Animation Artifacts &Story & Storyboards 11 Jun 2007 07:47 am
Fantasia Leica I
- Once again, John Canemaker offered, and I jumped.
From his collection we have some of the Leica reels for Fantasia. 
The Leica reel was virtually a slide show that timed out the drawings to the soundtrack. It gave an inexpensive indication of the film’s timings, and it could be easily adjusted for further screenings.
(To get a more complete explanation of Leica reel projections Hans Perk on his site, A Film LA, has an excellent post about this – here.)
(Click on any image to enlarge.)
There are quite a few pages of these, so it’ll take a couple of weeks before I’ll be able to post them all. (They also take a lot of time to scan and prepare for posting.) They’re all equally beautiful.
Many of the sections loaned me by John are from the Nutcracker section. However, I’m going to start with this section from the Pastoral symphony. The drawings are by James Bodrero. I start with this section because I wanted to give an indication of what the actual drawings look like, and John had this one from this sequence (not used in this version of the animatic), and I’m posting it to the left.
on 11 Jun 2007 at 8:40 am 1.Mark Mayerson said …
So who’s going to isolate these images and synch them to the music to recreate the leica reels?
on 11 Jun 2007 at 9:02 am 2.slowtiger said …
I’m curious about how those single images were synced to sound, technically.
on 11 Jun 2007 at 11:23 am 3.Bill Robinson said …
Wow! Beautiful drawings. Thanks for posting these Michael, and thanks to John Canemaker too. I’ve never seen anything like this.
on 11 Jun 2007 at 12:16 pm 4.Michael said …
My sense of it, based on the documents as supplied on Han Perk‘s site, is that the filmed stills are keyed to an audio track (one assumes in 1940 that this would have been an optical film track) which has had tape placed at key frames where the picture changes should take place.
Via an electric impulse the Leica projector changes the picture at that specific point. (In essence, it’s not too different from the slide projectors they had in AV rooms in my early days, where the projected sound from the record would cue the picture change.)
There’s also the ability of the image changes to be done by hand to match the electric impulses.
If anyone thinks I’m reading the information incorrectly, please chime in and let me know.
on 12 Jun 2007 at 2:18 am 5.Mac said …
These look awesome! Thanks to you and Mr. Canemaker. Now back to looking them over some more…
on 12 Jun 2007 at 6:17 am 6.Eddie fitzgerald said …
Wooow! Interesting drawings! Thanks to Michael and John C for putting them up!
on 12 Jun 2007 at 6:34 am 7.Stephen said …
Thank you for taking the time to post all of this wonderful art.