Articles on Animation 07 Nov 2008 09:05 am

John Oxberry

- An article chronicling the life of John Oxberry appeared in the April, 1975 issue of Animation Magazine. Oxberry was quite an interesting figure in the technical history of animation. He used some experiences in the Signal Corps to create a company around a series of animation cameras he developed and perfected. For so long, he was just a name built around the “Oxberry Camera” or “Oxberry pegs.” I think the articles worth reviving for your possible interest.

JOHN OXBERRY
The man behind the machine
John Oxberry deserves more than the cursory glance afforded him
by the industry he served during a lifetime.

by Gary Comorau

Everyone in the film business has heard of an “Oxberry.” But other than the fact that it is bigger than a breadbox and that it has something to do with animation, much about this specialized equipment eludes the awareness of the average filmmaker. Even more shrouded in mystery remains the singular figure of the inventor and innovator who gave his name to an entire family of animation stands.

John Oxberry deserves more than the cursory glance afforded him by the industry he served during a lifetime; this pitifully miniscule obituary appeared in Backstage, in November, 1974:

    “The well-known film inventor and developer, John Oxberry, passed away last week reportedly at the age of 58. His best-known achievements were in the animation field with the Oxberry stand, an industry standard.”

Millimeter Magazine was in the process of preparing an article on John Oxberry at the time of his untimely demise, which is why this interview ends so abruptly. Though we cannot hope to do justice to the memory of this pioneer in animation, nonetheless, by acquainting our readership with the life and work of this unassuming master-craftsman, we hope in some small measure to pay tribute to the man and the legacy he___John and June Oxberry, at
eft for future generations of filmmakers and movie-goers.____their wedding in Aug 1942.

It’s hard to say anything about John Oxberry without stumbling upon superlatives which to most listeners would sound exaggerated. He was unpretentious, yet incredibly knowledgeable; a pleasure to meet and a joy to talk to. Though considered by many to be a genius in his field, his wife describes him as “a simple, simple man.” He was a man who followed his heart, and he cheerfully invested his energies in animation, because of his fondness for this matchless medium and the people working in it. Thirty-five years in the business brought him many successes and failures, but he never sounded bitter about his setbacks. And after having opened many new vistas for exploration in his younger years, he embarked upon a personal quest to broaden the horizons for future animators by providing the possibility for sophisticated, but inexpensive Super-8 animation to anyone who wished to give flight to his imagination.

The scale of Oxberry’s business had changed in later years, but not his attitude towards it. At one time he built some of the most expensive and complicated animation equipment, and then, with the same enthusiasm, some of the least expensive. Producing quality equipment and having his name known throughout the industry did not make him rich and his modest ambition extended but to owning a boat, sailing and relaxing.

John Oxberry was born in 1918, in New Rochelle, N.Y. and spent most of his life in that area. His interest in film began at an early age, and when World War II broke out, he “got mixed up in the Signal Corps and worked on training films.” Eventually, the operation moved from Fort Monmouth to Astoria, New York, “…and we started doing animated films showing how to clean a rifle. It was your life…and we used to make these pictures for the Armed Service’s musicals once a month. Top talent would come in from studios and do that, and the medical stuff, like the sex pictures, which showed what one was supposed to do or not. We used to have to go see them every month…and then here we were making the damned things. So from that point on I wanted to get out of that mess, and thought it would be a good idea to make a piece of equipment that would top all that junk that we had had to work with. After WWII I decided to start a little
John Oxberry at Signal Corps______._company in New Rochelle.”
Photo Center, 1942.

Oxberry Products had been manufacturing top animation equipment since that time, under the ownership of John Oxberry, and during this time his name became synonymous with the best that the industry had to offer. Following a few bad business breaks, John sold the company to Berkey Photographic in 1970. He stayed with the company for awhile, but eventually decided that, “I didn’t want to stay there anymore…! didn’t like it. They gave me a contract, and money-wise it was very nice, but I didn’t like the work…I didn’t do anything, so I left. Then the company was sold to Richmark; they just bought it for the name. You know, I never did get paid for my name…Dick McCarthy over there says, “You know, you can’t use that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, are you going to pay the rent? I have to sign John Oxberry every month. I’ll go along with you; you can call me Joe Schitz if you want, but you’ll have to pay for it.’ ”

From that time on John was on his own again, doing design work for friends and developing new products. One of these is the Supermation stand, a small unit selling for around $100, and now manufactured by Ox Products, in Ma-maroneck, N.Y. He hoped it would introduce animation to people who would have had little possibility otherwise to experience for themselves the joy and satisfaction it provides. “I decided to get back into things again. I think it will foster interest in an entirely new group of people who haven’t the slightest idea of what went into it originally. A hundred dollars is a joke. Just the lens to collect light for the operable burner cost four hundred. This whole damn stand would sell for $98.50.”

For this amount and with a Super-8 camera anyone could animate. It was not designed for professional work, but for families, schools and filmmakers who wanted a stand to play with. An animation kit was also being assembled to familiarize neophytes with the tricks of the trade. It would explain the rudiments of animation, how to work with cycles such as a person running, walking, etc., and other effects which could be achieved easily and economically.

John Oxberry was interested in animation as an art form, as a means of recreation and self-expression, not just as a business. His knowledge of film in general was amazing, and he continually worked toward furthering his understanding. He didn’t care much about becoming famous; he just wanted to work, to learn, and to enjoy whatever he was doing. His basic grasp of concepts and their relation to each other enabled him to keep things in perspective. “I always avoided getting involved on the subject of lights. Everybody has his own idea of how lights should be, and you can argue about them till the year one. It’s a peculiar thing…a lot of people don’t realize it, but when taking a picture in animation, it doesn’t make a difference whether your color temperature is right or wrong. But they think, ‘Gee, it’s got to be just right for the platinum glass.’ They call it an optical flap. An eight-by-ten piece of optical flap costs around $25,000, and they don’t even know what it is. If you put down a background, any background, nobody knows what color was originally chosen. They only see what’s on the screen. What are they going to compare it with? Now if we had a pretty girl with pink cheeks, and we could make a Turner girl out of her or something like that, we could see the difference; everybody would know. You could look at the face, the pink cheeks, and the little blonde hairs on the eyebrows, and you could compare with a memory. But in animation, you haven’t seen the original so there’s nothing you could compare it with. I would like to see the color temperature of a light that’s practical to use. But down at the hardware store, I could buy two showcase lamps, and the color temperature may be 2700, way down at the bottom. Things will look a little redder, perhaps, so I think a little bluer when I’m drawing. Now they last for one year, and cost a dollar and a half, so I think a little blue…that’s all.”

John Oxberry was a quiet almost solitary individual in the film industry. His name was never up in lights and some will say that his achievements have been sorely neglected. But if a man’s work is any measure of his greatness or importance, then John Oxberry’s prominence as an artist and craftsman is undoubtedly beyond question.


Details of an “Oxberry Animation Stand”
from Eli Levitan’s Animation Art in the Commercial Film

45 Responses to “John Oxberry”

  1. on 07 Nov 2008 at 10:26 am 1.bill said …

    Wow.

    I heard this name my whole life, and it never occurred to me there was an actual person behind the name. Stupid me.

    Thanks, Michael.

  2. on 07 Nov 2008 at 12:48 pm 2.willy hartland said …

    Mike thanks for posting that.
    My dad bought me the Ox Supermation stand back in the 70′s.
    I rigged up my Canon 310xl super 8 camera to it.
    I thought i was so cool!

    willy

  3. on 07 Nov 2008 at 1:30 pm 3.Michael said …

    It was cool. I bought the platen to that stand and built my own stand around it. I still have the platen.

  4. on 07 Nov 2008 at 1:50 pm 4.Tom Pope said …

    When I got to CalArts in ’88, we didn’t have the option to use the vintage (really vintage) Oxberry to shoot all our animation; we had to use it. There were Lyon-Lambs for pencil tests but no video for the final pass. It wasn’t until the next year that video was an option.
    Using the Oxberry was scary and exciting at the same time. I was so green that I’d never even seen a peg bar before I got there. But it was great because you thought you coming into contact with something historic it the camera. I t had apparently originally been used by Disney in the 40s to film some of their classics, then was sold to the Army at some point, then eventually came to CalArts. (I’m sure there’s someone, like maybe Dale McBeath, who could tell you the whole story.)
    Anyway what a great memory of times past.

  5. on 07 Nov 2008 at 2:25 pm 5.Ray said …

    If computers have spared us the grunt work of contending with these fine old machines, they’ve cost our industry a little romance too…. Animation has been one of the last survivors of the industrial age. I always liked the place of good, old-fashioned, mechanical know-how in getting those crazy cartoons up on the screen. The cast iron camera stands and noisy Moviolas, machine oil on everything–all of it almost made you feel that our strange business was something real and substantial, just a little like building cars or ships. I miss that part of it. (And not a hint of Hollywood vanity to hear John Oxberry talk–he may as well be just one of the guys working at the garage.)

  6. on 07 Nov 2008 at 3:32 pm 6.Tom Minton said …

    John Oxberry stated in another interview that he considered the Acme animation camera stand to have been designed backwards. It may have been part of the “junk” he had to work with during WWII. He certainly improved the process of animation photography with his single and doulbe-poled Oxberry rigs. When I got into animation there were still studios using ancient Acme stands, because they were cheaply available and camera operators regarded them as fast – plenty of footage could be cranked out on an Acme. They worked but were indeed sort of a reverse design of what Oxberry came up with – the camera rotated 360 degrees on an Acme, rather than the platen on an Oxberry, for one thing. One studio had several Acmes to crank out Saturday morning animation and one Oxberry, used only for commercials, p.s.a.s and anything that had to look good. It’s curious how today the Oxberry, once the very definition of modern, is regarded as an antique.

  7. on 07 Nov 2008 at 4:17 pm 7.Michael said …

    Thanks for the info on the Acme cameras, Tom. By the time I got into animation there were no Acme cameras in NY. In fact, because Oxberry was a New Yorker, I’m sure there had been no Acme cameras in NY for years. To date, I still haven’t seen one but have heard about them.
    It’s interesting that Acme pegs still reign on both coasts. Oxberry pegs (along with Signal Corps pegs) dominated for a while in NY, but they weren’t as efficient, in my view. Any freelance animator had to have three sets of pegs so they could be rotated for whichever studio you were working for.

  8. on 07 Nov 2008 at 8:59 pm 8.Tom Minton said …

    Even Disney, which boasted its own peg system, switched over to Acme pegs during the 1990′s, for some reason.

  9. on 10 Nov 2008 at 12:43 pm 9.Tom Sito said …

    Thanks for the cool post, Michael. My old teacher at SVA Gil Miret, was a good friend of John Ox, as he called him. He said Oxberry kept a sketchbook full of engineering diagrams and comparative lens ratios. At the time of his death John Oxberry was trying to solve the problem of developing a better 3D camera. He was trying to synch two camera lenses via a prism, much like our own two eyes synch into one picture in our minds.

  10. on 15 Nov 2008 at 3:01 pm 10.Tom Minton said …

    I can now verify that there’s a vintage Acme animation stand, complete with rotating camera, on permanent display at San Francisco’s Cartoon Museum. It’s the one that was used to shoot the original “Crusader Rabbit” series in the late 1940′s. I visited the place yesterday and got a good look at it.

  11. on 28 Jan 2009 at 8:52 am 11.John Oxberry, Jr. said …

    I am the grandson of John William Oxberry. John William Ragone. It’s nice to see so many people giving my late grandfather credit where it’s deserved. I don’t know what I’d like to further learn but I’ve sure read enough on this site. I hold some original “prototypes,” however they’re museum dinosaurs at this point. Something only Walt Disney himself would want to possess – when he wakes up. As to Mr Minton – the computer age has transformed animation forever. My grandfathers concepts are still applied in some of the animation programs but as a subtle option or click of a mouse, no longer as detailed and diffcult as the “old days.” John Oxberry was a New Rochellean born and raised in Southern Westchester, NY (New Rochelle), having dealt with Terry Tunes on Centre Avenue in New Rochelle as well as Walt Disney himself and many others (Chuck Jones, etc.). There is little left but his memory and his integral work in the grand spectrum timeline of animation. I wish I was lucky enough to have met him. I’m his closest living relative and only male of his bloodline and I had no idea he was developing a better 3D camera at the time of his death. You animators know more in a blog then I’ve learned from my mother! Good to know, regardless. It filled me with joy to know he preceeded Pixar/DreamWorks!!

  12. on 18 Mar 2009 at 5:43 pm 12.Linda Welch said …

    Hello John Jr.
    My father was Pat Mathison, who was John’s partner. John was the designer & my dad was the engineer. I remember John & June, as they were best friends with my parents and we all lived in the Army barracks arter the war. I grew up with Kevin & Karen Oxberry. I found this web site as I am trying to sell a Trademark to Disney It is amazing to read all of this stuff. My Dad died in 2005 and I too have some of the photocells. Write me back!

  13. on 22 Jun 2009 at 11:12 am 13.Joel Brinkerhoff said …

    When I started out we used a double rostrum Oxberry with an aerial projector underneath so we could do live-action combined with animation. There were only three of them built and everything on the pegs,( North, South, East, West moves), were hand operated, no servo motors. I recall thick books of mathematical equations to figure compound moves and the heat generated from the lights. The main motor that ran the camera and it’s up and down function hummed and drowned out all the ambient sound and really focused your attention.

  14. on 19 Aug 2009 at 11:14 am 14.Brett Geer said …

    I used an Oxberry 16 single pole stand extensively at Cinecraft Productions, Inc. in Cleveland OH in the late 1970s, mostly for titlework, slidework and some cel animation. Oddly, the rig was outfitted with Acme pin registers and not the Oxberry pins. I was impressed with the Swiss-like machining and precision and materials, like the opal glass and the front-silvered mirror. I will never forget the time I had to make deadline and toward the end of the shoot the reflex mirror fell off (became unglued) and broke when it hot the lens. I had to superglue the mirror back together and then run test after hand-developed scratch tests so I could be sure that the reticle was matching up properly. I got the job done at like 4 in the morning, but the damn thing worked — matched up perfectly. I later had to order from Berkey a new front-silvered reflex mirror and then re-install that — and had to go through the whole painstaking reticle calibration process again. Talk about the old days at the old school. I loved that machine. Knowing how to operate it made you feel like a real technician and artist all at once. There was really an art to operating it. BRETT GEER

  15. on 07 Sep 2009 at 1:06 pm 15.david oxberry said …

    hi there
    i am trying to trace the oxberry name i wonder if anyone has any info about any oxberry’s going to america. i would like to know when and from where they came. There is a connection with the town of Oxberry Mississippi, and the indian tribes around 1700.
    my grandfather Harry Oxberry and his wife Martha oxberry (cronin) went to america with fred Karnos troupe around 1909 along with Charlie Chaplin, and apeared in some early silent films, but this is much later.
    Maybe the info i seek is about early settlers. any info would be of help.
    regards david oxberry davidoxberry@hotmail.com

  16. on 21 Sep 2009 at 3:12 pm 16.Thomas Baker said …

    I was fortunate to start in the business as a very young man in 1979 before Oxberry’s were outfitted with stepping motors and computers. I worked on two different ACME Camera’s and a 16field Richardson as well as two different computerized Oxberrys for a guy named Nick Vasu. At one time I felt the Oxberry was a part of me and had quite a strong bond with it. I helped move several camera’s as our animation camera service moved from Hollywood to Burbank. It was then I met and got to know John Huber who knew the Oxberry Animation Camera Stand as well as anyone. In 1993 I joined Disney and went completely digital. Now I work in various programs but everything goes back to the early days of physical animation camera stands. To answer the question of why Disney left their pegging system was for two reasons in my humble opinion. They wanted to employ several outside animation camera operators for Little Mermaid as well as outside Animators. Everyone in Hollywood and Burbank were using the ACME peg system. The second reason as any camera operator who like me shot on the Disney Camera’s and Disney peg system it was slow. Yes registration was great but it was slow and the pegs were too close together so if you tried to go fast you quite often would tear the peg holes out. This did not happen nearly as frequently on the ACME peg system so when you had to reshoot a scene your artwork was actually in better shape.
    Tbaker

  17. on 11 Nov 2009 at 4:12 am 17.Stephen Hallett said …

    Hello all… please know the company Oxberry LLC is very much alive and well. We are located in Carlstadt New Jersey USA. We now manufacture digital film scanners, but we continue to supply parts and worldwide service for the animation stands and optical printers. Contact Oxberry at +1.201.935.3000. — John Oxberry’s photo is respectfully mounted on the wall in our office.

  18. on 13 Dec 2009 at 3:41 pm 18.Holly Oxberry said …

    I’m so glad my cousin John Jr. and all of you still remember our grandfather and for posting all of this valuable information that we only heard bits of from our family. He was a brilliant man and I’m so glad he’s getting the credit he deserves. I’m even learning things about him with this post I didn’t know before. I miss him, his wife June (my grandmother) and his son Kevin Oxberry (my father) so much and wish they were all still here to see how far the computer world has advanced us. I know they would all still be one step ahead of us all in the technical world. :-)

  19. on 27 Jan 2010 at 11:30 am 19.Stephen Hallett said …

    Can anyone from the Oxberry family please tell me where John Oxberry is buried?

    Thank you.

    Steve Hallett
    Vice President of Sales and Marketing
    OXBERRY
    hallett.steve@gmail.com

  20. on 03 Mar 2010 at 10:49 pm 20.Holly Oxberry said …

    Steve,

    My grandmother June had him cremated when he died in 1974, and since, she passed away in 1999 and Karen Ragone, their daughter (my aunt) is now in possesion of their ashes to the best of my knowledge.

    Holly

  21. on 23 Mar 2010 at 2:08 pm 21.BILL STODDARD said …

    I knew and worked with John to the very end. He was a dear friend, as was his partner in Ox Products, Dick Sassenberg. I have many, many stories about John. I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone. He loved jokes! He once put a live Praying Mantis in one of his cameras at Al Stahl’s studio. and told Al that he had a “Shutter bug!” Al opened the camera door, and almost pooped his pants. I have probably the only copy of his film on his Optical Printer.
    Bill

  22. on 23 Mar 2010 at 4:37 pm 22.Michael said …

    Bill, if you’d ever want to write down some of these stories to share them, just email them to me at msanimation@aol.com and I’ll build a whole post around them. John Oxberry is someone whose name should stay front and center in the history of animation. Too often, people like he disappear to the oung because they’re not using his equipment any more.

  23. on 07 May 2010 at 1:26 am 23.Bruce A. Heller said …

    Hello all and especially to Tom Baker if he is the same I worked with at Disney? I was there for 9 years as an effects animator. This is a fascinating blog, very informative and certainly full of emotion and memories. I was never fortunate to have met John but I can tell you that I own one of the stands, a master series that belonged to Colossal Pictures in San Francisco. I bought it from Carter Tomassi who had purchased it from Colossal when they went out of business. It is controlled by a Tondreau RP-4 computer system and has at least 6-8 working axis. It is an amazing piece of engineering and certainly impressive to look at when it’s parts are in motion during streak photography. It is perhaps one of the last surviving computer controlled stands on the west coast? I have back up chips and software to keep it alive for the rest of my life. I would love to share it with kindred animation buffs if they would like to see a vintage working unit. It is going to be set up this year after being in mothballs for the past 7 years. I felt this piece of equipment was worth saving. It’s a great teaching tool for old school animation and is capable of some great special effects. I hope to use it in the future for some great experimental animation. Does anyone know where John Huber is these days? I live in Sherman Oaks, CA and I thought he used to live in Woodland Hills. I will surely need his help when I set it up to make sure it’s tracking correctly. He may be retired. Thank you all for helping me to be more informed regarding this great man and his gift to the animation industry. I will do my best to help keep it alive through his machine.

    Bruce

  24. on 07 May 2010 at 1:42 am 24.Bruce A. Heller said …

    Forgot to add my email address for those interested in contacting me. bheller@pacificnet.net

  25. on 15 Jul 2010 at 5:21 pm 25.JOHN ARCHER SLOBODIN said …

    I AM TRYING TO CONTACT A COMPANY CALLED THE OXBERRY AND RICHMARK COMPANY IN CARLSTADT, NEW JERSEY. THEY MAY BE OUT OF BUSINESS OR HAVE CHANGED THEIR NAME TO SOMETHING ELSE. THEY WERE IN THE BUSINESS OF SUPER 8 MOTION PICTURES. THANK-YOU.

  26. on 24 Aug 2010 at 1:01 pm 26.Carol Jarvis said …

    Hi
    I found this article by chance, trying to find some info about the Oxberry name I was an Oxberry until I married, I was born in Northumberland England and never realised there were Oxberry’s in the USA, how wonderful a really amazing find what a brilliant man his family have every right to be so proud of his inventions I wonder if our branches of the family are related at all?
    Nice to have found you all, Carol Jarvis

  27. on 10 Mar 2011 at 1:34 pm 27.Richard Roy said …

    glad to find this site to exchange ideas. I have Oxberry Master Stand serial #4.
    I originally purchased the stand from Madelyn Bullock in Hollywood. Currently I am attempting to design a retrofit so I can shoot digitally. All suggestions welcome.

    Thanks

    Richard Roy

  28. on 07 Apr 2011 at 4:47 pm 28.Thomas Baker said …

    Bruce it is the same Tom Baker. Unfortunately John Huber from what I heard fell ill I believe with a stroke. Moved back to his second house in Germany where he eventually Passed Away.
    I moved numerous camera’s with the help of John Huber who was the entire West side of the Nation Representative for Oxberry.
    If in fact John is no longer with us may he rest in Peace for ALL the help he gave to Animation Camera Operators over the decades.

  29. on 27 Sep 2011 at 9:56 pm 29.Alan Markowitz said …

    Hello Tom,

    Thank you for the update on John Huber. I, too, helped John reassemble several Oxberry animation cameras over the years as he was the “go-to” guy on the West Coast for service. He was a wonderful human being, and always there when I needed him.

    My first job in the Industry was shooting on an Oxberry Master Stand in 1976 for an optical house in NYC. It was a couple years before a computerized model was available for purchase that I knew of. Back then, most of the studios retrofitted their stands with customized motor controllers & hardware. Actually, I was the first to adapt one of the pan bars with a motor on the stand at the optical house where I worked. Just doing that opened up a whole new world for creating new & inventive effects. Boy, does that sound silly now.

    Interestingly enough, when I relocated to the West Coast in 1978, I learned that there were already many who had some sort of motion control rigged to their cameras. Right then & there I knew I had made the right decision to move out West.

    The last animation stand I worked on prior to leaving most of my film production behind me to produce in the digital realm was a modified Oxberry Master Stand fitted with a custom 35mm/65mm multi-format camera manufactured by Imagica, Japan back in 2004. I went from a fully computerized, motion-control Oxberry Animation Stand to a stripped down model with an oversized compound for shooting 16-field art, and with a one-of-a-kind multi-format camera for shooting IMAX and other giant-screen formatted films. What a kick.

    Over the years, I also had the pleasure of working on many of the 35mm/65mm optical printers in the Hollywood optical houses and VFX studios, but my fondest memories are the films I produced work on with the Oxberry Printers.

  30. on 15 Jan 2012 at 11:42 pm 30.Bill Ferster said …

    Richard Roy,

    Are you the Richard
    Roy in Detroit?

    Loved my Oxberry!

  31. on 15 Mar 2012 at 9:50 pm 31.kenneth gacek said …

    i worked for oxberry for ten years and never met john oxberry,wish i did ,was a great machine to rebuild and work on with alfons ritz .i worked with alot of great people at oxberry .wish i was still rebuilding them.

    on that note thanks john oxberry for letting me have a great job building a great machine.

    kenneth gacek.

  32. on 27 Dec 2012 at 12:57 pm 32.James Carney said …

    What is not mentioned in this article is that Oxberry Corp In Mamaroneck N.Y. Made one of the finest and most innovative Identification cameras ever produced for DEK Identification Systems ,(A company in the photo driver licence business). As an executive with this firm I had the pleasure of meeting and working with John Oxberry and his staff while the first cameras were being manufactured. First used in the State of Michigan These cameras went on to produce many millions of identity cards.

    Jim Carney

  33. on 13 Apr 2013 at 1:14 pm 33.Sebastian Dorn said …

    Do you maybe think there is a ream of Oxberry animation paper I can have?

  34. on 13 Apr 2013 at 2:20 pm 34.Michael said …

    You can have all the holes you like; the paper is expensive.

  35. on 31 May 2013 at 4:56 pm 35.Debbie Bonzon said …

    I still have an Oxberry Master Stand from the early 60′s purchased from American Film Animation in NY over 25 years ago. John Huber set it up and Hans Hagi sold it to me. Crazy as it may sound, I am currently shooting a short film with it in 35mm. It still is great to work with and I find replacing fuses, switching out take up motors, and replacing parts here and there is still a lot less frustrating than learning a new animation program, but, then I guess I am an “old dog” now. Oh, and it is great fun for the kids to shoot a sc. with Mom. I have some floating pegs that anchor to the columns that I have never used and disconnected the motion control system that was attached over 10 years ago. Haven’t used the stat camera for awhile or the flatbed as we edit digitally, but, the Oxberry is a different story, it still humms!!! I still enjoy turning it on, hearing that hum of the motor, the take up motors engaging, switching the lights on, lowering the platen, pushing the button and hearing that click, click as the shutter takes a picture. Wonderful to hear some of the history of John Oxberry and know that I share in that history every time I take a picture!

  36. on 04 Jan 2014 at 8:56 pm 36.Gary Schwartz said …

    Michael,

    My mother worked in requisitions during the Second World War at Fort Monmouth.

    Small world….

    Gary Schwartz
    SINGLE FRAME FILMS

  37. on 30 Jun 2014 at 3:18 pm 37.Ray Pointer said …

    I’m interested in photographs of the Oxberry accessories, particularly the Rotoscope unit that attached to the right side of the camera.

  38. on 28 Aug 2014 at 1:57 pm 38.Andrew Rogers said …

    Tracing family tree brought me here as hopefully a distant relative of John, who’s family hailed from a small village now absorbed by Gateshead in the north east of England, called Windy Nook. My mother was an Oxberry, does anybody else have any family information.

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  40. on 13 May 2015 at 9:22 pm 40.Chris Strattan said …

    I am in possession of an Oxberry model 25-OP camera. There is no animation stand with it, just the camera. Does anybody know anything about this model? For example, who actually built it? It appears to have a Bell & Howell film movement similar to a Bell & Howell model 2709, but it looks like Mitchell camera Corp. manufactured it because it has a Mitchell magazine attached to it and a 4-lens turret. Can anyone tell me anything about this model of the Oxberry? Thanks so much!

  41. on 23 Aug 2015 at 2:25 pm 41.Casey Herbert said …

    A 25-OP camera would have been off of an optical printer.

    I owned and operated an Oxberry Master Series Animation Stand with a 20 AN for many years. There were a number of variations with two different camera heads, the 20AN and the 25AN. The 20′s were earlier cameras, 25′s more modern, but very similar. Both offered interchangeable sprocket and shuttle/gates and optics to shoot either 35mm or 16mm. There were also rare modifications for 65mm and 70mm. Mine had an early Cinetron motion control system on it for precise stop action and open shutter streak photography.

    I recently salvaged a Master Series Stand with a 25AN camera on it before it was scrapped. Saved the compound, rollbacks, and many other parts, leaving the columns and base behind if anyone is interested in parts…

  42. on 09 Apr 2016 at 5:45 pm 42.Adam Savje said …

    Anyone have an Oxberry aerial image optical printer that they want to part with?

    I have several Oxberry master series stands, including one with a Cinetron system. They are great machines.

  43. on 12 Sep 2016 at 3:31 pm 43.Bruce McClatchie said …

    I am Friends with Matt Ragone, son of Karen Ragone, who is the daughter of John Oxberry. If any one would like more family info I can direct you to the family as I am very good friends with them.

  44. on 18 Jul 2023 at 12:23 pm 44.Chris Brochon said …

    Hello all! We have an Oxberry machine here at Longwood University that was donated to us. Story goes it was used by Disney. Does anyone know if there are records accessible to find out if this is true? It’s a model 20 AN serial number 196.

    Thanks for any help in finding out more about this amazing machine for our students!

    Chris

  45. on 14 Feb 2024 at 6:15 am 45.P Oxberry said …

    Fascinating to hear about the Oxberry camera! Do any of the Oxberry family have links to the Native American Indian Oxberry’s?
    I read somewhere that a Scotsman named
    Oxberry traveled to America and forged links.
    Any info welcome.

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