Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1951)

321 F!G. 4, at left, shows art work possibilities with author's pantograph and cutout system of design, layout, lettering. FIG. 5: An architect's lettering guide is suggested for introductory scrolls, long subtitles. Attractive titles are easy, with a pantograph at your fingertips and lettering on top of a piece of glass which can be raised or lowered with respect to the background. Then, if the title is lighted by a spotlight from the side and top, the letters and the cutout gain depth, as shown in Fig. 3. The speed of this method of making titles may be judged by the fact that the Nantucket title shown took only fifteen minutes to prepare. A painted title, by way of contrast, would have taken over two hours. There is almost no limit to the number of effects that can be created in this manner. Take Fig. 4, for example. The airplane was traced from a TWA map, while the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge was scaled-up bv pantograph from an auto map cover. The sky is a sheet of orange paper, the water is a deep purple and the cutouts are a dark blue. The effect is striking, yet not a bit of original art work was required. Furthermore, the position of the plane or the letters and the colors of the background can all be changed at will right up to the moment of shooting. WHITE LETTERS BEST Whatever the subject of the film, it will almost always be possible to find a drawing or photograph which when pantographed up to the right size will make an excellent decorative background for your title. A word of caution, however. It is sometimes suggested that the white letters be painted to provide an interesting color effect. I do not recommend this because it lowers the visibility of the lettering and also because the next time you want the letters they are always the wrong color. Leave the letters white and get your color and shade effects by your cutouts and backgrounds. THE LETTERING GUIDE On occasion, a longish title may be needed to explain a point in detail. Such titles often exhaust one's stock of title letters and for such cases a lettering guide, such as shown in Fig. 5, is very useful. The Doric guide. recently put out by the Keuffel & Esser company, is both inexpensive and excellent. These titles can be lettered on light colored stock for color film. Also they can be used for positive film since the black letters on a light background will project as white letters on a dark field. The same effect, by the way, can be obtained with the white title letters by back lighting. In this manner the white letters appear to be black on a white field, as shown in Fig. 6. When such a setup is photographed on positive film and developed to a negative, it will project as de FIG. 6: Ordinary white letters appear black filmed in back lighting. sired: white letters on a black field. This is just one of the many uses for the light-table feature of the vertical title stand described in last month's article. ESTIMATING EXPOSURE After the title itself is prepared and the camera has been centered on the title and focused, there remains the important problem of exposure. There are three general methods of exposure determination. 1. Calibration by test. 2. A meter reading on title. 3. A meter reading on gray card. Calibration by test, in which a standard lighting arrangement is always used and the correct exposure is therefore known, can produce excellent results. The trouble is that a standard lighting setup is not always suitable for the particular title to be taken. An exposure meter is therefore very helpful. One can expose by reading the title itself, but there is grave danger that a misexposure will result. The reason is that a title tends to predominate in either light or dark areas, a light background for black letters and a dark background for white letters. The exposure meter, calibrated for subjects in which light and dark areas are in even proportion, will tend to make the predominant shade photograph as gray. Thus, white backgrounds must be overexposed ( in relation to the meter reading) to stay white and dark backgrounds must be underexposed to stay black. An even better system is to use a neutral gray test card (which corresponds to an average subject in reflectance I in place of the title at the time the exposure reading is taken. This test card will pick up any change in lighting level, but will not be thrown off by a predominant light or dark background. In next month's installment there will be a discussion of methods of making titles which move and which can be shot while the camera is running.