The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

November— December, 1944 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN 113 xposure. Winter had been rightly chosen to give the best dramatic environment typical of so many frozen merchant seamen in this war. Now a person seen up against a summer's blue sky. bathed in radiant sunlight, is. to use a technical term, a pushover; but take away the radiant sun and blue sky, and an unrecognisable silhouette is smude.ed against the grej horizon. On groups of seamen this was just right for at mospbere ; but on a closeup I emild not get enough exposure to see who it was, unless I shot with the lens wide open — but then thai over-exposed the sky behind. For instance, the sky alone usually needed an exposure of five ai [east, bul the face was usually underexposed even with the lens wide open. Consequently, the laboratory could have printed on printer point 1 lor the tee. hut that made the skj flare from over-exposure, so the scene should lie printed at printer-point "20. I could not use a sky filter, as in black and white, for obvious reasons, and for a few worrying days "Western Approaches" looked like being the mystery film of all time, until we managed, after many difficulties, to get a couple of lamps in our boat — yes. there was only just room ' — which were run from a small generator on the drifter towing us. This enabled me to put enough light on the faces until 1 could give an exposure of .1, and we were able to carry on. Tic next problem was continuity of weather. Eaving started to shoot the scenes of the seamen's first da\ in the lifeboat — a matter of several days' work — in dull, rainy weather, we had to continue that way. But the next day would he like blazing •Tune, with blue skies and that radiant sun again, so we decided that the second sequence would he shot in fine weather. So. if dull, first sequence; if sunny, second sequence; but after the first fewdays we ran into a much bigger headache — the continuity of the seamen's beards. After shooting in four days' fine weather on the second sequence, the seamen would show four days' growth of beard. Then rain and dull weather would come for a week, but in order to return to the first sequence the seamen should be cleanshaven ! As the weeks went by and we had got to the sequence where the men had been adrift for twenl days, with beards over an inch long, we would horrified to see that one or two of the seamen had gone to a dance the night before and were cleanshaven ! 1 made an interesting experiment at this stage, which enabled us to shoot sunny scenes in dull weather. The lamps I used were incandescent, and for normal use had to have a blue filter to correct the yellow light to white. By taking the blue <_dass off. the face was much too yellow lor ordinary purposes, but by over-exposing to (dean tic dirty grey sky r<> a white one. and allowing for the laboratory to print on the blue side to correct the complementary yellow, so making the white sky blue, T was aide to save waiting so long for sunshine. When a rare sunny day did arrive in the months of October onwards, the sun was wan and orange, and always at such a low arc that the usual ground reflection was practically nil — but there wasn't any ground, only dark blue sea, which was in complementary opposition and accentuated the jaundiced effect. Reflectors in the shadow side were impossible with the boat rocking so much that the angle of reflection swung off far too much for the most adroit counter manipulation, and the inky gloom on one side of the face would he intermittently flared like a morse signal ! Winter sunlight is very yellow, much more than is usually realised, and when yellow face, are corrected by yellow's complementary, blue, the seas, which are already blue, look fantastically unreal. At the start of the film I was dismayed to see many faces over-sunburnt, for a tomato face in Technicolor is not very charming; but by the time winter had been wearily passed there was very little tan to he seen, and the difference was f^H *(hP^ PBr^ J_j w^^^'