A back room behind a real-estate office on Kingswell Avenue, a borrowed camera, an uncle's garage before that — and the whole trick was a live girl standing in front of white paper so the drawing could be laid in around her. Cut to the contract: Walt and Roy sign for the Alice Comedies in 1923 and call the thing the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Two names on the door, one of them doing the sums.
Five years on and the sums changed shape: for Steamboat Willie in '28 young Wilfred Jackson sat with a metronome and a harmonica, working out how many frames a beat took, so the band could be cut to the drawing instead of the other way round. Carl Edouarde conducted the date in New York. Listen for how the players hit the action square — that's a click, before anybody called it one.
The door downstairs said Holly-Vermont Realty, so for a while the most famous studio on earth was the back room of a man selling houses. Rent was reportedly about ten dollars a month.