Thursday, May 29, 2008

Viewmaster



Here is a cool picture of Joe Liptak sculpting a scene for the Viewmaster reel of Peter Pan.

I've been playing with stereoscopic drawings and went hunting for information on how the Viewmaster Company made their very cool 'drawn' reels. We all know the company made sculptures and photographed them with a 3D camera,(Animated GIF of Tigger), but how did they do the drawn ones?

pooh

Some were your typical drawings cut up into planes like most anaglyph printing of artwork. The best had depth that bent back into space and appeared to have actual round edges,(Animated GIF of Space Mouse).

Spacemouse

If you have any information on how they created theses astonishing images please contact me.

2 comments:

Gabriel said...

it's quite easy to do them actually, provided you have each plane drawn separately. I've done them in photoshop using layers, but you could do them analogically (is that a real word?) by using cutouts (or cels). The 'actual round edges' is tricky, though. I suppose that would require redrawing the objects in a slight different viewpoint, so you'd have both eye's views. I can see they did just that on that spaceship mouse one you put there.

Joel Brinkerhoff said...

Thanks for the input Gabe. I’ve done the anaglyphic thing and had trouble keeping the colors pure exporting them, eventually I separated the drawings and made them free-view style. I agree that it’s easy to do the flat planes in Photoshop and other modern digital but what I really am interested in finding is how the very sculptural drawings, where all the lines curve in natural perspectives through the image planes with depth, were done with 1950’s technology.