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PICTURE YOUR HOME TOWN
OEVESTE GRANDUCCI
NO MATTER how small or how large, your home town will make top notch cine fare — not only for out of town guests, but for your neighbors as well.
Honest to goodness advance planning is a prerequisite, or your picture will not be complete. Planning is vital, too, as a means of putting on the brakes, so that your picture will not be too complete. Have it run an entertaining ten minutes, not a boring ad infinitum.
First, start from scratch. Assume that you know nothing about your home town. Approach it as a stranger, to make it interesting for the stranger. If you do, your home town portrait will interest every one who sees it.
HOW TO PLAN
First, get your source material together and make notes as you read it the first time — highlights, interesting tidbits, the unusual, the picturesque. Your first impressions, while your mind is more or less blank on the subject, will undoubtedly be best. These highlighted first impression notes will turn out to be the backbone of your film, for you can't possibly get everything in your city packed into ten minutes.
Use no more than two information sources, to avoid confusing yourself and your audience. Your Chamber of Commerce will be the best source. Write the secretary, tell him your idea, and ask for printed material which he thinks will help you. When Movie Makers asked me to do this story, that was exactly what I did. In my case. Home Town was Cincinnati; here is how I would use the facts which I found out.
Courtesy Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce
Mac C. Gramlich
HUMAN INTEREST is of first importance in a home town film. Your city's parks, zoos and beaches are good hunting grounds.
LOCATION FIRST
Location is the first subject of importance with any community. Why and how did your home town spring up and grow just where it is? So let's locate it — time-wise and geographically. In my work of writing non-theatrical film plans, we use narration to provide this information. In your hobby of home filming, you will most likely be using subtitles. Writing one or the other is much the same. Since the narrative form is the one I use more naturally, I shall stick to it here. By and large, however, you will find good subtitles growing directly out of the opening sentence of any well planned narrative.
How is this, then, for the opening narration of our establishing sequence of Cincinnati's skyline and river locale?
Cincinnati, called Losantiville ivhen first settled in 1788, became a thriving metropolis largely because of her location on a busy artery of commerce, the Ohio River. Now some shots of the picturesque river boats, ending on a busy dockside sequence — the final shot looking toward the city, up the levee. (This is suggested by pictures in the material promptly sent me by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce.)
THE BUSINESS DISTRICT
Today, river traffic is booming again,
funneled through the business section of
the city, squeezed on a plateau sixty feet
above the river. [Continued on page 32]
THE LOCATION of your community should be the subject of your opening sequence. Why and how did it grow just where it is? With Cincinnati, the Ohio River was the key.
An easy to follow formula
for movies of your Main Street — outlined by an expert