Analog Camera is a seriously fun and fast camera app with personality! From a design perspective, it’s very well done. The gestures and animations are lovely, and everything down to the sound design just works. The app is fast, intuitive, gesture-based and built for social. It makes the stock camera app feel like it’s.
According to Imagineer Ken Anderson original presentation: 'The Heartbeat of Africa show will open as a standard 70mm projection on a section of the dome filling an area of 28' x 53' there are two themes to our show: the first is to present an image of what Africa is like today - the differences of its peoples, the contrasts of traditional with modern, an 'african experience' that will give both insight and entertainment. The second theme is an exploration of the evolution of music which probably began, as man himself might have begun, in africa. Our title derives from the concept that everything has both visual as well as audible rhythms. As the film progresses, the music will follow its historical development, beginning with the sounds of nature, then moving on to the imitation of those sounds by the original instruments - drum, rattle, bells, and flutes - voices singing and chanting give rhythm to work. The drum-beats and flute notes of the first music become more sophisticated as they are used to accompany ceremonial and dance. Then african music went out into the rest of the world where it influenced european and african music.
Finally, at the conclusion of our show we will discover that african music has gone full—circle to return to its source in thoroughly modern jazz. 'As the guests enter the salon to await the film show they are greeted by the sound of a full orchestral arrangement of traditional african instruments and voices in the 'welcome ceremony.' The waiting area will be the interior of a chief's house attractively decorated with colorful african masks and objects individually illuminated. Centrally located will be the circular preshow stage mounted on a dogon platform called a togu—na. Traditional african musical instruments - xylophone, the stringed cora, the mbira (or stomach piano), fifes, horns, flutes, bells and gourd rattles—-will be hung from the ceiling.
After the opening 'welcome' number there will be other arrangements featuring these instruments playing african theme music. Many african tribes have musical themes to represent nature's manifestations——the forest, rivers, mountains, rain, different bird and animal species, etc, these will be the themes we will use. Each will be identified as will the names of the various instruments.
This section of the preshow in the waiting salon will last approximately nine minutes -slightly over one half of the total 17 minute time for the pre show.' 'Then our hostess (an ethnic african) will appear spotlighted at center stage and begin the final 8 minute segment of the preshow.
She will welcome the audience and inform them that the music and rhythm they have been listening to are the 'heartbeat of africa' - the very core of african life. Essential to this music around which life revolves are the african drums - like the drum family which she is about to introduce. These drums of various sizes and designs are arranged on the stage in a semicircle.
As she introduces each one by its name, it is spot-lighted and responds with animation and a drum roll (each drum beat will appear as an impulse spark of light at the point of origin on the drumhead.)'. 'The drumbeats have not been interrupted as we enter the fully illuminated theater. Then as guests have taken their seats and the lights dim, huge drums, appearing three dimensional as they seem to tumble overhead across the dark sky, sail away like asteroids in space, growing smaller as they reach a common vanishing point at the front center of the dome. Out of the zone of disappearance something appears. It grows, pulsing with the drumbeats, and becomes a decorative visualization of the african continent; throbbing with the drumbeats until we feel they might be the very heartbeats of the earth. The continent grows and grows until africa fills the whole foreground of the dome; then as it continues to grow larger we are inside the land mass, zeroing in on the central part where a huge waterway divides the land - the river congo. The camera moves toward the source of sound - behind the giant buttresses of a forest tree.
Out of the shadows of the roots, a figure steps into the sunlight - an old man, the griot an appealing-looking gentleman with wrinkled skin and a sparkle of humor in his eyes. This engaging personality who will become the leitmotiv of our film has a face and bearing warm with personality. On a strap held tightly under his left armpit, he carries an hour—glass shaped squeezedrum - the ancient talking drum of west africa. The griot indicates to us, the camera, that we should follow him: the old man has become our symbolic guide.
When he addresses us, it is directly into the camera: like us, he is an insider, and he engagingly (and somewhat conspiratorially) takes us along under his wing. The griot is an acute observer of nature and he points out details which without his help would have gone unseen.
The camera - our eyes goes on, stopping, seeing, moving again. The lens has totally assumed a subjective point of view and we move through a forest alive with creatures that must be sought out with the camera eye, vignettes of life that are only seen—-and their rhythms heard+—by the most experienced hunter. The formations of pelicans at nakuru in their choreographed fishing behavior, the fish eagle shouting its superb cry, a horde of multi—colored butterflies whose wings make a soft rhythmic patter as they flutter over a puddle, the thousands of pink flamingos that burst in a stunning crescendo of sound and color from a black lake. Water ripples across the dome: it becomes a cataract. Suddenly the spray is parted by the bow of a huge canoe. The chanting of strong men's voices bursts into the dome and we are with the powerful wagenia canoemen of zaire, transported as we are carried with them into the boiling rapids. Bursting with vitality and physical strength they stand tall at the long paddles of their canoes, twenty men to a craft, pulling together in exacting rhythmic strokes, chanting to help them in their great energy, pulling us through the rapids with exciting speed.
In Mali, a group of drummers beat a tempo as singing men and women flailing sticks thresh dried millet from the stalks——we catch the eye of the old griot, nearly hidden behind the other drummers as he accompanies them with his drum. He gives us a grin and a wink—letting us know that he is still with us. Then on the beaches of Senegal, chanting as they pull their net, the seiners take up the tempo. A graceful pirogue is poled across the mirrored water of Casamance to the song of the boatmen near Sangha, women pound grain in tall mortars, one with a baby slung on her back, asleep, its little head lolling from side to side in rhythm with the work and song.
Then we are in the lively market at djenne, following behind a woman as she weaves her way through the colorful multitude. On her head she balances a stack of loaded egg trays three feet tall. She moves with graceful nonchalance, colliding with merchants, stopping abruptly to let running children race by at her toes and, somehow,incredibly the eggs perched so crazily on her head do not tumble. As she passes an overhanging balcony, the griot appears.
He reaches down, plucks an egg from the top, gives us a conspiratorial grin, breaks the egg, throws back his head, and swallows it raw. The lovely senoufo girls of the ngoro ceremony and the acrobatic boys of the leopard dance near korhogo, the twelve-foot-tall masksof the Dogon in mali dance to the ancient sound of drums, the wildly whirling dancer—drummers of the baoule, the tumbling of the Wakamba, people dancing across the wide breadth of the continent. In ivory coast the masked dances of the dan leap on tall stilts, while the knife dancers of danane challenge gravity and fate with their perilous dance as young boys are seemingly caught in mid—air on the sharp points of long knives. The dazzlingly painted Nuba of Sudan fill the screen with their suberb ritual. Wild animals it pursues.
We race out onto the plain and our purpose immediately becomes clear. We are aboard a game—catching vehicle, manned by the Kenya government capture and translocation unit, and the ride is the most hair—raising experience imaginable. Flat—out on the tail of a herd of giraffe, we follow whereever they go, through gulleys, over ant hills, across rough grasslands. We plow through thickets of thorn bush without slackening speed, explosions of wicked thorns rat-tat-tatting against the windshield.
We pull alongside a young giraffe and a man who seems to cling to the truck with his toes reaches out with a lasso on a pole and nooses the animal. The music continues, growing richer, and now we are high in the sky, looking down on one of the most beautiful modern cities in the world; tall buildings on a green finger of land-—the cap verde——point into the blue atlantic. In the heart of the city, surrounded by modern skyscrapers, is a wide mall - the place de l'independance - and as we descend toward it we see that it is jammed with thousands of people. The sound of the jazz concert grows louder and more exciting, people in the mall are dancing.
Closer, as we come down, we see the sengalese group called, jalam, dressed in traditional clothing, incorporating traditional african instruments into their exciting music. We continue to move, closer and closer until we zero in on the drum of our old griot. Closer and closer until only the drum head fills the frame, and then as his fingers strike the skin we begin to see eruptions we can only describe as visual sound-laser light effects, interpreting the music in visual images, colorful, growing stronger as we cut back to the entire group of jalam, and now each of the instruments is emitting visual musical images, erupting from the drumheads, horns, and strings, increasing in importance until they explode in color and motion and take over the whole dome above us. The music plays on, fuller and more exciting, but now dakar and the griot and jalam change from realistic to surreal, vibrating with vivid color as they play, an exciting phantasmogoria of exploding, melting, drifting african designs, dazzling in three dimensions. It surely would have been a great show, and now, here is the interview by Didier Ghez of Jack Couffer - picture above - who filmed the movies for the Africa pavilion and who was one of Disney's key naturalist-cinematographers on various 'True-Life Adventures' and on many of the best 'nature' movies that the studio produced for cinema and TV over the years.
This is an excerpt from Jack Couffer full interview that you can find and Jack tell us more not only about his work on the project but also about why the Equatorial Africa pavilion was cancelled. JC: The original idea was that, like the other pavilions, the Africa Pavilion would be paid for by the countries represented. Morocco came in early, but it didn’t have the “Tarzan” flavor imagined by the brass.
Thus “Equatorial” was added to the idea. South Africa, wealthy and thus the most obvious as a contributor (even though it was outside the geographic limits, the country did have some traditional cultural interest). But it was in the midst of apartheid times and troubles and was considered off-limits. A team of Disney guys (and I don’t remember who they were if I ever knew) made an unsuccessful tour of African countries to solicit partners. I don’t know who they met with, but they failed to come up with any contributing countries. That doesn’t surprise me, because we’re talking about mostly impoverished countries run by governments with officials on the take. This all happened when the Africa Pavilion was only an idea, before any development began.
I made my first across-Africa tour, researching the places where I could shoot the kind of stuff we were after. Along the way, I was instructed to make pitches for contributing funds, and so met with upper-level government people — presidents and ministers, in Senegal, The Gambia, Ivory Coast, Mali, Zaire, Guinea, Ghana, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Sudan.
This was necessary, anyway, as I also had to be assured of obtaining the necessary permits and government cooperation. The Disney name opened doors that would otherwise be hard to crack.
And my first meetings in each country visited were usually arranged by the USA Embassy in that country. I met with titles such as Minister of Information, Minister of Arts and Culture, or Minister of Tourism. I met the people who the first guys should have approached, but didn’t. I made three tours across Equatorial Africa. The first was to find and select the different traditional events I wanted to film. I was accompanied by Sieuwke Bisleti who spoke French.
Important, as most of West Africa (where there is still lots of traditional life) is French-speaking. She had a way and personality that quickly charmed the Ministers and although we never got the funding, we did get wide-open doors and access to everything we asked for. Sieuwke and I went deep into the hinterlands to find traditional culture as untouched by modernity as it still exists in remote places to this day. Marty Sklar called the UCLA black history department and arranged for a half dozen students to look at the film and comment.
Couldn't have been a worst move. These young guys came with a chip on their shoulders. The theme of the film was the development of music in Africa (where it all began), and it covered a lot of traditional music in traditional settings. The gist of the objections that came from these kids was their embarrassment that some modern Africans look and behave the way they do. I wasn’t showing the Africa of today—suits and skyscrapers—but dwelt on Africans who still live in the traditional way.
The film was about history, after all, and African blacks, unlike African-American blacks, are of a different kind. All blacks who saw the film or knew the concept—and there were many—loved it. These UCLA guys missed the whole point of the Africa Pavilion, which was directed at showing the rich cultural history of the continent and the film greatly enhanced that point of view. Marty was uneasy after this session. I agonized as to who I could get to counter the student agitator remarks, someone who would make an impression on the Disney folks, and I settled on Alex Haley.
I got his number somehow and called him out of the blue. He wasn't connected with Disney in any way. He came, saw the film, loved it, and became my champion. He got support from Loretta King and others in the important African-American community. He made such an impression on the Disney folks that he was invited to join the Board of Directors. He told me they merely wanted him on the board as a 'token black' and declined.
There was one potentially touchy detail for which I wanted to get Alex’s input before I screened the movie for the Disney brass. I had shot a lot of dance and ceremonial material in remote areas where the tribal people still lived in their traditional way. One sequence, the Poro ceremony in northern Ivory Coast, was a favorite. A dozen musicians played flutes, drums, portable xylophones, and other percussion instruments for which I only heard the local names. They were led by a grotesquely masked and costumed figure who repeatedly cracked a long whip with explosive reports. A dancing chorus of twenty bare-breasted girls wove through the players in a snake-like column shaking pom-poms with rattles.
All was filmed at night in the light of open fires. It was wild, spectacular, and exciting, one of my favorite pieces—but what would Disney folks (Disney being what Disney is—or was) think of bare-breasted girls? Technical note: I shot this show with two cameras in 35mm (myself and Steve St John operating). 70mm cameras, although they are used for IMAX shows, were too bulky at this time to ship and use with a small crew all over Africa. We did a lot of experimentation with 35 mm projection on the big screens.
Because of a slight jitter between frames of 35 mm at 24 frames per second, we modified our cameras to shoot (and the projectors to project) at 40 frames per second. This smoothed out the jitter and with the sharpest anamorphic lenses available at the time (Technoscope—a British company), the result was nearly indistinguishable from 70 mm. I’ve got some regrets about this project. I spent a year on the film, researching, location scouting, writing, shooting, and editing. I was disappointed that it was never shown in its proper venue.
I was proud of this film—for its difference, its enjoyment and quality. Also, some of the ethnographic things may never be filmed again. Surely they would have been of interest to some anthropologists and musicologists. Even if the footage has been saved (and I doubt that it has been), it would be difficult to screen because of the 40 fps.
Also because as it was shot so specifically for three screens, that would make viewing difficult. Still, the center screen pretty much told the story and carried the show and that alone might have been of value to anthropologists. An astonishing story.
As a Cultural Representative at the Canadian Pavillion in the 80s' I loved to hang out with the PEKO and WED guys after my shift. I never knew this story, and would have loved to have seen this pavillion happen. I'm a Virtual Reality producer and read with interest the interface design considerations taking the audience from reality, to a 3D reality (lemur on the trees) to the 70mm film (I'm referencing part one of this article). Even the problems with 3 huge projection screens are not problems when you immerse the audience fully in an environment. The 'screen' are as big as you want them to be.