American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1942)

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The best 14mm. camera and sound equipment can, like the B-M camera shown here, be used almost exactly like 35mm. studio equipment. motion picture practice begins to diverge froin that of the manufacturer with his blueprint. For it is at this point that the variable factors which are peculiar to motion picture production come into play. Suppose, for example, you start production with a sci'ipt which, while still in the scenarists' typewriters, has been pared to the bone, so that instead of the 1,000 or 1,500 scenes we've all seen in scripts in the past, it contains but 450 or 500 scenes, which experience tells us ought to be about right for the average 8-reel feature. Assume, too, that you have a director, cast and technical crew so efficient that you can be confident of averaging but two or three takes per scene for the entire picture. The average business-man or manufacturer, accustomed to figuring materials out on a blueprint basis, would say instantly that under such conditions, you ought to be able to bring the pic "PRE-PHOTOGRAPHING" IN 16MM. AS A MEANS OF CONSERVING FILM By LEE GARMES, A.S.C WHEN you build an automobile, a tank or an airplane, there is no difficulty in determining how much material will be needed, or how and where material can be saved in producing it. You need only look at the blueprints, and all that information is at your fingertips in mathematical blackand-white. Now that wartime necessity has focused our attention on the need for conserving film and many of the other materials that go into the production of motion pictures, many of us have felt that some similarly accurate method of making a precise pre-production blueprint of a motion picture would be invaluable in our efforts to conserve film and materials. With such a bluej)rint, we ought to be able to stop most of the industry's film wastage before it fiappens. Without it, we can simply skim the surface of the subject, getting off, so to speak, the top layer of waste, but leaving most of it undisturbed because we can't put our finger on it until it makes itself visibly evident — after which, of course, it's too late to remedy. Such an api)roach is rather like a doctor who attempts to cure the symptoms of a disease rather than the cause. For example, it is very obvious that almost all of our film wastage is traceable to over-shooting, some of which can in turn be blamed upon over-written scripts, but much more of which is caused by the fact that we habitually — in many cases, necessarily — expose considerably more negative in filming a picture than can possibly be compressed into the picture's final release footage. During the last six or eight weeks, we have begun to find out that it is not too hard to cure some of these surface symptoms. For example, it is not too difficult to put into effect a policy whereby scripts must be written with only the approximate number of scenes which can be contained within the production's scheduled release length. Neither is it so difficult to agree that except in instances where the contrary is absolutely unavoidable, action should be so thoroughly planned and rehearsed that it can be filmed within an average of, say, three takes per scene. But when you get things streamlined to this point, you reach the i)oint where August, 1942 American Cinematographer ture in with an exi)enditure of about three times the footage of its releasecut negative — say 25,000 or even 30,000 feet, to be on the safe side. But anyone experienced in motion picture production would say that you'd be doing uncommonly well if you get the picture comj)leted with only 60,000 feet of negative exposed, and that many major studios and directors would consider they'd achieved something remarkable if they did it with 100,000 or 150,000 feet of negative shot — exclusive of retakes and added scenes! Unfortunately, that "perfect" script isn't a real blueprint of the ])icture, in the manufacturer's meaning of the term. It details the dialog and at least outlines the action, while the sketches of the art-director and production designer complement it by suggesting something of the visual appearance and flow of the scenes and secjuences. But none of them can bluei)rint how a scene will "play," or how scenes and sequences will cut together. Two different actors playing the same scene will very probably give the identical script action entirely different tim