American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1942)

single column placed a few feet in front of a simple flat. With a chair and perhaps a potted palm, and of course the right type of floor-surface, you can suggest a corner of a grand ballroom! Flats don't necessarily need to be literally flat. If you really want to be fancy, you can build flats with any kind of curved section you wish. This calls for a curved frame, and steaming the plywood until it can be bent to fit the curve of the frame. It's decidedly a more complicated job of carpentry than the ordinary flat, but it can be done, even by non-professionals. We do it all the time, and of course these stock curved sections, come in very handy in remodelling old sets and pieces of sets to get something apparently new. We keep standard sections of stairways— long and short, straight and curved — and work them with flats into sets, too, for scenes that call for such things. This, I realize, is something a bit beyond the average non-theatrical filming group, but once you get started, you can imagine how helpful it is to have a good "library" of such stock •set-pieces. In practically every studio, we build things like this for the big "A" pictures and then remodel and reuse them time and again in the lessexpensive program pictures. Whether or not you recognize them when you see them in the "B's" depends upon how much the art director had to spend for remodelling them for use in the lesser films, and on how clever he is. Nine times out of ten you'll not recognize them. In some studios, instead of building flats from plywood, they use very similar frames covered with muslin, which is porous to sound. This is very nice in theory, but in practice, especially in the hands of the non-professional, it's not so practical: the fabric walls require an extra lot of reinforcement to avoid having the walls ripple every time a character closes a door. Anyway, if you're shooting in sound (as I know some amateur groups making Defense Films are) and you have trouble with reverberation from the plywood walls, you can usually cure it by seeing that no two walls are parallel, so that the sound waves can't bounce from one to the other. It takes only a little angling to do this — so little the camera will seldom, if ever, detect it. But muslin has its uses. If you want a "Citizen Kane" effect with roofed-in sets, you can get it by using the same method "Citizen Kane's" art director did, and putting a muslin ceiling on your set. This, incidentally, permits a group that is shooting sound to place the microphone above the muslin celling and, lighting largely from the floor, to get almost entirely away from the problem of microphone-shadows. In sets representing interiors, where you have windows, you run into the problem of suggesting (except in nighteffects) something, at least, of what lies beyond the window. With 16mm. equip ment, you can't as a rule use the expedients used by the professional — huge painted or photographic "backings," projection process-shots, and the like. But by means of a few potted plants or tree-branches, and a flat painted to represent blue sky, with perhaps a bit of foreground, if needed, made from a roll of that green grass-rug stuff sportinggoods stores use in golfing windowdisplays (we use it, too) you can get a surprisingly acceptable effect. If you build your set outdoors, and have a real view beyond the window, you run into a variety of photographic problems. If you rely on daylight to illuminate your set, you get a very unnatural lighting effect. If you cover the set in so that you can use artificial lighting, you run into photographic problems in exposure and color balancing. Rut these can be circumvented. If you're shooting in black-and-white, you can usually balance up the exposurevalues of your interior and the exterior as seen through the window by covering the window-pane with fairly deep yellow cellophane — about the color of a K-3 filter, and using enough layers of cellophane to build up the desired density to balance the exposure. If you're shooting in Kodachrome, you will most likely be using "Type A" for your Photoflood-lit interior. With this film, the area seen through the window, and illuminated by daylight, will naturally photograph a decidedly bluish shade. You can get around this by either of two methods. For one, you can use regular "daylight" Kodachrome instead of Type A, and instead of the regular Photofloods, use the special bluebulb Photofloods. This will balance your color-values fairly well. If you don't want to do this, try covering your windows with pinkish cellophane — as nearly as possible like the color of the "daylight" filter made for shooting Type A outdoors. Using Type A, which is suited to your Photoflood lighting on the set, this cellophane filtering in the windows will, with a bit of experimenting, balance up the color-values of the daylit portions of your shot so that you'll get at least an acceptable color-balance between the two parts of the scene. Finally, remember that the greatest secret in professional set-building (and even more so in amateur use, where you've got to stretch a slim budget) is to make the fullest possible use of the camera's tremendous powers of suggestion. What you actually build doesn't matter nearly so much as what you make the camera see. After all, your actual set need extend only a few inches beyond the side-lines of your widestangled long-shot (just enough to give a safe margin for finder parallax, etc.) to get over the impression you want. Any additional construction is virtually wasted, since it doesn't show up on the screen. Don't forget, either, that your camera is an impressionist. You can fool it into seeing things that don't really exist. by means of cast shadow-patterns, fullsize and even miniature front-pieces, and the like. The effect you get on the screen isn't determined by what your tooliteral eye sees as you stand beside the camera (your eye has a far different angle from the lens, anyway) but by what the lens itself sees. If you make the lens see what you want it to, you'll get the right effect, regardless of whether or not it exists in reality. So when you start the job of making a purposeful film, such as a Civil Defense instructional picture, begin your set-building in your script. Sketch out each scene and set-up — and then build in your actual sets only what is necessary to get those sketched onto the film. You'll find it wnll simplify your set-building problems more than anything else. And it will rob the problem of building sets of most of its terrors! END. Field Hints (Continued from Pag3 199) Many of our Military and Naval photographic units are likely to be working in the tropics — as in the South Seas, India, Burma, and eventually Java and similar places — and in such arctic and subarctic regions as Alaska, Iceland, and so on. Working in regions like these demands very special techniques to meet the unusual conditions encountered. You could write a whole book on tropical and arctic cinematography, but here are a few hints that will be helpful. In the tropics, your twin enemies are heat and moisture. The heat softens your film, and the moisture makes it deteriorate. Keep your supply of fresh film always in its hermetically-sealed "tropical pack" cans until the last possible moment before shooting. Then take out only what you know you'll expose during the day's work. When transporting film in the tropics— either fresh supplies or film loaded for shooting — keep its containers out of the direct sunlight as much as possible. If you're shooting a camera with outside magazines, like a Bell & Howell, Mitchell or Wall, make sun-covers which you can slip over the magazine to pi-otect them. These covers are simply properly-shaped sacks made of heavy cloth. If conditions permit, light-colored cloth is better than dark fabric, as it reflects, rather than absorbs light. In regions where the heat is dry, rather than moist, you can use leather: but don't use leather for anything in a hot, moist climate such as you'll meet around •Java or the South Seas, for the leather will sprout a growth of mildew overnight. (So will film!) For such conditions, camera-cases should never be leather, but either galvanized iron or some of the synthetic fabrics and plastics which are mildew-resisting. Lighting and exposure are a big problem in tropical photography. The sun, generally speaking, is intensely bright, while the shadows are empty black. If you can, try and keep your action either 226 May, 1942 American Cinematographek