American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1963)

In both New Vork and Hollywood, the accelerated growth of film service organizations has been largely due to the expanding TV market with its big pres¬ sures for time and ever-increasing complexity of the services required. This involves opticals and animation work and few producers can justify the stall and equipment they would need to perform such activities in their own studios. Obviously, a producer experiences both surges and lulls in his assignments. The problem, there¬ fore, of being staffed and equipped for the heavy periods would pose an impossible economic situa¬ tion during the slow periods. Since the service house handles hundreds of customers in contrast to a pro¬ ducer’s one or two, many people and many machines can be utilized at full capacity the year round. The average producer gets his script or story board in rough form from the advertising agency. He has the necessary facilities to put the story to¬ gether on film in the form of individual scenes. He makes up a work print which is viewed, criticized and discussed with the agency. Once the work print is approved and sound is edited, it is ready for opticals. Today, the complexity of the opticals de¬ manded by agencies makes this a job for experts who can devise new tricks which will accomplish the purpose. One of the tasks the service house must perform quite frequently involves a scene where a person is watching a movie or a TV set with a live picture in action on the screen. To do this wth live shoot¬ ing makes the job almost prohibitive since it re¬ quires use of a camera and projector operating in sync, making the project much more complicated and expensive. It is much simpler to shoot the two scenes separately and give them to a service house to combine. Fig. 3 shows an example where a movie on a screen is combined with a live action scene of a family in the living room. A job recently completed for the U.S. Army Sig¬ nal Corps required three images on three TV moni¬ tors in a color scene of a control room. The se¬ quence also required multiple changes in the im¬ ages on the monitors in order to simulate conditions where a monitor shifts scenes and where the opera¬ tor shifts scenes from monitor to monitor. The service house handled this problem by shooting multiple mattes on its Oxberry animation stand, using drawings of the TV monitor screens properly positioned on the background scene. First, it was necessary to make a series of hold¬ back mattes, which allowed the background scene to be exposed separately four each monitor. Using the mattes and interpositives or fine grains on an Oxberry optical printer where exact control can be maintained over positive and exposure, the com¬ posite scene was recorded on one film to give the desired effect. Because the producers service house handles such FIG. 3 — A familiar effect often attempted by inexperienced film makers with straight photography. The movie scene on the home movie screen was combined with the live action scene of family in living room by traveling matte process on optical printer. a large volume of work, special techniques have been developed and optical equipment of the most advanced design is employed. Motorized animation stands permit precise projection of scenes for pre¬ paring the shooting mattes. Special techniques have been devised for handling the mattes on the optical printers in order to assure accurate registration. These machines have aerial image projectors and many other new features which afford complete flexibility in combining mattes and in repositioning scenes. The Signal Corps job mentioned earlier was made more complex, too, because color had to be balanced in all scenes to provide a realistic and Continued on Page 294 FIG. 4 — Familiar to TV viewers is this shot from a commercial for Peter Pan peanut butter. The live Peter Pan and the jar of peanut butter were photographed separately and later combind in this composition by traveling matte process. AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, MAY, 1963 277