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LIGHTING
James Wong Howe
METHODS of lighting a motion picture set have changed tremendously since the day, long ago, when Cecil de Mille wrote that lighting to a motion picture was like music to an opera: but the importance of skillful lighting has not changed, save to increase. With the early films, lighting merely meant getting enough light upon the actors to permit photography; today it means laying a visual, emotional foundation upon which the director and players may build. In other words, lighting has changed from a purely physical problem to an artistic, or dramatic one.
The first moving pictures were made exclusively by daylight. The first studio — Edison's "Black Maria" — was made to utilize natural light. It was a small building, scarcely larger than an ordinary garage; actually, it measured about 20 by 25 feet. It was a mere framework, covered with tar-paper, with one end that could be opened to admit the sunlight. The whole studio was on a turntable, so that the stage could follow the sun! Another of its contemporaries — the first Vitagraph studio — was merely the top of a New York office-building, where, on sunny days, the troupe could erect their canvas scenery, and hurriedly shoot their scenes while the sun lasted. With this beginning, it is small wonder that when the first dramatic films arrived, and after stories began to demand more scenes than could be made actually out of doors, all studio stages were daylight affairs. At first they were merely large, flat platforms, upon which the sets could be built: then, as photographic skill grew, there were added increasingly intricate systems of muslin diffusing curtains overhead, worked by a network of cords, and by which the light could be somewhat controlled. And finally, as. the movies began to change into a respectable, stable business, there came vast, steel-framed, glass walled stages.
About this time, cinematographers began to discover that they could get better results if they mixed a little artificial front light with the top light supplied by the sun. From this it was but a step (probably taken on a rainy day!) to the discovery that the top light could be supplied better by artificial means than by the sun. And from then on the daylight stages began to disappear, and the art — or science — of lighting came into being.
The tools used in lighting have developed slowly. At first the only lights — either for supplementary use, with daylight, or to take its place entirely — were the Cooper-Hewitt Mercury-vapor tubes. Then came arcs, first to supplement the softer "Coops", and eventually to take their place almost completely. One or two rarely adventurous souls experimented with incandescent bulbs, but, since the ortho film of those days was only weakly sensitive to the yellowish rays emitted by these lights, the bluer and more actinic arcs and Mercury tubes remained supreme.
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