American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1942)

Teslinq the Auricnn Snund-Camera By WILLIAM STULL, A.S.C Left: with Val Pope at the camera and Ray Fosholdt directing. Walter Bach mixes sound for a 16mm. talkie scene. Center: the mike-boom swings the microphone in to record dialog as the camera films a two-shot. Right: Ray Fosholdt and Val Pope check the lens before making a !cene. Photos by Harold O'Neal. ALL too often there's a world of difference between a manufactur■ er's demonstration-reel of a new equipment like the Auricon 16mm. soundcamera, and the way the same outfit will perform in actual field service, in the hands of people more interested in making a picture than in turning out a perfect example of substandard sound-recording. Not that the manufacturer will necessarily cheat — but the difference between the controlled, almost laboratory conditions under which most demonstration tests are most conveniently made, and the far less controllable conditions of actual service can easily make things embarrassingly misleading, whether you view it from the manufacturer's or the buyer's viewpoint. For this reason, when the opportunity presented itself to make a test of the newly-developed Auricon sound-camera, under conditions of my own choosing, I naturally leaped at the chance. In the demonstration reels I had seen, the outfit had performed unusually well, giving an excellent picture, and sound a great deal better than any one has a right to expect from single-system 16mm. recording. What would it do under conditions comparable to those that might be met by an amateur or semi-professional group making a picture for Civil Defense purposes ? In mid-April I had been invited to take charge of a meeting of the Long Beach (Cal.) Cinema Club, choosing my own subject. As this Club had just completed photography on a Civil Defense picture which was to be released in sound, I decided that the group would be interested in hearing for themselves the latest developments in 16mm. sound-recording. As the very latest thing in this direction was the new Auricon camera — the first such outfit engineered for serious professional and advanced amateur use, yet marketed at a price comparable to that paid for a first-class 16mm. silent camera — I was anxious to include it. The E. M. Berndt Corporation very kindly placed at my disposal the first of their new cameras. The Photo Research Corporation granted me the use of their small studio. And with the aid of the group from the Long Beach Cinema Club who had been active in making the Club's incendiary bomb production, we made a little 200-foot Kodachrome talkie which deliberately put the Auricon camera over the bumps rough-shod. Let it be said here and now that the new camera emerged with flying colors (no pun intended!) despite the fact that the cards were stacked against it in plenty of ways. In the first place, the sudio — intended primarily for still-photography and demonstrations of the use of the Norwood exposure-meter — was not soundproofed. Its acoustics could have stood a good deal of improvement, too. And instead of taking the safe and simple course of making a single set-up, as nearly as possible perfect for both picture and sound, and moving our actors in and out of it, we deliberately broke our 200 feet up into no less than eleven completely diff'erent set-ups, shooting exactly as we would with a silent camera. Improvising continuity, dialogue and business and we went along, we made the whole picture in less than three hours. The only "break" we gave the sound was that we used our microphone on an overhead boom, professional-style, instead of on a floor stand, and that we let the Berndt organization's Walter Bach, who brought the camera, do the sound "mixing." But before the evening was out, any of several of the amateurs present, who have added to their movie-making hobby that of home-recording on acetate discs, could probably have done quite as well. Since our problem was to give to each (Continued on Page 224) American Cinematographer May, 1942 213