Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1952)

275 FOREGROUNDS A LA CARTE With ingenuity and imagination, the cameraman may often remold nature nearer to the heart's desire N. P. HARIHARAN, ACL OMAR KHAYYAM, he of The Rubaiyat fame, was of course a Persian . . . while I am a Hindu. But Persia, although not adjoining Mother India, is close to it geographically and, I am led to think, spiritually as well. For was it not in The Rubaiyat that this Persian poet sang: Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits — and then Remould it nearer to the heart's desire! On a far lesser level, perhaps, it has long seemed to me that this ability to remold the natural world nearer to the heart's desire is one of the truly creative opportunities offered the amateur movie maker. Take the matter of foregrounds, for instance, or even backgrounds. Hollywood has been remaking both of these for years, in operations ranging from the simplicity of planting a tree branch or two in a barren foreground to the complexity of a projected process background depicting an entire New York City skyline. We amateurs, of course, cannot aspire to this latter legerdemain. But we can do something about remaking the natural world on a small scale. I touched briefly on the matter of portable backgrounds in my June discussion, A Camera Cradle of Many Uses. My arrangement consists of two hinged sections of plywood, 2 by 4 feet each, over which I can drape lengths of cloth or paper of a color suitable to the subject being filmed. I have found this setup invaluable in adding clarity and simplicity to my closeup shots of flowers, birds, butterflies and small insects in the backyard garden. The amateur also can do more than most of us think to increase the effectiveness of his foregrounds. I noted with the greatest interest, for example, that Glen Turner, ACL, last year's Maxim Award winner, created the great majority of his delicate dance settings for In Fancy Free by the simple expedient of double exposing miniature foreground frames over his ballet patterns. Much of the same effect can be created wholly without double exposure by placing scale models of suitable objects close to one's camera and then shooting the scene with a wide angle lens. I recall one holiday at a beach resort where I came across a superb setting. The sky was a brilliant blue; the waves broke on the golden beach in cascades of white surf, and the shoreline curved away to the background with a gentle symmetry. But there simply was no foreground to give the entire picture depth. So, using pebbles and loose earth. I built a small mound about 2 feet long, 1 foot wide and 6 inches high. Off center on the top of this I planted a miniature palm tree (purchased at a souvenir shop), and I then placed my camera at a low level behind this half-pint sand dune. The resulting scene, shot with a wide angle lens, was an artist's dream. However, make-believe in miniature is not the only form of foreground which the amateur can create nearer to his heart's desire. As you will see in the accompanying illustrations, the full-scale real thing often may be brought to bear on the foreground composition of one's picture. In this instance my script called for a shot of an Indian girl striding along a sandy roadway toward the village school. But, as you will note in Fig. 1, the roadway looked more like a desert than a village setting. Fig. 2 shows how I enlisted the aid of a young neighbor as a "grip" to hold the tree branch arched over the schoolgirl's path. Fig. 3 pictures the resulting composition. And if this isn't nearer to the heart's desire, I've been wasting a lot of color film. FIG. 1: Bieak and barren was the natural setting for this medium shot of a Hindu maid school-bound. FIG. 2: With the aid of an obliging neighbor as a "grip," a curving branch was held as a foreground. FIG. 3: Appealing and alive is the compositon resulting from this creative faking. Note cross light.