Optical and Special Effects - Text 3
The production of this special effect required an extremely stable image, as unsteadiness in different areas of the frame would have exposed the illusion. Some of the Professionnelle cameras used in the Pathé studios took 35 mm negatives with a single perforation on each side of the frame, presumably to improve image steadiness. Some camera operators further attempted to improve image steadiness by stabilizing their camera with heavy contraptions when shooting special effects. In an interview with film historian Kevin Brownlow, cinematographer Charles Rosher explained that he had built a camera stand weighing no less than 2,000 lb (900 kg) while working on a film, Little Lord Fauntleroy (Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford, 1921), featuring two characters played by Mary Pickford. This stand was used to shoot the scenes in which both of Pickford’s characters, the Little Lord and his mother, appeared simultaneously.
Steel girders formed the framework; the base was lined with sandbags, and a huge, hollow block of steel supported the pan and tilt head. The contraption could be moved around on casters, but when I’d lined the shot up, packs secured it to the floor. Jacks held the pan head rigid, too, once it had been positioned. In front of the camera was the matte frame, and I moved the matte as Mary moved. The whole setup was so solid that you could jump around the floor without shifting it a thousandth of an inch.[2]
The Pathé Professionnelle was gradually replaced for studio work over the 1910s by the Bell & Howell 2709, whose intermittent mechanism incorporated registration pins which produced extremely steady images. As a result, the 2709 was especially suited to the production of special effects. Indeed, the first mention of the new camera in the pages of the Moving Picture World lauds the remarkable fades that the staff of the Essanay company – based, like Bell & Howell, in Chicago – had managed to produce with it during the production of a one-reeler entitled Sunshine in October 1912.[3] Thirteen years later, the producers of the feature The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925), a film adaptation of an Arthur Conan Doyle novel set partly in a forgotten land still inhabited by dinosaurs, heaped praise on the 2709’s steadiness in a Bell & Howell advertisement. The 2709 was also equipped with a variable shutter controlled by a device which made it possible to create automated fades.[4] It could also be fitted, like the Pathé Professionnelle before it, with an external iris whose position and opening were variable.