alt Hacker NewsHow was the Universal Pictures 1936 opening logo created?
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Reminds me a bit of the BBC 1 ident from the 1960s-1980s, which was a physical model that was broadcast live (not even recorded!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)
It was replaced with a custom-built electronic system which was itself pretty crazy. One of the COWs came up for sale a few years back:
Doctor Who's original 1960's intro is in a similar vein of "wait a minute, how'd they do that in that year?". This predated any commercial synthesisers and was mind blowing for its time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4
https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/making-of-the-doct...
Considering the breakdown of all the elements that went into it and the meticulous attention to detail, it’s not surprising that the creation of this logo took around half a year to complete. Golitzen really embraced the Art Deco movement and was also a storyboard artist for NANA in 1934, but its hard to find any illustrations online, what i can find is a mention of his name in a MOMA art/cinema expo from the late 70s https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327139.pdf
The original HBO "Feature Presentation" intro was shot with minatures and similar sorts of effects, all before digital/CGI existed or was feasible. There's a documentary about it on YouTube
There used to be real craft, based on the physical world, in creating that movie magic. It took a lot of knowledge about different stuff - materials, photography - to create this.
For other amazing examples of practical effects, check out the Visual Music artist Jordan Belson.
It strikes me as funny, because I've been around movie magic for so long, that the wizbang grafix abilities of today have nearly erased from memory the knowledge of practical FX. I do miss the extra features of a nice DVD release with a bunch of BTS clips that showed the various movie magic to make the final version. I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.
The Columbia logo is another one that has been updated over the years. I've seen writes up about refreshing it back when it was an edit bay ruled by tape based playback. Each layer of clouds was on a separate tape all played back in sync to generate the final comp. Further back, it would have been separate film strips.
Didn’t realize plexiglass existed in the 1930s!
related aside : the 'This Island Earth' MST3K is a great episode, which apparently features a part of the effect.
'This Island Earth' is great all by itself if you're into campy early-ish scifi.
It is interesting to see a post like this at the top of HN considering the vibe here lately.
The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.
And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.
I think the reflection of the letters must also have been a separate shot with no gap in-between the letters and the globe. Otherwise you would have seen the backs of letters on the left and right through the globe in the final sequence.
Side note: highly recommend MST3K The Movie, which features the classic movie “This Island Earth”.
Scott Manley made a video talking about what would happen if the modern logo was real: https://youtu.be/cBxb6LRFG08
The stackexchange post is a copy of the information in a blog which is a copy of the information the this X thread: https://x.com/That_Chair_Guy/status/1264632757856198658
I love practical effects in cinema
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Someone once described the secret to making magic as putting in far more effort than any reasonable person would, such that no reasonable person would think you'd done it the hard way.