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.
Photodramatist for September
23
^MVMWMWMMimiiia
pviniiwf Machines atWbr)<i^ & Many as 150 Positive Films are made from the Original Jlfedatitfe,
¥
Drying me Film on Drums following DeOelopmen t
i£L
TT was not long until I began to realize what the future held for the cinema, and with the
i i
realization I was convinced that a haphazard manner of preparing films for exhibition could not continue. I determined then and there to specialize in the laboratory phase of production.
"The producers were also beginning to see the necessity for better laboratory methods and equipment. The mechanical facilities available were yet limited, and some of the machinery used had to be assembled "on the lot." A laboratory capable of handling ten thousand feet of film a week was in those days a rarity.
"Today, the cinema, grown from a toy, has assumed a stellar place among the industries of the world. Every person connected with the industry claims for his own line the major share of responsibility for this growth. But to say that any one element exceeds another in importance is obviously unfair, and in addition would be the basis of a rather heated controversy. Let me ask you, though, would you go to a cinema theatre, no matter how great the story, how popular the star or how accomplished the director, if the photography was poor? If the characters moved across the screen in a haze of rain-like streaks, or if they jerked from place to place in the manner of a mechanical doll; if in the midst of an exceptionally tense emotional scene the face of the heroine were to be obscured by a smudgy shadow? You would not!
' ' CCIENCE and invention have happily kept ^ pace with the allied Arts of the cinema. The modern camera is a marvelous piece of mechanism, and the projection machine of today stands no less efficient and complete. But it is the film, finally, that makes possible the projection of shadow pictures on the screen, and between the camera and the projection machine, the film must be handled by machinery marvelous, complete and efficient.
"It may be well to explain, simply, for the benefit of some of the readers who are not students of chemistry or science, how the camera, the laboratory and the projection machine function. The photographic process is based on the fact that certain silver salts, or compounds, when exposed to light, undergo a chemical change. of structure, and will, when so exposed be acted upon by certain chemicals to form an entirely different compound.
' ' A FILM consists of a strip of celluloid with a ^■* coating or emulsion of the first silver salt. If portions of this coating are exposed and others not exposed, or exposed to a lesser extent, and the whole film is immersed in a developing solution, these portions will be acted upon or oxidized by the chemicals in the solution in direct proportion to the extent of the exposure. The oxidized salt becomes an opaque black substance which is insoluble by either the developing solution or a second chemical solution called the fixing bath. The unoxidized, or unexposed areas are, however, soluble in this bath and are washed away.
"So is formed a negative film, on which the objects which have been light, that is, which have re