All about is a labyrinth of still standing sets—here a corner of a business office, and just beyond the interior of a drawing room in a rich home, with a beautiful curved stairway mounting ten feet or so into nothing at the right. Next comes the corner of a large restaurant. Under the guidance of an assistant director, in the glare of a single bluish-green Cooper-Hewitt “bank” turned on as a work light, property men are “dressing” it. They are putting yellow table-cloths on the tables (in the finished picture they will look white; in reality they are yellow instead of white in order not to be too glaring, before the picture can be exposed long enough to bring out the contours and details that are more important in the darker places); and hanging a row of horse-race pictures along the wall.
This is a big studio, supposed to be making a dozen or more pictures at once. We are surprised that on this whole great dark “light” stage only one company is working; we learn that two others are “shooting” elsewhere on the lot; one in back of the carpenter shop, where a clever director has found an ideal “location” for his purpose right under his nose, and another on one of the big “daylight” stages that we shall see presently. Several other companies are out on location miles from the studio—one perhaps in another State on a trip that will last a couple of weeks. Still others are not at the “shooting” stage of their picture at all; one or two are still “casting,” one that follows the methods used by Griffith is “in rehearsal,” and still others are merely waiting while scenario writer and director work out the final details of the scenario or “continuity,” or while the director “sits in” with the cutter or “screen editor” and title writer to put the finishing touches on the completed product.
We go over to the corner where the one company on the big stage is “shooting.” A dozen people are sitting around on chairs or stools, just outside the lights. About in the middle of them, with a whole phalanx of lights at right and left, two cameras are set up. Beside them, in a comfortable folding camp-chair with a back rest, sits the director. He is wearing what a humorous writer has called the “director’s national costume” of soft shirt, knickerbockers, and puttees. On the floor beside his chair is a megaphone.
If you hold your hands together with the palms flat, making a narrow angle about a third of a right angle, you can get an idea of what a camera “sees.” This angle is called the “camera angle.” Only what happens within that narrow angle will be recorded on the film. Sometimes white chalk-lines are drawn on the floor to mark the camera angle; what is within the lines will be photographed, while what is outside will not show.
Along the sides of this open space that the camera will photograph are ranged the bright white carbon lights and the bluish-green vacuum lights that illumine the scene. Overhead, suspended by heavy chains from tracks that traverse the ceiling of the great stage, are more lights; white carbon “dome” lights, and additional bluish-green Cooper-Hewitt “overhead banks.”
Courtesy Brown Bros.
How a Motion Picture Interior is Made.
A mass of complicated paraphernalia is necessary to light and equip a motion-picture stage. The tall lights with the lines across them are the “Cooper-Hewitts,” or vacuum lights, called “banks.” The smaller square lights are the white arc-lights or “Kliegs.” The snake-like cables on the floor carry the electricity.
