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Post #985965

Author
Spaced Ranger
Parent topic
Fantasia (a WIP)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/985965/action/topic#985965
Date created
21-Aug-2016, 11:17 AM

SilverWook said:
The only scant evidence widescreen was planned for Fantasia in 1940 is a very murky shot of a mixing session …

Thanks for that reminder (same website, too)! It looks like the “widescreen” Superscope was released, and to bad reviews:

Curator’s Note:
Buried in the tons of historical materials written about Fantasia is an infrequent mention that Walt Disney planned to show the film in a wide screen format. Figure 14 may give us evidence that those statements were true. The aspect ratio of the projection screen illustrated here is 2.14:1. In the early 1950s, Disney released the film in a Superscope version with four channel magnetic sound. The critics panned the cropping of the film, which may have been a sloppy job, pretty atypical of anything that Mr. Disney was associated with.

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FrankT said:
So… Do I render the whole thing in 4:3 with the curtain effect untouched, or…?

Coincidentally, I worked up a demonstration of the above referenced Superscope picture (from the Fantasound studio) to show how the original 4:3 photography was cropped in this particular shot (other shot compositions would be different). Keep in mind that such instances of extreme zoom/crop would look grain-awful:

If your source is an actual Superscope print, all you would do is confirm that the entire frame (black bars and all) is in it’s widescreen projected size. The characters would look normal (no squash or stretch). Everything else, zooms, crops, bars, regardless of when they show and when they don’t, is as what they wanted (again, the critics panned it).