optical printer.
The camera rises through two floors of the museum, which has been imaginatively converted from a former army barracks. Its use was perfected in Snow White, allowing several layers of artwork to be moved past a camera at different speeds and distances, giving a 3D effect and also allowing different parts of the picture to move in and out of focus.

The optical printer takes two films and combines them, allowing real-life pictures to be merged with animation, such as in Mary Poppins . Alfred Hitchcock borrowed it to add swarming flocks to his The Birds movie.

Walt Disney died of lung cancer in 1966, before computers played a role in film. The museum tells the story of his life and work using more than 200 video screens displaying films and the copious archive of photos and footage that recorded his personal life .

It is likely to lead to a reassessment of the man as more of a great innovator and visionary than movie mogul.

“My father’s name is probably one of the most well-known names around the world, but as the brand or trademark has spread, for many, the man has become lost,” said Diane Disney Miller, his daughter, now a Napa county wine producer and a founder of the museum.

There is a model of the original Disneyland as he conceived it, details of his work on EPCOT - the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow - and a cinema in the basement which will premier with Fantasia , the animation he collaborated on with conductor Leopold Stokowski, featuring multi-channel “Fantasound”.

Ten galleries tell the story of his life from his early work as a cartoonist to him becoming a champion of colour television, stereo simulcasting and widescreen technology.

Now those technologies are being used to state-of-the-art effect to illuminate the life of one of the great influencers of the 20th century.