The basics of producing a stereophotograph of real life places were well-established by the time the View-Master arrived, but producing images of imaginary scenes was a bit more involved. [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble] took a look at how the fairy tale and media tie-in reels may have been made.
Staring with simple dioramas, View-Master eventually developed an entire team to work on fairy tales. One of the most influential members was sculptor [Florence Thomas]. She was instrumental in updating many of the original fairy tale reels from small scale miniatures to 1/6 scale dioramas for the scenes. Unfortunately, the department was eventually cut and all the original miniatures thrown away.
Before VCRs, View-Master was the primary way people could interact with their favorite TV shows and movies when they weren’t being broadcast. TV shows could be photographed while in production in Hollywood with a stereo camera giving great visual detail. Some cartoon and movie reels were less engaging, having been made from promotional images, giving more of a paper cutout appearance rather than “real” 3D. In either case, many of these visual techniques have been lost with little documentation on how they were achieved.
We previously covered [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble]’s History of the View-Master and how you can digitize the disks for posterity.
As the proud(?) owner of an inherited setup for producing these (camera’s, film cutter, a ton of tin reels, and a setter for making the reels permanent, as well as an x-shoe adapter for a xenon flash, projector, and all of the other toys of a low-end pro kit) I love seeing how the top quality things were done.
My kit came from my grandfather, who had a consumer camera for vacation, and the low end pro for work. He wasn’t a photog, but an engineer. His last job before retirement in 1977 were the valves on the Alaska pipeline. There are some wonderful reels from his jobs in the 1950’s through the mid 1970’s from his collection. Some are digitized and out there. Any stamped “proprietary” have not been. Ya, its been 50 to 70 years, but some of it may still be considered an issue, unfortunately.
“Staring with simple dioramas”. Typo, but really not far out of line. :-)
I inherited a viewer and stack of reels. Still kind of fun to look at. If you want to know what some tourist attractions looked like (e.g. Marineland of the Pacific) in the 50’s-60’s, I may have you covered.
“Before VCRs, View-Master was the primary way people could interact with their favorite TV shows and movies when they weren’t being broadcast.”
Umm no. View Master was NEVER the primary way anyone but kids interacted with anything. In the 60s and 70s we bought movies, cartoons, etc on Super8, You could purchase everything from classic Universal monster movies and silent-era comedies to massive blockbuster hits like Star Wars Walt Disney also famously sold condensed versions of its animated and live-action features.
US Military sent ~100K units with ~6M reels for aircraft identification to the GI’s in the 1940’s (source: QI and Wikipedia, take your pick, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master)
Great way to tell a Texan from a Zero.