New Methods

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 684, 8 June 1929, Page 25

New Methods

Silence and Sounds in Talking Pictures GREAT CARE DEMANDED

It was the strange stillness that impressed me most on my first morning in a tallcie studio , writes Norman Foster, a young Broadway actor . for “Popular Scien'cc.” I | heard no voices, no ivhir of j i cameras — nothing.

TfOR a minute or two X stood by the assistant director. The silence was oppressive, uncanny. One scarcely dared to breathe. Suddenly, a loud, long ring from an electric bell. ' Instantly, a thousand-and-one noises assailed my ears. The door was flung open with a bang. Everywhere at once, people called to each other, walked about, talked, coughed. Machines hummed. A bedlam of hammering, sawing and scraping seemed to have broken loose. “One long ring,” the assistant director explained, “is the signal that a rehearsal or the actual ‘shotting’ of a scene has ended and that normal activities may be resumed. “You see, in making ‘talkies’ we have a double job. Not only must we get sounds into the pictures, but we must also keep out sounds that don’t belong there. I was surprised, even a little disappointed. I had expected to see many intricate and mysterious looking machines and devices, but all that seemed to distinguish the place from an ordinary movie studio were two or three microphones suspended from the ceiling. The “stage” was a room measuring about forty by ninety feet. The particular scene set up in it represented a well-appointed private office. The room had been made soundproof by double walls, cloth was hung to prevent echo and the cameras were enclosed in booths like padded cells. The customary Kleig lights had been replaced by noiseless lamps and the floor was covered with thick, gray felt that muffled every step. Even the “office” desks were overlaid with thick felt pads.

I noticed, on a mezzanine overlooking the studio lengthwise, two rooms with large windows through which men were surveying the stage. One of these rooms was the “monitor room”; the other the “sound room.” Sounds caught by the microphones are carried to the monitor room and here an operator uses a device to control the volume of sound transmitted. Through a loud speaker, he hears every word or noise on the stage, and it is his task to regulate sounds to make them natural. From the monitor room, the sound is carried to an amplifier which increases its strength several thousand times; then to the sound room, where It is recorded. A scene must sound absolutely right before we can afford to reproduce it and not until everyone concerned feels satisfied is it “shot” for final reproduction.