With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

In order to secure “close-ups” that fit in with the realistic miniature snow scenes of the preceding illustration, real actors are photographed in such scenes as this. Tons of salt were used to make a few square rods of Alaska.

In one of D. W. Griffith’s shorter photoplays a number of girls leave a party with a fellow in a Ford; a storm is coming up. We see the car leaving the lighted house and starting down the dark street, we see the gathering storm, see the car jouncing along in the blinding rain as the storm breaks, see it cross a little bridge, with lightning flashes illuminating the scene, and finally we see it arrive safely at the home of the heroine, who gets out and runs to the back door in the dark like a half-drowned kitten.

The street scene was taken with lights illuminating the house windows, and enough of the street to show dimly the outlines of trees and so on in the supposed night. The short scene of the gathering storm (merely a picture of masses of moving clouds, taken of course some bright day when there happened to be a good cloud-effect) gives us the impression of an impending deluge. The scene of the car in the driving rain was taken in the studio, with a black curtain hung behind the car, a man lying concealed on the farther running board jouncing up and down to give the impression that the machine was bumping rapidly along over a rough road, and a hose squirting rain upon the scene in front of the car, being driven upon it and past it by the blast of air from a huge aeroplane propeller whirling just out of the camera’s sight. The scene of the auto crossing the little bridge was done in miniature; that is, a toy auto, mechanically propelled, equipped with tiny electric searchlights, was wound up and sent across a little eight-inch bridge, over a road that wound between trees made of twigs ten or twelve inches high, stuck in damp sand—with little fences, houses, everything, perfect—and the lightning made by switching a big sputtering arc-light behind the camera on and off. Then, the final scene, of the girl leaving the auto, was taken in fading daylight, with a hose again supplying the drenching “rain,” and the print tinted dark blue to indicate night.

On the screen, the illusion of the whole was perfect. As I said, it is not whether or not a trick is used that counts—but how perfectly the thing is done, how complete the illusion that is carried, and how faithfully and sincerely that illusion or impression conveys a really worth-while idea, or a story that is convincingly true to life.

You mustn’t think, though, that all the big effects on the screen are secured by tricks. For indeed they are not. Sets are constructed that cost thousands and thousands of dollars, locomotives are run head on into each other, whole companies travel into out-of-the-way and dangerous places to film unusual scenes,—shipwreck, tropical adventures, Arctic rescues. A camera man told me of how, in a shelter on top of a rock above a water-hole in Central Africa, he watched for days to photograph wild elephants, and saw a fight between an elephant and a big bull rhinoceros, and in the end almost lost his life.

All over the world the moving-picture camera is now finding its way, blazing new trails, bringing back information of how this gold field really looks, or how in the next range logging is carried on at ten thousand feet. Sooner or later you and I will see it on the screen, and it is for us to know something about the business—for the film is taking the place of many and many a printed page, and the picture, in part at least, is the speech of to-morrow.

Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation.

“Shooting” a Tramp on a Moving Train.

Imagine you are looking down at the tramp’s head from the point where the camera is, with the train moving rapidly, and you can get an idea of what is shown on the screen.