Schultheis Notebooks, detailing animation effects, have been published

I've got the book now, and I must say it exceeds what I expected: a massive tome of information, very well researched (lots of footnotes!) and beautifully laid out.

Photographer, electrical engineer and sound and image specialist Herman Schultheis diligently took notes of dozens of photographic effects he contributed to for Fantasia, Pinocchio, Bambi and some other minor Disney productions, and illustrated them with concept art, diagrams, and his photographs of set-ups and plaster models.

For those interested in this level of detail, among the things he documented are, apart from what I mentioned above, for instance that the orchestra footage at the beginning is not all live action! I assumed it was 'just' very cleverly planned tracking shots of the orchestra playing, while various lights with colour filters illuminated them and cast shadows behind them.

Now it turns out that the rows of coloured shadows of musicians on top of each other are in fact up to six matte shots, in other words composites of six separate images, where each of them was progressively masked and combined with a new image. Well, the tests show six, but I count up to three rows in the released movie. See picture of two matte shots:

http://oi62.tinypic.com/2epj8ec.jpg

Anyway, it's all the more impressive to realize that these are not static shots, but travelling mattes, where the orchestra members (all the sliding violin bows!) move, and sometimes also the camera. And to top it all, they used three-strip Technicolor film at the time, meaning that each matte had to be performed three times, for film strips later to be dyed cyan, magenta and yellow!

I read about the difficult travelling mattes in Kubrick's 2001, but this was 25 years before, and must have been even harder to achieve.

So hats off and deep bows to Disney and his artists and technicians!

Dicky