Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1949)

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Price * C /\f\ Postage only ?J.UU paid Order Today SAM CARVER IS West Grand Ave., Highland Park 3, Mich. GEO. W. COLBURN LABORATORY, Inc. 164 N. Wacker Dr., Dept. M, Chicago 6, III. Easy Time Payments AM PRO, NATCO. MOVIE MITE, DE VRY, BELL &. HOWELL, KEYSTONE, VICTOR, REVERE, cameras and projectors and all equipment . . . also films. No interest or carrying charges. We carry all Castle, Official, Pictorial, and Hollywood films. We Exchange your equipment or films, or will buy them for cash. Catalogue free. State 8, 76, or sound FRANK LANE & CO., 5 LITTLE BLDG. BOSTON, MASS. Master light meter. The great majority of scenes shot were closeups, so that lighting offered few problems. Two No. 2 flood bulbs in Eastman metal reflectors were used for most scenes, and at no time was it necessary to use more lhan three. I believe that by holding the light level around //2, one produces a better proportioned picture under conditions which are much easier on the actors. I encountered some difficulty with the baby at first, as the bright lights seemed to bother her eyes. However, by first turning them on at a respectful distance from the child and then gradually bringing them to the proper working position, I soon eliminated this trouble. But these are mere technical matters which vary with each filming occasion. You will find it easy to work them out for yourselves. What can never vary is the high and lasting satisfaction of making, at the last, a good film of one's family. Even now, after three years, as I look at my wife and daughter I recall a deep, warm feeling of pleasure at the many happy moments we experienced in making this picture together. No worldly gain could ever induce me to part with these memories— memories which can now be revived at the flick of a switch. Cine maps that move [Continued from page 14] watt lamp (the frosted type) and house it in a cardboard tube. Over the front end of the tube affix a circular shield in the center of which you have cut an oblong slot approximately 1 by 3 inches in size. This serves to concentrate the beam of light projected from the tube. LIGHT TRACES ROUTE The use of this rough approximation of a spotlight is simple. With the camera running, the light is moved steadily behind the map along the perforated travel route until it arrives at the first stop. Here it is held motionless for a moment so that it illuminates from the rear the translucent place name. The effect as filmed from the front of the map is of a sparkling, animated route line moving along to disclose at the pause the suddenly illumined name of the place to be visited. Your timing of the lamp's movement behind the route line will be determined first by how far (in inches) it has to travel and second by your own taste in the animation speed desired. Working in 8mm. film, you can be guided by the fact that a foot of film takes 5 seconds to expose (and screen), two feet 10 seconds, etc. These time figures should be halved for those shooting in the 16mm. width. In general, I believe that it is better not to slow down the animated travel effect too greatly. The pauses on the place names, however, should be appreciable in duration — for a reason which will be explained immediately. Whatever your timing of the animation, it is necessary to keep an accurate record (by reference to a stop watch) of the seconds elapsing during travel between one place and the next, as well as the elapsed time allowed for the place names. It is this record which will be your guide in the second run-through of this same footage. STILLS DOUBLED IN With your film returned to the starting point, you are now ready to make the masked second exposure. For this shooting, switch from the three-quarter (270 degree) mask to its complementary one-quarter (or 90 degree) mask. With this in place, the exposed area will now be the upper right section of the film frame — previously left blank. In my use of this area, I doubleexposed in a series of still pictures, each of them representing an outstanding feature or landmark of the place being visited. These exposures were made with the camera mounted on my regular titling outfit and the still pictures in the place of the normal title cards, since the pictures were now of a size to be accommodated in this way. You could as well, I expect, double in these still picture scenes by affixing the prints directly over the upper right corner of the map. Still another possibility — if you can achieve adequate exposure — would be to cut out the upper right corner of the map, replace it with a sheet of translucent tracing cloth or ground glass, and then to project from the rear on this screen your Kodachrome slides made on the same trip. In general, I believe this procedure would require rather strong slide-projector illumination and an ability to operate the camera at least at 8 frames a second. The appearance of these scenes and their duration of exposure was timed (by reference to the records taken previously) to coincide exactly with the lighting up of the place names with which each was associated. Thus, for example, as we arrive at Bristol on our journey to the English coast, there appears coincident with the city's name a picture of Clifton Suspension Bridge, a well known landmark of the community. The combination has proved quite effective in identifying the place and in keying its outstanding feature. For those filmers who have not yet constructed the masking device, it should be emphasized that the entire first part of this animated map effect — the moving line of light and the illuminated place names — can be achieved entirely without use of the mask unit. The maskedin still pictures are simply an added refinement.