Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1923 - Feb 1924)

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52 The Real Speed Demons more of the action, so that it will extend over a longer time, revealing more minutely the expressions of the actors when the film is shown on the screen. If there is a fight between two characters, and the camera man feels the need) of hastening the action to give it more reality, he slows down the speed of his crank so that he will take fewer pictures to the second, and the action will consequently pass before your eyes more quickly when exhibited. For the sake of clarity let me explain that the normal speed at which the film is run in a theater is about sixty feet per minute, and as one foot of this passes in front of your eyes per second, the speed at which you are seeing the pictures is exactly the same as that at which they are normally taken. The speed of projection in the theater never varies more than a trifle, unless the exhibitor gives orders to speed up so as to get his show over in a hurry; and this happens only in poorly run theaters — never in a really high-grade one. Long before camera men found means of speeding up the taking of photographs, they found the way to slow it down. In fact, they started from the simple principle of the kodak — that is, one picture at a time. Consequently the early pictures were naturally much more jumpy than those which are taken nowadays. The camera didn't used to be able to keep up with the action, because it wasn't geared up for speed. This, of course, was a long time ago, but despite the improvements which have made for smoother and better photography, the camera is still provided with a device for taking one picture at a time. This is an auxiliary crank, and it is this crank that is so often used to secure effects of quick motion. It can be turned at a rate that will permit the taking of three or four pictures per second at the most. This auxiliary or so-called trick crank is used for some very neat effects, known as stop-motion work, at times. The results are occasionally weird. Inanimate objects, for instance, like plates and saucers, can be made to come to life in dreams that are supposed to be experienced by some character in a play. Not long ago in the Larry Semon comedy, "The Barnyard," I saw a pair of shoes cavorting around all by themselves. Of course, they could possibly be moved around with wires, but the effect is better where the stop-motion trick is used. The shoes were really moved by hand, but this had to be done in such a way that no signs of the person who animated them were to be seen. With the utmost care, therefore, their position was changed a step at a time. As soon as they were moved, the person who shifted them got out of the way, and they were photographed with the trick crank. Then they were pushed forward again another step and the crank given another twist. In the dream sequence in ''Hollywood" every kind of trick camera work was resorted to, in order to obtain the weird effects that are shown. vehicles by reducing Strange to say, the 1 nique nowadays is in Slowly and tediously several hundred pictures were secured in this wise — enough in fact to fill about fifty feet of film. The stunt brought a laugh because the shoes walked up to a mule and frightened him so that he showed his teeth and scampered away. In the primitive days of picture-making, audiences used to derive a tremendous kick out of pictures made with the trick crank that showed knives and forks climbing out of a cupboard and getting up on a dining table, and plates scrambling across the floor to find their places for a meal. Occasionally too you would see tenpins bowled over by an invisible ball and apparently setting themselves up through some ghostly assistance. The thrill of this sort of pictures, minus story or other attractions, soon wore out, and they were relegated to the ash heap, but the technique of their making has persisted even to this day, and is sometimes employed in feature dramas as well as comedies — as it was in Jackie Coogan's "Oliver Twist," where Oliver dreams about dishes and spoons and bowls scrambling around on his chest and squabbling with one another. Too, this stopmotion technique is constantly employed in cartoon comedies, where the figures, like Felix, the Cat, or the animals in Aesop's Fables, generally modeled, are moved about by hand and photographed in each of their separate maneuvers, and thus animated. Of course, you can see that where it is possible to cause even inanimate things to come to life and walk arid run about quite humanly, it is very simple indeed to induce autos and other motor-driven and manguided contraptions to do astonishing things just by adjusting the speed at which the pictures are photographed, as in the Lloyd feature, where only a slight variation, if any, was made from normal. Nearly all high-speed illusions on the screen are obtained, as a matter of fact, simply by slowing down the camera crank, and giving everybody plenty of time to get out of the way of the moving wheels of the pace of these as well, ine of progress in camera techan entirely different direction, namely, toward high-speeding (instead of low-speeding) that permits the analyzing of the stride of the runners in a race, the jumps of tennis players, the galloping of horses. Whereas the ordinary speed of the camera is about sixteen pictures to the second and, with stop motion, any time from one in a moment to one in a year (as for instance when the slow natural process of the g'rowth of a tree is to be observed and shown in a hurry on the screen) the ultrarapid cameras may buzz along fast enough to take one hundred and sixty, or ten times the usual number of photographs. Not long ago I saw in process of filming a scene showing a waterfall, over which two small boats were supposed to race to destruction. It was for the Dorothy Continued on page 86