American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1941)

the ceiling, some chandeliers and some overhead drapes in the long-shots. As I recall it, this miniature cost around $800, a figure considerably more than a good matte-shot would have cost. But — overlooking for the moment the fact that it would have been difficult in a mattepainting to reproduce the textural effect of the drapes to match those on the actual set itself, or to paint in the natural, fine gradations of lighting which Director of Photography and Associate Producer Lee Garmes, A.S.C., used to make the effect so completely convincing— the matte-painting could only have been used for a single cameraangle. The miniature, on the other hand, was used for some half-dozen or more angles of the sequence. When the added cost of the miniature is thus spread over several shots, the disparity in cost is greatly lessened, if not actually offset, and the more convincing effects possible loom more significantly. Like most of the other worthwhile practices of cine-technique, the set-miniature, I might add, is fully as adaptable to Technicolor as to black-and-white. The perspective and optical characteristics of the color-camera are such that the set-miniatures for a color production are, as a rule, rather larger than those one would use to obtain a comparable effect in monochrome; but their usefulness is the same. We employed quite a number of them in "The Thief of Bagdad," and more recently, in "Jungle Book." They enabled us to put on the screen sets which seemed spectacularly large, yet without involving the now-prohibitive costs of constructing enormous full-scale sets. In this, it seems to me, the miniature set-piece can serve a further useful function. We often hear it said by critics and others not directly connected with the industry and its economic problems that the cinema has definitely lost in eye-appeal since the impressively huge sets of such silent-film spectacles as "Intolerance," "Ben Hur," and others passed from the scene. Yet we know that under modern conditions, such sets are economic impossibilities. Modern set-miniatures. Left: chadelier and draperies in top foreground were a front miniature. Right: top, scene from "Jungle Book"; note elephants in middle ground, actors moving in foreground, and massiveness of ruins in background. Below: how it was done; note fullscale foreground set, reduced-scale miniature set-piece suspended over set, and painted backing for extreme distance. Photos by Robert Coburn. In many instances, the use of miniature set-pieces can go a long way to restore this spectacular appeal without involving proportionately high costs. With the actors moving in an actual set of thoroughly practical size and cost, the spectacularly huge completion of the scene can be effected by the use of an economical miniature-piece, and much more convincingly than would be possible with the use of a matte-painting, projected background, or the like. It has been done in a number of recent instances. "The Thief of Bagdad" owed much of its spectacular visual appeal to this technique. So, too, do some sequences from "The Jungle Book." One of the sets we built for this latter production serves as an excellent illustration of the possibilities this technique affords. The scene represented an ancient, lost city in the Indian jungle, with massive ruins half-concealed by the over-running jungle growths. It would be manifestly impossible to reproduce in full scale anything which would give the desired impression of massive size. The use of either a backing or a matte-shot would fail to give the convincing aura of reality we wanted. A combination of a reasonable amount of full-scale construction with a rather large miniature, and a skillfully-painted backing, solved the problem. The set itself was sufficiently large to permit us to use several full-grown elephants, as required by the script, not only in the round but in the middle-distance of the scene. The miniature necessarily quite large — represented the upper, jungle-clogged terraces of the temple, with its spired pagodas and weird, manyfaced idols towering almost like sky(Continued on Page 588 American Cinemato<;rapher December, 1941 •"<i*>i