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onto a small set, even with today’s most efficient lighting equipment.
When you add to this the necessity of obtaining the maximum depth of focus in miniature shots, obtainable only by stopping down the lens of the camera, the value of today’s highspeed films for miniatures can be appreciated.
At first sight it might seem that depth of field might be relatively more easy to obtain in a miniature than in a full-scale scene, since the set will be relatively small, and the focal depth needed far less than in a fullscale shot. But in practice, this is by no means the case: for in the miniature, the lens will probably be focused on a point considerably closer to the camera — and as the focus is brought closer to the camera, depth of field decreases with alarming rapidity. A 50mm. lens, focused at 25 feet, will at an aperture of /: 2.3 give adequate definition on everything from 1 8 to 40 feet from the lens — a focal depth of 22 feet. But the same lens, used at the same aperture and focused on a point 6 feet from the camera, will have a depth of scarcely one foot.
This is a somewhat extreme example, but it will serve to illustrate some of the problems involved in miniature cinematography. In addition, it may explain one reason why some of the miniatures made on the old-type, slower films were unconvincing. They might be scaled right and photographed at the proportionately correct camera speed: but they exhibited a shallowness of focal depth utterly alien to full-scale scenes made under normal conditions. And though only the trained eye of the technician might be able to detect the reason, even the untrain
ed eye of the layman coidd spot them as camera trickery and brand them as fakes.
With today’s high-speed films, this situation, if not wholly eliminated, has certainly been minimized. The added speed now makes it possible to obtain adequate exposure at reduced apertures, even at extremely high camera speeds. The reduced aperture, in turn, yields increased depth of field which makes the miniature-shot intercut better with full-scale scenes, and gives the miniature an infinitely more convincing aspect.
This necessarily brief commentary on the relation between modern emulsions and special-effects cinematography can inevitably but briefly touch the surface of the subject. A great deal that could hear discussion has of necessity been left unsaid.
Nevertheless, I hope that these remarks will be sufficient to bear out the contention that modern specialprocess cinematography owes at least as much as production cinematography does to the advances brought by today’s high-speed film products. When the history of special-effects or “trick" camerawork is finally written (and what an absorbing tale it will be!) two dates will stand out strongly above all others. The first will be 1931, when the first superpan-type emulsion appeared and made possible our present invaluable projected-background process. The second, of almost equal importance, must be December. 1937, when the appearance of the first of today’s super-speed films opened the door to advances which have so greatly multiplied the value of specialprocess camerawork to the industry.
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