Long Form Post
The Multiplane Camera
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Animation is not a new idea. Animated films and shorts have been made and released for nearly 100 years. But as the industry has grown, it has had to change. Early animators ran into all kinds of problems and had to invent ways to get around them. They had nothing else to go on but their own ingenuity. This article is about one of these difficult roadblocks of the animation process, and the machine that was created in order to break through it: the multiplane camera. In this article I will discuss what the camera does, how it was made, how it was used throughout history, and why it’s now obsolete.
Depth in 2-D
A fundamental hurdle that one must leap in animation is depth. The problem with animation (and film in general) is that it is often trying to represent 3 dimensional objects with only 2 dimensions. When watching a play, we can see the actors and props, and we know where these things are relative to one another; we perceive height, width, and depth. But when we look at images on a 2 dimensional screen, we loose depth. In film the image is entirely flat.
How do animators get around this? How can the viewer perceive depth if it isn’t physically there? The solution is to create an effect known as parallax. This is a concept that is familiar, but you may not have known it had a name. Parallax is simply the effect by which an object’s position or direction seems to differ depending on the position you view it from. Here is an example of the parallax effect:
As the viewpoint moves side to side, the objects in the distance appear to move more slowly than the objects close to the camera. In this case, the blue cube in front appears to move faster than the red cube.
So there are some animation techniques that allow us to create depth. In fact, most modern animation programs allow for easy layering of images, and the issue of depth is less severe in 3-D animation. But how was this parallax effect done in the past? Early animators had no fancy software to rely on. They had to hand-draw each frame of animation and record the image with a physical camera. How did the first animators create depth?
