We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
298 INTRODUCING THE OUTDOOR SCENE
to one another on the film, but nineteen " frames " of the film apart because the lens of the projector is several inches above the apparatus for reproducing the sound to enable the film, which is projected intermittently as far as the picture part is concerned, to smooth out into a continuous running movement where the sound is concerned. Therefore the photographic image must be several inches away from its corresponding sound on the film, but this is only a matter for adjustment in printing).
Phonofilm recording did not, therefore, present quite the same difficulties as faced the Brooklyn pioneers, nevertheless Miles Mander who directed these early sound-on-film pictures, found the road by no means strewn with roses.
The Clapham studio camera boasted only one lens — a two-inch one. It had no fading device or iris and no finder that was any use, while the stage equipment consisted of two old-fashioned spotlights and two banks of mercury vapour lamps. But the progress of talkie technique made surprising strides under these adverse conditions. Two of the early pictures, As We Lie and The Sentence of Deaths contained sound, music and dialogue. It was possible to include exterior scenes by taking the apparatus outdoors, whereas the disc system was too cumbersome. It effectively recorded the voices of actors talking off — that is to say, shots of the listener were shown to the accompaniment of the voice of the person speaking to the subject of the close-up ; while change of shot was practically no problem at all. In one film more than fifty different scenes and individual shots were included in one thousand three hundred feet.
The early sound-on-film talkies had much in common with the silent film ; there was none of the camera-bolted-to-the-floor flavour of the early disc talkies ; close-ups, mid shots, long shots, flashes, exteriors and interiors, all followed one another in rapid succession, thus preserving the essential fluidity of the moving picture medium, and there was no mad scramble to include sound or dialogue on every inch of the picture, a fault which marred most of the early American talkies, for Miles Mander was not afraid of using silence as well as sound. A great deal of his early technique was swamped by the later American invasion and it was some time before talkies regained the mobility of the silent film.
Lilian Hall Davis, Owen Nares, Dorothy Boyd, Malcolm Keen and Mary Clare all figured in these early British talkie ventures, which were exhibited, as were the first silent movies, as items in