The blue book of the screen (1923)

SCREEN RENAISSANCE THROUGH MOTION PAINTING of the mansion standing beside the weird tarn, a picture such as Dulac and other artists would conceive, and such as a director or cameraman would like to produce. By the aid of the easel painting, such a story may be made, with a series of beautiful sets and scenes, on a scale far more sumptuous than when sets were built and natural scenes were used, and without crippling the finances of the company and without being limited by location, season or the narrow requirement of the camera lens. But motion painting achieves far more than doing away with negative barriers. It introduces into screen productions the vision and style of individual artists, and makes possible spectacles of the most daring imagination. The "Thousand and One Nights' Entertainment" of the Arabian, through motion painting, now becomes available screen material. And one need not leave the studio stage to photograph ancient Bagdad or the fairy-peaks of enchanted isles. Scenes may be laid in starlight or in romantic, moon-lit gardens of the South, and photographed at noon in the studios with the thermometer registering zero ouside. Formerly stories were written around three or four more or less costly sets and limited in their scope by the cost of those sets. If a castle was essential to a play, much of the action necessarily centered around the castle, because of its excessive cost in material and labor, thereby handicapping the scenario writer and the director in their The stage where ,lhc action takes place and is photographed through the opening in the canvas. The edges of the arch melt riqht into the painting. 347