July 7 - Ub Iwerks

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On this day, in 1971, Ubbe Ert Iwerks passed away in Burbank, California. Ub, as he usually went by, was born on March 24, 1901 in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of German immigrants. When he was eighteen, Ub went to work for the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City. He met another young artist working there, Walt Disney, and the two became friends. When one of them began working for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company as an illustrator, the other soon followed (it’s unclear who went first). When Walt decided that he wanted to start his own animation company, Ub said Sign me up! And that’s how the Laugh-O-Gram Studio of Kansas City began. Two friends trying to make their way in the cutthroat film industry. It didn't work out. Neither of the talented young men were business minded and Laugh-O-Gram went bankrupt. But our story doesn't end there.

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The only thing Walt was left with after the bankruptcy of his first studio was a short film that was a hybrid of live action and animation. He took that film with him out to California and convinced his brother, a financial wizard, to start a new studio. The Walt Disney Studio got a contract to produce more films like the one he had. They became known as the Alice Comedies and they were chiefly animated by Walt's old friend, Ub.

Ub followed Walt out to California and became one of the driving forces behind the success of the Walt Disney Studio. He was basically an animating machine, able to churn out quality work at incredible rates. The look and feel of early Disney animation should actually be referred to as the look and feel of Iwerks animation. As the Alice Comedies were winding down in 1927, Walt asked Ub to create a new character. He came up with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and supposedly completely animated the first short, Poor Papa, himself. If you look at the bottom of most of the Oswald posters, you can see Ub's signature, which means he created the artwork for those as well. When the studio lost the rights to Oswald in 1928 to Universal, Ub was right in the mix helping to design the studio's next character, Mickey Mouse (who is admittedly just Oswald with round ears instead of long ones and a different tail).

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Ub was responsible for animating most of the first Mickey Mouse shorts as a lot of the Disney staff had been hired away by Universal. Steamboat Willie is almost entirely his work. The same can be said of the early Silly Symphony series as well. Ub did the animation, backgrounds and layouts for The Skeleton Dance. Ub was pouring his heart and soul into incredible characters and animated series, but wasn't feeling the love from the man who was getting all the credit, Walt Disney. By 1930, the relationship between the two friends had become completely broken and Ub walked away from the Disney Studio to start his own.

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The Iwerks Studio received financial backing from investors who had a suspicion that all of Disney's success was due to the work of one guy, Ub. Disney animation did suffer briefly after Ub's departure, but only briefly. Walt hired new, talented people, recovered from the loss of his friend and carried on to bigger and better things. The Iwerks Studio had a contract with MGM and introduced new characters to the genre like Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper, but it never quite attained commercial success. The are two claims to fame the studio could make. First, Ub invented a version of a multiplane camera in 1933, famously using parts from an old Chevrolet to do it. This camera shouldn't be confused with the better version that was invented a couple of years later at the Disney studio, but it was definitely an inspiration for that one.  Secondly, the Iwerks Studio was the first place to hire a young man named Chuck Jones, but it had folded long before that claim would mean anything. By 1936, Ub's investors had pulled out of the studio and it faded into history.

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Following the collapse of his studio, Ub was contracted by Leon Schlesinger to animate four Looney Tunes shorts, two of which he also directed. He then spent a few years under contract with Columbia Pictures' animation unit, Screen Gems, directing several of their Color Rhapsodies series. By 1940, Ub and Walt had repaired their friendship enough that Ub would return to work full time at the Walt Disney Studio.

Ub's second career with Disney was mostly involved with the technical side of things. He was kind of put into a department by himself where he worked on creating new visual effects for animation. Ub is credited with coming up with a new process, called the multi-head optical printer, for combining live action with animation that was used in Song of the South. He would win an Academy Award for later improving that process and nab another one for perfecting color traveling matte technology. He also created the xerography process of transferring animator's drawings onto acetate cels that was first used on One Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1961. That process is basically what brought production costs on animation down enough that Disney continued producing it. As the Sixties progressed, Ub moved into doing effects work with WED Enterprises, the precursor to Walt Disney Imagineering, putting his influence on many of the theme park attractions created during that decade including it's a small world and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

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While Ub remains a name that the average citizen might not recognize, he has become revered by those who know and was given several accolades within the entertainment industry. In 1963, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his effects work on a non-Disney project, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. When the Annie Awards were created in 1972, the balloted award for Technical Achievement was named after him. He was declared an official Disney Legend in the second class of honorees in 1989 (he was the only honoree that year who hadn't been one of Walt's Nine Old Men). And in 1999, there was a documentary and accompanying book released about his life and work, The Hand Behind the Mouse. 

For the last few years of his life, Ub was involved with the development of shows and attractions for the Florida Project like The Hall of Presidents. He wouldn't live to see Walt Disney World open however. On July 17, 1971, he suffered a fatal heart attack in Burbank, California. He was 70.

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.

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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).

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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.

November 5 - The Old Mill

On this day, in 1937, RKO released the Walt Disney Studio's Silly Symphony "The Old Mill." This short is really more about mood and effects than plot, but the story centers around a group of animals getting ready for bed in an abandoned mill with a storm brewing. It's noted for being the first Disney production to use the multi-plane camera. I say Disney production because Ub Iwerks had used a different multi-plane camera on some other work he'd done. That camera was a horizontal contraption. The Disney camera was a 14 foot high vertical monster that was so expensive to build, the studio only ever had two of them. The results, though, are undeniably magnificent.

The multi-plane camera wasn't the only innovation happening in The Old Mill. Disney animators were also perfecting things like raindrops, lightning, complex lighting techniques and rotating detailed three-dimensional objects. Everything they learned doing this short would make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that much better. Everyone's hard work paid off. The Old Mill would win the Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Cartoon for 1937 and has been preserved in the National Film Registry.

The Old Mill has become an iconic part of Disney history. One of the scenes depicted on Disneyland's Storybook Canal attraction was of its three windmills (until the ubiquitous Frozen bumped them to storage). A snack bar in Fantasyland at Disneyland Paris is shaped like the old mill and at one time had a ferris wheel type ride attached to the back of it (technically the buckets of the ride are still there, it's just that no one gets in them anymore). Mill is so iconic, it's even been parodied on The Simpsons.