Getting Warmer

Content

This film is about the history of (home) heating. Throughout history, man has always been looking for warmth and comfort in his life. In a light-hearted, poetic way, ‘Getting Warmer’ tells what man has faced in practice. Several inventions are shown. The results are mixed. Until central heating makes its appearance in homes and buildings. This turns out to be the ultimate solution. Of course, the fuel is supplied by Esso by tanker.

Trivia

This film was commissioned by an advertiser who had difficulty agreeing with the concept of a ‘puppet film’. Animator Joop Bekker was ordered by the client to animate a number of scenes over and over again because they were rejected. The client thought it was ‘too funny’ for this serious subject matter. Joop Bekker later commented, ‘The client actually wanted to see live action and that's how the puppets had to be used.’
The team at Dollywood put a spin on it and the result is great! The painstaking work was crowned with a nomination for the Council of Europe Film Prize - 1962.

Where there's smoke, there's fire

In films like this, besides puppets and sets, special effects have been used.

Explanation:

• ‘fire’ was created by painting the flames on thick cellophane and placing them as cut-out cartoon elements between the fireplace blocks. Through a hole, under the backdrop, a small spotlight with a colour filter was often placed to emphasise the glow of the fire.
• ‘Smoke’.
  In several places, smoke can be seen curling out of chimneys. As long as there was no animated puppet around, a maquette could suffice, with real smoke rising from it. So this was live-action, filmed in a maquette. Once a puppet was in view, the smoke (or steam) was copied into the image using double shots. This required enormous precision. The smoke/steam was filmed separately. This was done against a black background. The ‘pipe’ was (like the background) matte black and had to have exactly the same position in the picture as the chimney that was in the puppet film set. No video editing facilities were available to position the image. The black background functioned as the current ‘greenscreen’ and became transparent after a number of operations. Smoke was thus integrated into the puppet film set.
  In a similar way, a rainstorm could also be simulated. Imaging these natural elements was therefore very laborious. For the Dollywood staff, however, this was the only way this could be shown.

Graphic lines

At three quarters of the running time, we see how a framework emerges in an apparently empty set, showing pipes of radiators. A building then forms around this. Now you would use a digital drawing programme for this. Done.
For this shot, the outline of the building was made from perspex glass, which matched the building's exact dimensions. Ingeniously, the corners and seams of the transparent model were illuminated, making the edges stand out like white lines against a dark background. This gave a graphic effect. The interplay of lines flows smoothly into a real building! Again, double shots were used to film the second school model amidst a landscape.

More complex

The complexity of this shot is greater because two camera movements were recorded at the beginning and end of the shot. Know that film cameras did not have a ‘see-through viewfinder’, and so the cameraman never saw what he was actually filming. He had to rehearse this for himself beforehand (without film in the camera). There was no computer controlling the camera. It was handwork.

Nice but boring

At the end of the film, we are shown again in detail where in the house comfort is to be found. This shot lasts over one minute. This is currently 3x the length of a modern commercial. Anyone who sees this scene now will quickly experience it as slow and boring. Do realise, though, that for the relatively new medium of ‘advertising film’, the transition from entertainment to commercial was a risky one at the time. The message had to be offered to the audience in an abundantly clear manner. The balloons that appeared on screen were the result of three-way merging of different film shots: 1) the house, 2) the balloon-shaped frame; and 3) the image that appeared inside the balloon. This required extremely secure preparation, in which the collaborators had to be well aware of the technical steps needed to achieve this result.
Who looks back at the scene now sees only a slowly told story. The technical ingenuity thus largely disappears.

Story of ...

Dollywood had gained an international reputation for making realistic animated films showing the history of a technique. Elsewhere on this website, films such as ‘Story of time’ (1949) (from Signal Film), ‘Story of Light’ (1954) and ‘Light and Mankind’ (1954) . Not surprisingly, therefore, the working title of this film was ‘Story of Home Heating’.