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MOVIES IN THREE DIMENSIONS

How to adapt any 8 or 16mm movie camera and projector to take and show stereo movies.

By William G. Esmond

IF you own an 8 or 16mm movie camera and projector, you can make your own amazingly lifelike three dimensional movies in full color or black and white at a cost of less than $6 for equipment.

The principle of stereoscopic vision is simple. Each eye sees a slightly different aspect of any view. The right eye sees slightly more of the right side of solid objects in the foreground, and the left eye sees slightly more of the left side. In addition, when the eyes are gazing at an object in the foreground, the objects seen by the right eye in the background are displaced to the right, and the objects seen by the left eye in the background are displaced to the left. Read the rest of this entry »

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Marvelous Movie Miniatures Portray Cities of the Future

THE scenarist’s dream of New York City in 1980 has been done in miniature at Hollywood for “Just Imagine,” a motion picture fantasy. This model took five months to complete and cost approximately $200,000. It was built in an old blimp hangar once used by the U. S. Army balloon corps and covers a ground area 75×225 feet, representing the most extravagant effort yet conceived by the American cinema industry.
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Origin of the storyboard?

MOVIES NOW MADE FROM “BLUEPRINTS”

Motion picture directors now work from drawings when getting out a new picture. Before they start “shooting,” a set of sketches showing each scene in detail is made. They show how actors will stand or be grouped against backgrounds and how lighting effects will be arranged. On the margin of each sketch are notes or diagrams showing the number and arrangements of cameras to be used.

Cameramen, directors, and actors study these drawings, known as “pictorial continuity,” before going to work on the picture. When work starts, each one thus knows beforehand the requirements for each scene. Four hundred and twenty-eight of these drawings were made recently for a picture now under production in Hollywood.

Movie Fans Collect Stars’ Voices
A LIBRARY of phonograph records constitutes the unusual “autograph album” of two Hollywood enthusiasts, whose hobby is collecting the voices of movie actors and actresses. Not satisfied with mere signatures scrawled in a book, they have developed a technique of their own to obtain a more interesting souvenir. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hobbies Are His Hobby

HIS friends laughed when Cliff Arquette announced that he planned to create puppets which not only would emulate Charlie McCarthy by moving their mouths and eyes, but also would raise their hair when frightened. As he worked, Arquette solved the mechanical problems one by one, and recently a show of his creation appeared in an all-puppet motion-picture sequence which is considered tops for mechanical actors.
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MUSIC MADE VISIBLE IN WEIRD MOVIE

Futuristic patterns of light and shadow are projected upon a movie screen to accompany the music of Wagner’s “Song to the Evening Star,” in a unique sound film recently completed for exhibition in a New York theater. Marching rhymically across the audience’s field of view, the odd designs were produced by trick photography, with the aid of bracelets, toy balls, silks, and crushed tissue ribbons.

I love how this guy makes such bold predictions about what the future of movie theaters will be like, but fails to anticipate little innovations like sound. The Jazz Singer came out only 4 years after this article was published and there were already short format talkies playing in NYC in 1923.

Famous Manager Predicts Egg-Shaped Playhouses

Plans to Paint Movie Theater Sets on Walls with Light THE day is coming soon when we shall not merely look at the movies; we shall live in them. By scientific blending of color-light painting with action and music, by consummate artistic realism, we shall be transported to a vivid land of drama, where pulsating, colorful life springs from the very walls of the theater in which we sit. While the drama unfolds before us, we shall be encompassed by ever changing lifelike scenes—now the crashing waves of a sea; now the shadows of a great forest; now the towering buildings and the crowded streets of a city—projected in color on the walls about us.
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Mickey Mouse Goes Classical

By ANDREW R. BOONE

MOVING sound has been added to moving pictures to bring greater realism to the screen. Accompanying Walt Disney’s newest Technicolor creation, “Fantasia,” in which Mickey Mouse and a host of new companions perform to the rhythms of classical music, this latest Hollywood invention made its first public appearance a few weeks ago at the Broadway Theater in New York.
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$97 Movie Made in Hollywood Kitchen

By A. L. WOOLDRIDGE Special Hollywood Correspondent

Stories of millions of dollars spent in producing ten-reel movie features have given the public an idea that only a big company could produce profit-making motion pictures. But Robert Florey, expending $97 produced a picture which is making him wealthy!

IF YOU have $100 or so, plus a few old cigar boxes, a motion picture camera, and a desire to break into the movies—as who hasn’t?—you can be your own director and cameraman and produce a motion picture worthy of exhibition in theaters throughout the country. That is, you can it you are as skillful and economical as Robert Florey, who cut his sets from cardboard and cigar boxes and produced in a Hollywood kitchen, at a total cost of $97, a movie which is being shown in United Artists theaters all over America.
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Putting Color Into the Movies

Everyone has seen the new color-talkies on the screen, but few people know how the startlingly life-like color effects are produced. This article gives the story of how technicolor films are made.

by RAY FRASER

BACK in 1915, Herbert T. Kalmus, a struggling chemistry instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invented a camera which took two pictures at the same click.

He had hopes that it would prove helpful to the country constable in trapping the speeding motorist. The picture thus obtained would prove scientifically the speed at which the automobile was traveling and also register the number of the vehicle.

When he tried to find his way to a practical application, he found that one camera of this type would cost more than the sum total of taxes collected by most townships for a single year. But he felt he had an idea and clung to it tenaciously.
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Odd Machines Put Fun in Movies

By John E. Lodge

MOVIE studio men were stumped when a comedy script called for an oyster that would open its shell and wink one eye. But a New York maker of comedy props welcomed the job. A few days later, he appeared at the studio carrying an ingenious shell made of papier-mache. The two halves opened and closed on a spring hinge and an eye within winked when a studio man pulled a hidden string.
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NEW DOUBLE FEATURE – FISH AND FILMS!
James Beach never dreamed his customers would take home fish caught while watching his drive-in movie.

WHEN James Beach built his drive-in theatre on a lakeside at Winter Haven, Fla., he never thought that fish might be lurking in the waters offshore. But customers began lugging their fishing gear when they came to the movie and Beach soon noticed they were having good luck hauling in speckled perch and black bass. Enterprising Beach now provides fishing poles for patrons who park their autos around the rim of the 420-car lot. The one problem Beach hasn’t solved: free-loaders who pull up in boats.