OPTICAL PRINTERS AND COMPOSITING
The Optical Printer was invented in 1931, as a device to take a picture of a picture. It is essentially a process camera and projector, called a printer and these two pieces of equipment face are mounted facing one another. In this way a projected image can be focused onto the film of a camera. The printer head (projector) and process camera are mounted on rails allowing the distance between the two can be adjusted. The rails allow the user to enlarge, reduce or exactly duplicate the size of the projected image. They have many uses during post-production. They can create basic effects like fades and dissolves. Optical printers can also put several images, filmed a various times, into one shot - like adding rain, fog and lightning to a single scene. This piece of equipment is used to add matte paintings, background shots, skylines, and miniatures to live action shots. The final shot is called an Optical composite. An Optical is any effect that is done with an Optical Printer.
Linwood G. Dunn.
Dunn's film career goes back to 1923, in the days of silent film, when he worked as a projectionist for the American Motion Picture Picture Corp. Following a relative to Hollywood, he was hired as an assistant for the Pathé company in 1925. He built a pioneering zoom lens, which, to everyone’s amazement, worked perfectly. Using a homemade optical printer, consisting of a Mitchell camera and a projector in a lathe bed, he made his first matte shots for Ringside (1929). Optical effects soon became his major interest, and he began working on ways to improve the art. He soon headed his own optical effects department and eventually became head of the photographic effects department. In 1942, the Eastman Kodak Company approached Dunn about a need in the U.S. Armed Forces Photographic Units for special effects optical printers. Printers at the studios were homemade rigs, but they had never been manufactured as a commercial product. The government commissioned Dunn to produce such a printer. With his longtime associate Cecil Love, Dunn designed the device, which was manufactured by the Acme Tool and Manufacturing Co. of Burbank. After the war, the equipment was made available to studios and independent effects labs. In 1944, Dunn and Love received an Academy Technical Achievement Award for "the design and construction of the Acme-Dunn Optical Printer."
Optical printers could be used to produce effects with more control at a later stage, with no danger of spoiling the original negative. To produce a fade-out, the master positive of a scene is loaded into the printer head, and re-photographed one frame at a time by the camera. The fade-out is produced by incrementally closing the cameras shutter in order to reduce the amount of light that reaches the copied film. To create a dissolve from one shot to another, the editor studies the film and marks the points at which a dissolve should start and end. The first scene is loaded into the printer head, and the camera’s shutter is gradually closed during re-photography to produce a conventional fade-out. The second shot is then loaded into the printer head, the film in the camera back-wpound and a second exposure made. This time the cameras shutter is gradually opened over the same period that it was previously closed. The second image therefore fades in as the first fades out, the two appearing to dissolve into one another.
Before digital techniques, compositing was done with optical printer. One of the most extensive uses of the Optical Printer was in the feature film Blade Runner. A film, which was loaded with miniatures and matte paintings. The print of the film was run through an optical printer in black and white, which showed everything that would be in the shot. As many as 30 composted elements would appear in one shot. Multiple shots were added at once while others optical shots were done layers after layer. The original Star Wars trilogy heavily relied on the Optical Printer in which George Lucas's ILM effects company created different versions of the Optical Printer best suited for specific needs. The trilogy used an extensive amount of miniatures, blaster shots and matte paintings to create the films. Making Superman fly on film, for instance, was done by compositing an image of Superman dangling from ropes in a studio with the tops of skyscrapers shot on location. The optical printer is also used to create whole-scale changes to already shot film (converting a regular speed film to slow motion for example).
The Optical Printer would be considered the most important piece of post production equipment in the Special Effects world. While computers are generally making the Optical printers an outdated piece of machinery, it will not easily be forgotten by those who do the effects or fans who know how they are done. With rising production costs and series budgets the Optical Printer is likely to remain around for a long time. There are still some animators who find new and interesting uses for this piece of equipment, rescuing it from obscurity Moritz, Williamis one of them.
Sources:
Richard Rickitt. (2000). Special Effects the History and Technique. London: Virgin Books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linwood_G._Dunn
http://www.scifi2k.com/misc_html/articles/aricle_optical_printer.html
