"Cabbages and Kings or the Dancing Princess" v18 AI 1979 Restored

“Cabbages and Kings or The Dancing Princess” is truly unique.
This film is a noteworthy example of an early work of an ambitious crew whose members later went on to score an Oscar, 5 Emmys, a BAFTA award and multiple other awards in their later careers. Cabbages and Kings itself won several festival awards, got written up in The American Cinematographer magazine and, (unusual for a student film), actually got a distribution deal. (The film makers never saw a dime of course. Welcome to Hollywood.) Anecdotally the film even got a thumbs up from Stanley Donen, director of “Singing’ in the Rain.” Not bad for a production whose budget was a meager $1200.

It’s important to recall that this film was made in a time before cell phones, before digital cameras, before home video, before PCs, before fax machines, before the internet, before social media, before so many of the film-making tools and other daily conveniences we now take for granted. Additionally, in the digital age we tend to forget just how tedious the process of telling stories via photo-chemical processes was. In our production not only was there was no video assist during the filming, there was not even a direct view finder on the camera. We only learned if we got the shot days later when the film came back from the lab. Also, film is expensive so one doesn’t shoot many takes. Most of this film was done in two takes or less per setup.


Likewise in post production compositing you really had to get it right the first time. Today in digital compositing we’ll do the equivalent of dozens of “takes” in an hour. Back then one or two a week.But now let’s go back to 1977…

ORIGINS
When I was searching for inspiration for my senior “thesis” film project, one of the things I did was head back to the well that Uncle Walt had dipped from so often—Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I checked out a volume from the library (you know, before there was the Internet) and started reading story after story. But I was quickly dismayed and shocked at how terrible most of the folk tales were. Many of them were just strangeness with little rhyme or reason. Senseless cruelty, violence, and lack of humanity permeated most of them. But I kept reading, hoping to stumble onto some un-discovered nugget.

Finally I came upon a tale called “King Thrushbeard”.
Eureka!
It had it all—sin, redemption, romance, spectacle, laughs, tears, and even a surprise ending. Yep, this was the one. I cobbled together a script, melding the story with bits of another tale called “The Dancing Princesses” to give our heroine a bit more identifiable human depth beyond being just a spoiled brat.

But how to get this sweeping costume epic saga on the screen for a budget of umm…essentially zero?

In my advanced animation class I had become enamored of the works of a German film maker named Lotte Reiniger who made fairy tale movies using delightful cutout silhouette puppets. Telling our story via animation was one possibility, but not a realistic one considering the available resources and hours available in a school semester.

But as an animation teaching assistant I did have additional access to the equipment of the animation department so it would be wise to leverage that somehow.I came up with the concept of doing a Lotte Reiniger style silhouette movie but utilizing live actors, combined with animated backgrounds and some peripheral animated characters. It would be ambitious and crazy but I was young and stupid and decided to go for it.

In order to do so I had to prepare a presentation and a pitch for the faculty “producers” who would choose only four team project proposals to go into production for that semester. Though I was nervous, stuttering, and naive, for some reason selling the concept and the script turned out to be a piece of cake. It seems I had them with the color storyboards. I think they must have wanted to make bets on whether we would be successful or not. I swallowed hard and we were off to the races.

PRODUCTION
To generate the silhouetted live action we filmed the actors against a white screen by shooting high contrast black and white film stock running through the school’s antique 16mm Mitchell pin registered camera.After the filming (and editing) the black and white originals of the chosen takes would be bi-packed (or sandwiched) with unexposed color stock as it was run through our Oxberry animation camera to photograph the watercolor painted backgrounds. Thus the silhouette footage would “cast its shadow“ on the new color film while it was recording the artwork, resulting in a composite image where the background image is of highest quality, being a first generation image.In addition to adding actors to a background, this process could also be used, by shooting one frame at a time, to add animated characters and effects to a scene to interact with the live characters.

Make sure you also check out the restoration demo here on YouTube: • "Cabbages and Kin...
-Tim Landry