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I used to obtain a particular effect. The story was of the fanciful thought-pictures of a small boy which came to him when he played the pipes. One of his visions which I wanted to show, was of a number of fairy children playing round his heroine, the girl who was so kind to him and seemed to understand him so well. Alma Taylor was that girl, and the fairy children were supplied, I think, by Italia Conti. Among them was one whom I picked out at once as being a specially clever little dancer. She was about nine or ten years old and her name was Angela Baddeley! I wanted them to appear to be dancing on the surface of a lake. I fastened a little piece of very thin, optically worked and surfacesilvered glass horizontally in front of the lens, just touching it and just below its optical axis. The dancing children were shown clearly but the grass they were really dancing on had disappeared and their inverted images were reflected as if in water. I hope this little trick will be useful to someone else some day — it was certainly very effective. It was very much cheaper than laying down a whole mirror large enough to cover the lawn and the reflections were softer and more pleasing.
Helen of Four Gates, from the novel by Ethel Holdsworth, was another of my productions with Alma Taylor but in an entirely different style, for what I really wanted in this case was to capture the wonderful atmosphere of the story. So we all went to Haworth — where Emily Bronte and her sisters had lived and where she wrote Wuthering Heights — for it was a somewhat similar atmosphere that I was anxious to obtain. As soon as we left Hebden Bridge and began to climb the hill to Haworth we seemed to feel the dour, cruel environment which I wanted. Up on the moor at the top it was far more intense and somehow it managed to get into the picture as I wanted it. It was one of Alma's best bits of work and I was pleased with the whole job. But it was not a popular film.
A better picture which gave her more scope was Tansy, a sheepfarming story on the Sussex Downs, written by Tickner Edwardes. Alma played the part of a shepherd girl and to get under the skin of it, she lived with a shepherd's family for some weeks and studied the work thoroughly. And she borrowed a sheep dog and brought it home with her so that he got to know her and obey her every word. There was much delightful pictorial photography in this film and here again the very atmosphere of the story really crept into it.
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