Home Movies (1943)

PACE 334 HOME MOVIES FOR OCTOBER Here's the Key to Good Titling! Home movie titling is really easy once you have a reliable guide that tells how to focus and center camera, what exposure to use, styles of lettering to use, title measurements, etc. Here is THAT guide written by America's title making authority, Ceorge Cushman. Its contents include: • How to compose and letter titles • Choosing proper title backgrounds • Auxiliary Lens Chart and Field Areas • How to develop your own titles • Tinting and Toning Titles • Complete plans for building titler • Animation in Titles • How to Center Titles • Trick Effects in Titles • Exposure Data for Titles • Exposure Tests for Titles — and Scores of Other Topics THIRD EDITION NOW READY. ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY! $1 00 Postpaid VER HALEN PUBLICATIONS 6060 Sunset Blvd.. Hollywood 28. Calif. almost every play in order to make sure they will catch the spectacular ones. Experience, a sort of football wisdom mixed with good news sense, guides them in selecting the plays to pass up. Newsreel cameramen no longer film kickoffs. This action rarely makes an interesting picture and it is seldom that a kickoff is followed by a spectacular return. Players are badly scattered over the field. If a regular short focus lens is used on the scene, the players will appear mere specs on the screen. The kickoff can be omitted for the same reason that we would no longer begin a vacation film with scenes of packing a suitcase and placing it in our automobile. Everyone knows a football game begins with a kickoff. The well-rounded, completely edited football movie will include appropriate human interest and action shots a: the beginning and intercut throughout the action. A good start is a view of the players running on to the field in their first appearance before start of the game. This generally brings forth applause and cheers from the spectators. Swing your camera around and catch this audience reaction. Then look about and size up the crowd around you. You may be fortunate in finding a "character" there whose antics throughout the game will furnish one or more interesting shots for human interest. Plan to get shots of parade formations, color card maneuvers in the rooting section, and of the cheer leaders — just brief shots of each are all that are necessary tc spice up the reel when editing. If action shots of the game are most important, then concentrate on these shots first. Then, when film gets low, make the planned atmosphere and human interest shots. Another wise plan, if you are shooting more than one roll of film, is to reserve atmosphere shooting for the last few feet. Thus, you won't be liable to run out of film in the midst of a spectacular action shot. Try to gauge your shooting so that film changing takes place between quarters or the half. Never let your camera get lew on film during playing time. Something might happen just as film runs out! Lclgar J3erg,en Present* . . . • Continued from Page )iy funny scenes around the Bergen swimming pool and also of Bergen treating his pate to stay the thinning of his hair. Bergen's boyhood hobby of building model steam engines culminated in the purchase of an old steam driven automobile about the time gas rationing set in. and this comes in for a laughable sequence in which Bergen is depicted as a miserly guy who acquired the car because it could be operated on kerosene costing only 6c a gallon. Another Bergen hobby is that of bee fancier, and Charlie's camera pictures Bergen smoking out the bees and then the bees virtually smoking out Bergen. Bergen's clever patter, in the voice of Charlie McCarthy, accompanies all of these scenes, pointing up the humor. Bergen's ambition to become an actor manifest itself early, and when he was fifteen, he bought a motion picture camera. With the aid of a friend he made a screen test of himself he hoped would land him in Hollywood. This film remains one of his prize possessions and a copy of it has been cut into Charlie's first film production. Charlie uses it to show an impoverished Bergen before he "met" McCarthy who later was to bring him success. Then, subsequent scenes climaxed by pictures of Bergen and Charlie leading a Tournament of Roses parade, show, as Charlie states, "Vi'hat happened to Bergen after he met me!" In analyzing the showmanship values of this film, there are one or two features which the average movie amateur might well adopt as a means of making his pictures more entertaining. For one thing, the practice of orally narrating a picture through a P. A. system during screening comes in for solid support from Bergen. "Oral narration when skillfully done," said Bergen, "offers certain advantages in that it can be altered to suit the audience." Another thing, Bergen's film proves the value of humorous titles in getting a picture off to a good start. A notable feature of his titles, incidentally, was his choice of soft pastel shades for the backgrounds with the lettering in white — a pleasing contrast. B;rgen insists he's strictly an amateur movie maker. He's been making movies since he was fifteen and has cwned practically every make and type cf 1 6mm. camera plus one or two 35mm. jobs. Occasionally his interests extend into the professional field, but only as a producer. To his credit are several 1 6mm training films on nursing, a project that stemmed from one of his non-theatrical interests, a foundation for the training of graduate nurses. His are said to be the only such films available on this subject and are now being distributed nationally by Burton Holmes. The movies he made for entertaining servicemen, however, have probably netted Bergen the greatest enjoyment.