Richfield Shows Its Past and Future In Dramatic, Entertaining Exhibit
THE Richfield Show, carrying the title The World Beneath us, uses two separate motion picture media — CinemaScope and the "underground" fiberglass dome show.
The presentation is held in a modernistic theater which accommodates 125 people. As spectators file in, they see a wide, CinemaScope screen at the rear of the theater. In front of the screen, occupying the position which would normally be held by a stage, is a 40-foot wide diorama of the Los Angeles basin.
The diorama is an authentic model on a one-inch-to-100-foot-scale. Its 840 square feet represent 4.50 square miles of Southern California. The diorama was patterned accurately from some 100 aerial photographs taken especially to guide the technicians of the Dell Display Company, who put in some 8,000 man hours building the model.
As with the other Tomorrowland shows, the movie presentation in the Richfield exhibit is on a highly automatic basis. Pressing a single button starts the show and automatic timing controls do the rest.
The first portion of the show is on the wide CinemaScope screen. In five minutes a cartoon, produced for Richfield by Disney Productions, tells a capsule-sized three-billion year geological history of the world. A full scale entertainment effort, this cartoon was turned out by crack Disney personnel, some of them with experience on such major works as Lady and the Tramp. The Disney people put months of library research into historic and geophysical study. One portion of the crew even went through a concentrated two-week course in geology to pick up background for depicting underground formations. The end result is made up of some 20,000 drawings on 450 feet of 35mm film.
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