With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Haven’t you ever wondered, when watching moving pictures, why this or that was so, how that or this was done? Whether or not a real person had to make that dive off the cliff—or perhaps why, in some color pictures, there are sudden unaccountable blotches of color, yellow or red, perhaps green?

For instance, you have noticed, probably, in news reels and so on, how fast marching men always walk? A regiment comes past at the quickstep—almost at a run. Yet obviously, when the picture was taken, the men were marching along steadily enough, at a swinging stride that would set your pulse throbbing.

There are two reasons for that: one is a fairly normal convention that has become firmly established in motion-picture theaters, and that has nothing whatever—or at least practically nothing—to do with the taking of the picture. The other concerns the camera man or director in charge, and is a plain matter of judgment, good or bad.

You have probably seen strips of the celluloid ribbon, with little holes along the sides, that they call motion-picture “film.” It’s about an inch wide, and the little pictures run crosswise, sixteen of them to the foot of film. When the camera man turns the little crank of his motion-picture camera twice around, it carries a foot of film past the lens of the camera. Sixteen exposures. Ordinarily, the speed of this cranking is one second for the two turns—one foot of film, or sixteen exposures, per second; sixty feet a minute.

When the film is developed and a print made for exhibition, it is run through the projecting machine of a theater: if it were run at the rate of a foot a second, sixty feet a minute, the figures on the screen would move just as fast as they did in real life when the picture was taken—no faster and no slower.

But the custom has grown up of running film through the projecting machines faster than the film was run through the camera. Instead of being run sixty feet a minute, it is usually clicked along at the rate of seventy feet or more a minute. Seventy-two feet or more a minute is called “normal speed” for projection. So that on the screen everything happens about one-fifth faster than it did in real life, and frequently even faster than that—much faster, since more and more there is a tendency to “speed up” still further, until the feet of marching men in the news reels almost dance along the street, and their knees snap back and forth like mad.

Of course, you see more in a minute, watching in a theater where film is run through the projection machine so fast—but what you see is distorted, instead of being quite so much of the real thing, as would be the case if it were run more slowly. Probably on the whole it would be better if the convention of “speeding up” the projection machines were done away with, and all film ordinarily run at only the actual speed of real life—except where there happened to be some special reason for hurrying it along.

Then—the other way of making things happen on the screen faster than they do in real life. For instance, when one automobile is chasing another, and turns a corner so fast it almost makes you jump out of your seat—the hind wheels slewing around so dizzily it seems as though the whole thing would surely go in the ditch.

That’s done by what is called “Slow Cranking.” The director, we will say, wants to show an automobile crossing in front of the Lightning Express, with only half a second to spare. If he were really to send the auto with its driver and passengers across the track just in time to escape the flying cowcatcher, it would be too terrible a risk. So they “slow down” the action. Instead of crashing along at sixty or seventy miles an hour the train is held down to a mere crawl—say ten miles an hour, so that it could be stopped short, if necessity arose, in time to avoid an accident. The auto would cross the tracks at a correspondingly slow gait. And the camera man, instead of cranking his film at normal speed, two turns to a second, would slow down to a single turn in three seconds, or thereabouts. That would mean it would take six seconds for one foot of film to pass the lens of the camera, instead of the usual second. So that when the picture appears on the screen, projected at normal speed, we should see in one second what actually occurred in six seconds; the train traveling at ten miles an hour would hurry past, on the screen, at sixty; the automobile bumping cautiously over the tracks in low speed or intermediate, at six or seven miles an hour, would flash past the approaching cowcatcher at somewhere around forty.

In comedies, this trick of “slow cranking” has been used until it has grown rather tiresome, unless done with some new effect or with real cleverness. Autos have zigzagged around corners, or skidded in impossible circles, men have climbed like lightning to the tops of telegraph poles, and nursemaids have run baby-carriages along sidewalks at racetrack speed until we are a little inclined to yawn when we see one of the old stunts coming off again.