Motography (Apr-Dec 1911)

April, 1911. MOTOGRAPHY 33 inated the so-called magical pictures, in which persons and objects appeared or disappeared in an instant. Of course, these were merely placed in or removed from the scene while the shutter of the camera was closed between the photographs. Then dolls and Teddy bears were shown, moving as if alive, and acting stories in pantomime and letters whirled in circles and zigzags in the darkness finally flying into place to form words and sentences. All of these illusions were obtained by posing the dolls or toys or slightly changing the positions of letters scattered on a black screen, while the shutters of the cameras were closed. It was tedious work, too. One of the "doll films," for instance, required from four to five days of continuous posing. Then the trick of substitution was brought to perfection. It has survived as one of the best of tht devices. In the picture of the "Great Train Robbery," for example, a dummy was substituted and thrown from a moving train in place of the living fireman who had been knocked on the head with a piece of coal. In one of the latest pictures this substitution is carried to such perfection that the spectators fairly rise in their seats in their excitement. Two men seem to be fighting on the edge of a high wall of a castle. One overpowers the other and throws him from the parapet to the ground far beneath. A dummy has been substituted for the living performer so neatly that the illusion of the fall cannot be detected in a scene of startling realism. This idea of substitution also accounted for an effective scene in a French moving picture. A thief pursued by monks had climbed to the belfry of a monastery. After tugging together at a bell rope in an effort to reach the thief all fell together through the floor to a lower story. The actors actually fell in a heap on the belfry floor. Then dummies were substituted for them, being posed in precisely the same position of each. The dummies fell through a trap in the floor. They were seen in the next picture dropping to the lower story. Finally, the living actors were substituted for the dummies again, any slight differences in the poses being screened by a thin veil of dust. Even the devices, merely as such, no longer suffice for the audiences at moving picture shows. The ideas must be more numerous. No labor seems to be too great to produce startling or bizarre effects. A foreign maker of moving pictures, for instance, amused audiences with the story of a paper hanger crawling like a fly over a ceiling, head down, laughing and talking to an assistant who passes bits, of paper to him from the floor beneath. On another picture a man, clinging to the ceiling as though glued there, goes through a series of antics and finally hangs suspended by his hands and his head. The secret of these illusions is as simple as that of a conundrum — when you know it. The men walking head downward on the ceiling are actually performing on a floor. The walls and furniture in the room are suspended upside down, after being fastened to a framework of wooden strips. Only the man who, in the moving picture, seems to be standing on the floor, has a difficult part to play. He acts while hanging head downward with his feet tied to the wooden frame of the scene. To make this scene effective the operator of the moving picture merely reverses the film. The same device is used while showing a long fall, or to make a man seen to climb a wall or the side of a house. In this instance, the scene cloth representing the walls and roof of the house is laid on the floor of How a Collision Between a Train and an Automobile Is Staged for the Moving-Picture Camera.