Harry Foster's hand stole up alongside of the cutoff button and he thrust it down viciously.
The scene stopped instantly and disappeared.
Foster, remaining beside the camera, swore. He rereeled manually a few yards and restarted the camera. He caught a previous scene's ending: a beautiful woman smiling shyly at another man. The scene's ending was brief, to a flash-over of Harry Foster standing in the center of the stage, and going through the same motions of smiling offstage, with the features changing from smile to scowl of hate.
Again Foster's hand flipped the switch and the image of Foster disappeared as did the settings on the stage.
Foster swore again. "There must be some way—How does he do this anyway?"
Foster opened the cabinet-like side of the solid camera and looked at the circuits. They were enigma to Foster, but there was some logic to it—there must be. You create an image and then wipe it away to make place for the next image—just as in common cinema. But in normal cinema it is possible to halt the film and project a still. That's what Harry Foster wanted—
He pulled a single tube from one circuit and snapped the camera on. The stage was blank. He replaced the tube and tried another tube removed by some distance from the first. He started the camera, and the stage flashed into being once and then went blank again. There was a tiny flash from the bottom panel of the machine and Foster looked down to see the indicator of a blown fuse.
Foster nodded. Obvious. To stop the wipe-away would mean that the next frame would be placed on top of the first. A double exposure would not work in the solids. Not without repealing that law of nature that states that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
What he had to do was to stop the projector at the same time he stopped the wipe-away. Tim Woodart had fixed the machine so that the wipe-away completed the scene after stopping the works. Just a matter of safety.
Foster puzzled over the machine and restarted it again. He waited until the image of Harry Foster stared off stage and then he grabbed two tubes and jerked them out simultaneously.