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May-June. 1938
THE C fXR-TECHNICI AN
7
Recollections of a Pioneer Cameraman
By F. HAROLD BASTICK.
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HEN J first went into the picture business nearly thirty years ago, trick photography was more of a necessity than a stunt. It was just as important to pack our thousand toot "feat ures with spectacles and dramatic effects as is the case with the more ambitious productions of modern studios. The great difference however, was that in place of unlimited resources in technical apparatus, capital and facilities, we had to rely entirely on imagination and ingenuity— in other words "Fake."
No matter how ambitious the script or what extravagant situations it called for, ways and means were always devised to "put it on the screen."
1 was lucky enough to start my career as a cameraman with W. R. Booth, a pioneer producer and genius at trick photography. He was originally with Maskelyne and Cook at the Egyptian Hall, so was literally steeped in the art of illusion. In his outdoor (garden) "studio at isleworth, many trick effects were born which can be seen with surprising frequency in the picture theatres to-da\ . The very settings used were fakes. In the case of an interior, the entire room would be painted in black and white on a backcloth, the big Moy camera focussed on it, and real furniture set in positions to tally with the perspective of the backcloth. Realism was added by cutting a slit in the canvas and pushing a real table halfway into the hole to match up with the painted half-table on the cloth !
The then popular 500ft. "trick-comedies" produced many weird and wonderful ejects and provided us with plenty of practice in achieving the (apparently) impossible. In one, a man suffering from a hangover was sitting on his bed with a splitting headache. The camera moved to close-up and the man's head actually split in two, the gap widening until the half-heads were at either side of the screen. Out floated bottles of champagne, lobsters, etc., the hangover was cured and the half-heads reunited, registering a beatific expression of relief. Many equally fantastic effects were achieved by using a combination of one-turn-one-picture and reverse turning but as the cameras of those days were not fitted with reverse gears, they had to be turned upside down on the tripods and tinned in the ordinary way!
While still with Booth, I was shown a completed film of Anstey's "Brass Bottle." The backer did not like the sudden appearances of the Genii (obviously obtained by the old "stop" method) and asked me if I could make them into something more gradual and artistic. I did so by having the two frames on either side of the "stop" enlarged to whole-plate stills. One. of course.
showed the bottle lying in the foreground of the set and flic other the Genii standing beside it. The first still was pinned to a board and covered with a sheet of clear glass, the camera focussed on this giving the exact shot as originally taken. "Vapour," apparently coming from the mouth of the bottle, was then painted on the glass and taken, one-turn-one-picture, until it took the rough shape of the Genii. The second still was then substituted under the painted glass and the "vapour" gradually washed off, revealing the Genii in position. This length of film inserted in the already completed picture gave the desired gradual appearance and brought me some measure of fame as a "fake expert. "
Progress in trick photography was rapid and big strides were made in the gentle art of double exposure. It was soon possible to film one artiste playing twin parts in a really convincing manner and I believe I can claim to be the first cameraman to make a player shake hands with herself.
This was in a ■"London Film" at the old St. Margaret's Studio, which was produced by Maurice Elvey. Elisabeth Risden was the star. The effect was obtained by using two model hands made by the property department. Fitting together in a perfect handclasp, they were covered with black gloves and attached to the high back of a chair placed exactly on the centre mask line. The one on the side to be shot first was then taken away and "Rizzy," wearing white gloves, simply had to grasp th one that remained. While winding back for the second exposure the dummy hand was replaced, its opposite number removed and the other half of the double exposure taken.
The picture-going public had now become more critical and soon recognised a double exposure as such. Hence another incident in which the same star featured. It was an ordinary twin-part double exposure. In one scene she stood talking to her counterpart across a table through the centre of which ran the mask line. To confound the critics, however, and prove this double exposure was not a double exposure, we provided a novel twist. As one figure moved towards the door to exit at the end of the scene, the other followed right across the picture and looked out after "herself." All that was done was to snatch the mask out of the camera during the second take, at the moment the artiste reached it and so leave the whole set clear.
Models always played a large part in faking difficult or unusual scenes and most of the early train smashes
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