Reel and Slide (Mar-Dec 1918)

"^^ EDIT^ODIALS (£5 — Q) lllll 3 NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS If you fail to receive your copy of Reel and Slide Magazine promptly please do not think it has been lost or was not sent on time. Remember there is an unusual pressure on the railroads, moving troops, supplies, food and fuel. The demands on them are enormous; they have more business than they can handle, so delays are inevitable. Everything humanly possible is being done to expedite prompt delivery. Where to Begin EDUCATORS are more or less sitting back waiting for the film producer to guess their wants and step forth with the finished product. In other words, they have set him the task of adapting films to the needs of the school room, quite an undertaking even for a college president who might turn his attention to learning the motion picture business. That is the trouble. Collegians are, in a large measure, asking the film interests to become pedagogues. Instead, a few of our best instructors should adopt the more sane and practical method of learning something about film production. Motion picture production is a mechanical art. It is true that various branches of the applied sciences enter into its ramifications, such as illumination, decorative art, chemistry and photography. At the same time, a working knowledge of all of these departments is quite enough for one man or group of men to master, hence to expect them to possess the ideals and experience of the professor of chemistry, geography or history is rather overstepping the mark. When there is so much difference of opinion among educators themselves concerning the various methods of instruction in each branch of pedagogy, the film producer who would satisfy all factions and elements will find himself more or less in a whirlpool of doubt. One chief difficulty which restrains the full expansion of the visual instruction movement lies in the nonstandardized condition of education itself. Unless a film man is willing to do a local business in a given state, he is apt to find his productions, though scientifically correct in one state, of no interest to the school board of another whose teachings are based on other authorities from those he has followed. This limits the scope of his activities and unless he can dispose of his wares broadcast, he is liable to find his capital tied up in a losing venture. The best he can do, then, under these conditions, is to take up the most elementary and accepted theories and screen them the best he knows how. He does it in fear and trembling though the script he uses may have been produced and passed on by the best brains in the educational world. He has no sooner announced his production than he is flooded with criticism and protest arid the complaint that his picture "shows nothing worth while," is amateurish and incomplete, lacking in the more academic phases of the subject and not under any circumstances to be called truly "educational." This has been the experience of at least one man who ventured several thousand dollars in biological reels for sale outright to colleges. A producer of popular travelogs in the East said quite recently: "We have the capital and the inclination to film the most approved theories in the five leading branches of study for class-room purposes — but what are they?" This man has talked to the country's leading school superintendents on the subject. He has never been able to get very far. While he found opinion unanimous that films are of unusual aid to the teacher in certain lines of study, he has found no way to circumvent the varied and conflicting opinion as to just how these films are to be standardized so that such a venture will at least pay its way. Titles WE all know that producers of dramatic pictures have certain sets of rules they follow in the titling of their pictures, and if we are to judge some of the rules by the titles we sometimes read on the screen, we are not likely to have a great amount of respect for them. But the dramatic producer is a picture man pure and simple and as his business is making and selling pictures for profit, we cannot expect him to lay any too great stress on the literary qualities of the printed word he finds himself compelled to utilize. It is quite obvious that titles written for a purely utilitarian purpose — to convey information — must be prepared and judged from literary standards different by far than those standards the aim of which is to "bring a gap" in a photodrama. The scenario writers are hedged in on all sides by restrictions and the title to them is an elastic device which may be used and misused in a score of different ways. It is more often the case that the title makes good a shortcoming in the scenes upon which it bears, rather than that it fills a definite place of its own in the picture. To this end the modern photoplay is told in so far as is possible, in pictures and the titles are made short, slangy and catchy. The "clever" title is the order of the day. But entirely different elements enter into the preparation of a set of titles which are calculated to inform. Their length is of secondary importance, providing words are not wasted and the idea is put clearly and to the point. This calls for much care and study when a reel on chemistry or physics is in hand, for instance, and when processes and principles that are highly technical and involved must be clarified, not alone by visual demonstration, but by means of the words in combination. In the photoplay the title is a by-product and secondary. In a strictly educational, it is an essential and of quite as much importance as the scene. A picture