A practical manual of screen playwriting : for theater and television films (1952)

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150 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING Dissimilar scene transitions. The problem in connecting totally dissimilar scenes, however, is not so simple. How, for example, with sound, could a quiet library scene be connected with an immediately following county fair scene? This problem was ideally solved in the British picture Storm in a Teacup. The two leads were first seen in the hushed confines of some library stacks, whispering their dialogue. But they were overheard by the typically sensitive though untypically burly librarian, who, upon being disturbed by their talk, boomed out, "Silence in this room," attenuating the last word in a bass but petulant whine. The attenuated "00" sound of the librarian's bass voice was then carried over, and "segued" (blended) into the loud, bovine "moooo" of a cow in the succeeding scene, which showed the animal penned up in a county fair cattle enclosure. The visual transition was accomplished by dissolving through from a close-up of the bovine librarian to a close-up of the petulant cow. The screen writer may often find it necessary to cut from a day scene to a night scene. Because the human eye does not immediately adapt to such a sudden change, it is essential to dissolve through slowly, to allow the eye to compensate gradually. The change from night to day, however, does not require a slow dissolve, because the eye can take the quick night-to-day change quite readily. Night-to-day and day-to-night dissolves should be avoided in television pictures. Technicians monitoring the broadcast film at the television studio will have a difficult time "riding gain" on these quick changes— that is, adjusting their controls to accommodate the varying light densities. Parallel-sound transitions. One of the most effective and widely known sound transitions was heard in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, in which the scream of the charlady, when she discovered the dead body, was cross-faded into the shriek of a near-by train siren. Here, the fact was established that the room in which the woman lived adjoined a railroad switchyard. This gave the transition added effectiveness because it became endowed with credibility. Other pictures have adapted this technique so that human shrieks have been segued into such other similar sounds as sea gulls croaking {The Girl Was Young) , wild birds fluting, babies crying, factory sirens screeching, musical instruments caterwauling and, in fact, into almost any