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Rubber “Actors” Lend Realism to Movies

Comic, Educational and Scientific Pictures Are Worked Out on Miniature Stage with Animated Figures

BY means of a series of ingenious inventions and most painstaking study of anatomy and sculpture, a Los Angeles producer has created a type of animated miniature figures which opens up most interesting fields in the realm of educational and scientific motion pictures.

As in the case of the use of all miniature figures, the process of making motion pictures of this inventor’s figures is a laborious one, each exposure on the film necessitating a re-posing of the “actors.” In producing 500 feet as much as four months is required to set up the various scenes and make the hundreds of poses. The work is not unlike that of the maker of animated cartoons who has to make a new sketch for each exposure in the film.
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Underwater Scenes Filmed from Odd Boat

Suspended like twin keels from the hull of a specially designed boat, cylindrical steel chambers fitted with thick glass windows enable motion-picture photographers at Silver Springs, Fla., to make a series of underwater movies. When a scene is to be taken, a cameraman descends from the boat deck into the submerged photographing chamber. Swimmers then dive from the deck to perform their feats in full view of the lens, as depicted above. The electrically propelled craft can be moved about during a scene to permit close-ups and various camera angles.

TUBULAR FILMS BRING MOVIES TO HOME
To bring motion pictures into the home, a camera and projector are being made that use tubular films costing a little more
than the average “still” photograph. One strip, which is of noninflammable film, will carry 1,664 pictures. The camera may be loaded in daylight. One reel equals 150 feet of standard film, and can be purchased for 75 cents. In projecting, rewinding and threading of the reels have been eliminated. The device may be attached to any electric-light socket. The camera is made of aluminum and differs little from the ordinary apparatus. The lens is always in focus, making it easy for the amateur to “shoot” pictures.

Movie Sounds from Queer Machines

When horses clatter down the street on the talkie screen, you can wager that the sound of their hoof-beats has been registered by a machine like that shown above. Arms on the two crank-turned wheels strike against metal brackets. The device is used mainly in comedy work.

Earthquakes must frequently be recorded in the talkies, and of course, nature can’t be depended on to supply these sound effects for the director. On such occasions the huge drum shown above is brought into action. Bowling balls are placed inside the metal drum, which is then revolved by a hand crank. Read the rest of this entry »

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Real Scenery for Popeye

MIDGET SETS GIVE DEPTH TO NEW MOVIE CARTOONS

LIKE immense slices of pie on a twelve-foot plate, curious miniature movie sets made of clay, wood, sponges, plaster, and cardboard now add new realism to animated cartoons by creating an illusion of depth. In the New York studios where Popeye, Betty Boop, and other famous characters of the screen cartoons come to life, such sets are replacing the flat, sketched-in backgrounds familiar in the past.
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Nothing like a nice dress you can’t sit down in.

Rest Chair for Movie Stars

Movie stars must rest between scenes despite tight gowns that can’t be sat down in without disaster. This ingenious rest chair is the solution of the problem.

It’s amazing how much those pictures look like frames from early computer rendered 3D movies.

Dolls Replace Drawings in Film Cartoon

THOUSANDS of carved wooden dolls give a three-dimensional effect to a new type of animated-cartoon film developed by George Pal, Hungarian photographic expert. Instead of using pictures drawn and photographed in sequence to provide movement, the new cartoon-film technique employs numerous doll figures carved and painted to represent the various movements and facial expressions of a single cartoon character. As many as thirty different carvings of one figure may be photographed in sequence for one simple change in a facial expression.

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A Famous Fairy Tale Is Brought to the Screen as the Pioneer Feature-Length Cartoon in Color

By ANDREW R. BOONE

BEHIND the black walls of an air-conditioned Hollywood studio laboratory, the shutter on a strange eight-deck camera flicked open and shut the other day, exposing the last of 362,919 frames of color film. At that instant was completed the first feature-length motion-picture cartoon ever created, one requiring more than 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawings and water-color paintings. Also, at that moment, depth, a sense of perspective and distance hitherto seen only in “live action” pictures, sprang into being for cartoons.

Both the giant camera and the picture had their beginnings in a decision made four years ago by Walt Disney, famed creator of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to produce a feature based on a well-known folk tale. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a movie version of Grimm’s famous fairy tale filmed by the multiplane camera, is the result.
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Movies Travel to Town in a Trailer Theater

Traveling from town to town throughout the northwest, a trailer theater is bringing talking movies to communities lacking theaters of their own. This mobile movie house is fifty-five feet long and comfortably seats sixty persons in bus-style chairs, which are permanently fixed. A small stage over the front wheels permits vaudeville or lectures, and two projectors in a fireproof booth show up-to-date movies against a rolling screen. If power lines are not handy, the plant can furnish its own 110-volt current. Electric fans have been installed.

Freak Movies Easy with New Amateur Camera

A NEW sixteen-millimeter movie camera now places the professional’s bag of tricks in the hands of the amateur. Fade-outs, double exposures, animations, and enlarged close-ups are only a few of the unusual shots that can be obtained merely by pressing buttons.

Besides lens turret and slow-motion shutter, this new product of the Eastman Kodak laboratories in Rochester, N. Y., has a number of other improvements not found on the ordinary high-grade home movie camera. A crank that runs the film through the camera backwards, an accurate, geared film footage indicator, a unique focusing device, and a shutter that can be opened or closed while the camera is operating are important features.
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Engineering the Magic Carpet’s Flight

Problems in Mechanics that Make the “Movie” Engineer’s Profession Recall the Magician’s Miracles

BUILD me a magic carpet on which I can ride; a flying horse like Pegasus and arrange a set so that I can disappear in a whirlwind.”

The “boss” of the moving-picture lot, without more ado, walked out of his chief engineer’s office, leaving that hard-working individual the three problems which he mentally added to the score or more of similar commands he had executed since the actual “shooting” of the scenes in the huge spectacle had begun months ago. For the engineering staff of the larger moving-picture producers is used to facing and conquering problems that for sheer unusual-ness are perhaps unrivaled.
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Panorama an a Giant Screen

SIGHTSEEING “trips” to America’s beauty spots have been conducted right on the Chicago Railroad Fairground with a projection system that makes color pictures of Niagara Falls seem so real that you wonder why you can’t feel the mist on your face. Kodachrome transparencies are projected on the screen five at a time and, so perfectly aligned are the individual pictures, that the effect is of a giant, natural panorama.
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