The Making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

The Modern Mechanix blog has an incredible, five-page spread about the making of Snow White, from the January 1938 issue of Popular Science. Modern Mechanix scans old science mags and posts them in high-res, along with transcripts of the article.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A Famous Fairy Tale Is Brought to the Screen as the Pioneer Feature-Length Cartoon in Color

By ANDREW R. BOONE

BEHIND the black walls of an air-conditioned Hollywood studio laboratory, the shutter on a strange eight-deck camera flicked open and shut the other day, exposing the last of 362,919 frames of color film. At that instant was completed the first feature-length motion-picture cartoon ever created, one requiring more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings. Also, at that moment, depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in “live action” pictures, sprang into being for cartoons.

Both the giant camera and the picture had their beginnings in a decision made four years ago by Walt Disney, famed creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to produce a feature based on a well-known folk tale. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a movie version of Grimm’s famous fairy tale filmed by the multiplane camera, is the result.

Heretofore, movie cartoons have been series of photographs of drawings and paintings on oblong pieces of celluloid held in a single plane. That is, when photographed the “cels,” or transparent sheets bearing the drawings, were stacked like pieces of paper. On each was painted a part of the scene reaching the screen.

Disney wanted to increase the eye value of the many paintings making up a picture by achieving a soft-focus effect on the backgrounds, illuminating the various levels of each scene individually, and separating” background from foreground, thus keeping background objects to their proper relative size.

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