Even the birch plywood desks these animators sat at were customized for their tasks, whether they were sketching storyboards, executing the entry-level grunt work of the “inbetweener,” or painting backgrounds.ĭisney animator office with Kem Weber furniture, courtesy The Walt Disney Family Museum. Weber’s low-rise buildings, which quickly filled with the company’s roughly 800 employees, were sited to maximize northern exposure, ensuring optimal natural light for Disney’s small army of animators. Together, they created a work environment that was designed expressly for animators.

As a builder, though, Walt Disney may have been even more ambitious, spending much of 1938 and ’39 consulting with his new studio’s architect, Kem Weber. “It was the basic, Kem Weber Animator’s Desk, big, wide, and solid as a rock, like sitting at a monument.”Īs a filmmaker, Disney always had big plans. But even before the financial success of “Snow White” was assured, Disney had pushed “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia,” into production at his company’s cramped Hyperion Studios-hence the need for a new animation facility in Burbank. At the time, Disney’s first full-length animated feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” was on its way to grossing $8 million at the box office, a new record for a motion picture. In the summer of 1938, Walt Disney put $10,000 down on 51 acres of land in Burbank, California, for a new animation studio. Courtesy of Mark Kirkland photo © Dave Bossert. Ollie Johnston’s Kem Weber Compact Animator’s Desk.

Diy animation desk