keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

I haven't seen Cars 2 (and won't), but the critical drubbing it took and Pixar's move into sequels has me wondering about the bigger picture. Companies, like individuals, go through a life cycle. They grow, they mature and eventually they decline. The only difference between companies and individuals is that because companies can outlive individuals or change their personnel, they sometimes revive. Growth is a phase where companies get larger but also expand their skills and discover their point of view. If we look at the Disney studio during Walt Disney's lifetime, we can see growth from 1923 to 1942. We can argue the exact dates or films, but the overall pattern is clear. During that time period, the skills and what exactly a Disney cartoon was supposed to be continued to evolve. After Bambi , the studio was mature. A Disney cartoon was a particular, identifiable thing . When the studio deviated from that, in The Three Caballeros or Toot, Whistle, Plunk and ...

Another great example of silent comedy slowed down to real time. Here's Ben Model working his magic on the opening factory sequence of Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The bulk of this has been shot at 16 frames per second, so that watching it at 24 fps means that the action is 50% faster than life. Note the pauses in the acting that Model points out that separate the movements and gestures. This is so the actions read clearly when they are sped up. This sequence works in the finished film due to the inhuman speed that the workers must move on the assembly line. There's a sense of urgency that's not only funny but a story requirement: Chaplin's eventual nervous breakdown has to be believable. As noted by Ben Model in the comments, here is the sequence where Chaplin has his breakdown, first at the speed at which it was shot and second as it plays in the film, 50% faster than it was shot.

Ben Model is a musician who accompanies silent movies as well as a silent film historian. He's done some very interesting work taking silent comedies and demonstrating the difference between the speed at which they were originally projected and being projected at a realistic speed. It was standard in the silent era for films, and comedies in particular, to be undercranked. What that means is that if the film was going to be projected at 16 frames per second, it would be shot at 12 frames per second so that when projected, the images would be faster than life. The term "undercranking" comes from the fact that cameras were literally cranked by hand. There was no fixed projection speed during the silent era. Projection ranged anywhere from 16 to more than 24 frames per second. Initially, projectors were also hand cranked, but even when they were motorized, they were controlled by rheostats which could vary the speed within a single film. What's interesting in Model...

Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Darryl F. Zanuck and John Lasseter. All of them worked as studio heads and film makers, but one of them was significantly different than the others. I'll bet you're guessing Zanuck, who was head of 20th Century Fox, but is that the case? I've just finished re-reading Michael Barrier's The Animated Man , his biography of Walt Disney (now in paperback ). His portrait of Disney strikes me as being accurate based on my own knowledge and experience of Disney history. Starting in the 1920's, Walt Disney was an entrepreneur trying to build a business. It wasn't until the early 1930s, that he really began to see the artistic possibilities in animation, that his focus shifted. The culmination of Disney-as-artist was Snow White , a film that Disney was intimately involved with every detail of. The problem in a collaborative commercial art form like film is that the delicate balance that has to be maintained between business and art. I...