April 2 - Bill Garity

On this day, in 1899, William Garity was born in Brooklyn, New York. Bill would later attend (but not necessarily graduate from, the details are really hazy) the Pratt Institute, a famous private school in Brooklyn that had programs centering around engineering, architecture and the fine arts (a STEAM school in the 1890s, when it was just called being well rounded).

By 1921, he was working under Lee DeForest. Lee was an inventor who held over 180 patents, including one for the Audion vacuum tube which made radio broadcasting possible. Lee and Bill worked together on a sound system for movies they called Phonofilm. Their process recorded sound directly onto the film itself (as opposed to Vitaphone which recorded a films sound onto records) but the sound quality wasn't terribly good. Even as the recordings improved, Lee had trouble convincing any major studios to use his system and after six years of trying, went bankrupt. At that point, a businessman-turned-producer named Pat Powers basically stole his idea, taking Bill to boot, and created a copycat system that he called Powers Cinephone. Pat, however, was able to convince a young studio owner looking to get into the sound game with a new animated character to use the system.

Image courtesy theymadethat.com

Bill became the in-house sound technician for the Walt Disney Studio in 1928. At the same time, Pat became the new distributor of the studio's cartoons. Everything seemed to go well for just over a year. Then, in 1930, an old problem reared its head again. Walt confronted Pat about money that was owed, Pat begrudgingly paid up but then convinced the studio's head animator, Ub Iwerks, to start his own studio under Pat's guidance. As the distribution deal (and seemingly the studio) fell apart, Bill opted to stay with Disney. As the Thirties He continued to develop better sound for the studio until Walt brought a new project to his resident engineer.

Walt was looking for a way to make cartoons look more like live action films. He wanted to zoom into scenes and have forests look like they had some depth to them instead of like flat paintings. Ub was working on the same problem over at his studio. Both Ub and Bill came up with the concept of a multiplane camera, but Bills was more sophisticated. Instead of a camera photographing an animation cel laying directly on top of a background, the multiplane camera allowed for several layers of cels to be photographed at once and each layer could be moved individually. In a panning shot, for instance, some trees could move by faster than others enhancing the illusion that they were different distances from the viewer. The first project to use Bill's invention was the 1937 Silly Symphony The Old Mill. The multiplane camera can be credited with earning the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Bill's multiplane camera became a staple of Disney productions and was used on every animated feature from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 until Oliver and Company in 1988 (at that point it was being made obsolete by computers).

Image copyright Disney

As the Thirties came to an end, Bill returned to work in audio. Walt recognized the need for richer, fuller sound for the studio's upcoming feature, 1940's Fantasia. Bill's solution was known as Fantasound and made Fantasia the first commercially released film to be heard in stereo. Fantasound is credited with the first uses of a click track, simultaneous multi-track recording and is generally recognized as the first surround sound experience. It wasn't a cheap process (almost 20% of the film's budget was spent just on recordings) but it is a process that stood the test of time. In 1956, when a transfer was made from Fantasound's optical recordings to magnetic recordings (over a phone line, no less), just a small amount treble response was lost.

Shortly following the release of Fantasia, Bill would leave the Disney Studio to become Vice President and Production Manager over at the Walter Lantz Studio, where he would finish out his career. He passed away on September 16, 1971 in Los Angeles, California. In 1999, Bill was posthumously made an official Disney Legend for all of his technical genius that directly made the Walt Disney Studio what it is today.