Queer Effects

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 566, 19 January 1929, Page 23

Queer Effects

Movie Cameras Have Amns and Legs "FOLLOW THROUGH’.’ SHOTS

! -wroU have often noticed I the queerly satisfactory \ photographic effects secured ! ] by cameras which follow i people and moving objects I I wherever they go. This system is known as I that of follow through " I shots and the method adopted f i.v described in the following | Hollywood dispatch. 1

_HE popular vogue for "follow through’’ shots, which means In ordinnlKM Cflfkl ary terms, having a | UESmITWJI camera follow the * 1 action of the story through several changes of scene without stopping, presents some hard technical problems for the men behind the cameras. In one shot in "The White Sin,” with Clive Brook and Olga Baclanova, the camera followed the pair up three flights of stairs, across a hallway, into a bedroom, and then added a runningup shot on the pair. The camera was mounted on a platform on wheels, which ran along a track following the pair on a parallel ts they walked across the hall. With careful timing, just as the couple came to the bottom of the stairs, the camera and cameraman and platform slipped into a timed elevator that rose simultaneously with them. Reaching the landing, the couple were kept in range, and the camera, electrically propelled, slid on its wheeled platform off the elevator on to the hall floor and through the door behind the couple. Usually a platform on a track, or overhead pulleys, carefully planned, provides the solution of a joltless and continuous action shot of this sort.