Home Movies (1951)

CASH... with your camera By WESLEY HART HOUSE CONSTRUCTION When we built our house two years ago I hovered over the carpenters and bricklayers shooting a movie of the construction. I photographed every step: the pouring of the foundation, the wall, lath and roofing construction. At that time I thought that the film was only for my enjoyment. Since then, however, I've changed my mind. I've found that these films can bring me extra cash. It started when I projected the reels for a group of my friends. They began to request me to do similar films on the houses they were having built. This has now worked into a profitable sideline for me. Home owners are finding these films invaluable. They are excellent as insurance records and recently a friend found a new use. He offered his house for sale. Buyers stopped in to question him about the construction and the value of the house. Instead of giving them a long sales talk, he projected the film I had made for him. The film was such a persuasive salesman that he found the buyers were bidding amongst themselves for the house on the basis of the film. I charge $50.00 for a 200 foot reel. This price includes titles and editing. The film is shot on my spare moments. I drop in at the job whenever a new porcess begins. — Carl Rheem, Chicago, Illinois. REAL ESTATE FILMS An amateur can make extra money with his camera by duplicating an idea which I have found lucrative. It works this way. I make a short sales film of a house a real estate agent has for sale. The agent can then project the film, in his office, to clients. The film will show the client a little bit about the house. It saves the client and the agent time and if the client is really interested, the agent can then bring him out to the lot. These films are easy to make. An agent wants long shots of the exterior from the front, the sides and the back. If the landscaping is unique then I include a couple of short pan shots of the better features. I make shots of the kitchen, the bedrooms, the living room and if interesting, the den. These shots can be • See "CASH" on Page 424 Three Shots tell a story By AUSTIN LEY When you press the button you are telling a story. But not every moviemaker is a story teller. And without a story what have you got but a group of totally unrelated scenes which say nothing. How, you ask, can we get story values in even the simplest shots? How can we make pictures that record the things we want to remember — in the best possible way? It is simply this — observing a few rules which have been set up by those who have shot pictures for years. Think of your film as a piece of cloth, spun from a multitude of tiny threads. By connecting the threads, we wind up eventually with the whole cloth. And that's all there is to it. Here are the things to remember. There are three basic positions when shooting movies. At a distance of approximately 50 feet, you would say that you were making long shots, or LS. At 20 feet, or the middle distance these would be called medium shots, or MS; and anywhere from 6 to 2 feet is obviously a close-up or CU. Apply these three basic positions to any sequence you want to shoot, and you cannot help but make interesting footage. But the three basic positions • See "SHOT" on Page 430 1. 2.