Sprinkle Tinkle

Animation Effects: How They Created the Snowflakes in Fantasia

Herman Schultheis was an effects animator who worked on Fantasia. He kept a tight record of the effects they were creating from 1938-1941, and a photo display of how they were done.

Schultheis disappeared in 1954 while trekking through Central America, and the notebook was forgotten until his wife’s death in the early 1990s, after which it was discovered behind the couple’s bedroom wall. In 2014, Disney released this hallowed tome, this book of magic spells for aspiring animators as The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis & the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic. It is AWESOME.

Shown above are a few of the steps Disney’s animation effects artists used to create those hypnotic spinning snowflakes.

Pics 1 + 2: The Ink and Paint Department traced scientific diagrams of real snowflakes onto a material slightly heavier that regular animation cels, then used a translucent white paint to fill them in.

Pic 3: The snowflakes were then cut out and attached to spinning gears.

Pic 4: The gears were affixed to wire ‘guide tracks’ (almost like toy train tracks) that mapped the snowflakes’ path of action.

Pic 5: Sheets of black velvet were used to hide the tracks from the animation camera.

Pic 6: The snowflakes were then filmed one frame at a time – stop-motion style – as they spun on their gears, ‘descending’ down the wire guide tracks.

Pics 7-9: The film footage of the snowflakes was then ‘burned’ over the multiplane background, where it was matched with the 2D animated fairies.

Voilà – movie magic!