White Horse whisky

Content

A bottle with a label containing a white horse. This detaches itself from a label and then gallops through the skies. In this way, the white horse appears in numerous places around the world. Everywhere, it is welcomed by people who raise their glasses in greeting. Whisky bottles shoot out of the ground. Eventually, a bottle floats above the globe."

For its time, it was a spectacular gimmick, in which the story is less relevant, but the visual spectacle all the more so. The commercial was well received. Therefore, a sequel was made ‘White Horse Rides Again’, of which no footage has been recovered to date.

3D horse

Bummer that the effect of the three-dimensional horse is not clearly visible. Filming a series carved out of wood horses was very difficult at the time because it was shot on the high-contrast Technicolor film. An additional lab edit (double printing) was needed to ‘project’ the horse into the sky. Moreover, we are looking at a scan of an analogue VHS video tape here, so by no means high resolution.
Puppet maker Harry Tolsma had a huge job making the wooden models, each about 50 cm long.

Outstanding

Puppet maker Harry Tolsma had a huge job making the wooden models, each about 50 cm long. At the time, the basis for the movement was taken from the classic photo series ‘Animal Locomotion’ by Edward Muybridge (1830-1904). In this case, the horse only needs to walk from left to right. For this reason, only the right side of the horse was modelled in wood.  To make the whole cycle of one gallop series, 12 different poses were cut out of wood, seamlessly matching each other. During the shoot, #1 joined behind #12, creating a repeating pattern.

Muybridge

In the 1960s, capturing high-speed movement was not easy. Fortunately, the studio had at its disposal the standard book work of photographer Muybridge, who had built an experimental ‘motordrive’ camera in 1878 and used it to capture numerous movements. These photographs were used in this case as examples of a galloping horse.

Twelve horses

Puppet creator Harry Tolsma was given this experimental photo series (from 1878!) as a working drawing to produce the white horse three-dimensionally. Director Henk Kabos was confident that this was enough for the experienced Tolsma. He had his work cut out for him. 
Below are similar photographs placed in an endless loop (‘cycle’).