On this day in 1960, Disney creative genius Ub Iwerks won an Oscar for Technical Achievement at the 32nd Annual Academy Awards. The award recognized Iwerks’s design of an optical printer for special effects. The device was essentially a camera that worked together with at least one projector to take pictures of photographs. This made special effects and matte shots possible, like fade outs and fade ins, dissolves, slow motion, and fast motion.
