HOW FILMS ARE FAKED.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 April 1922, Page 11

HOW FILMS ARE FAKED.

INGENIOUS TRICKS. Some may say, “Don’t spoil the show by giving away the trick”; but film “faking” has become so ingenious that it is near to art, and it may be that the next time you go to a kinema theatre an idea for a new “fake” may occur to you and prove profitable financially, writes Andrew Soutar in the Daily Mail. At any rate, your interest in the screen play will be increased if you learn to look for flaws or “fakes” and try to unravel them. In New York there is a Frenchman who makes a large income by devising “fakes” for the big producers. I was in his office one day when this proposal was put to him by a producer: “My leading man is no horseman, but 1 want him to take a fence eight feet high—higher, if possible. Can you make fifty -feet of film for insertion in the reel ?” He made it the next day. The fence he erected was one foot high, but when the picture was completed it looked ten feet high, and horse and rider performed a feat that made an audience gasp. How did he do it? By digging a pit six feet deep and pointing his camera upward. When next you go to the kinema theatre, try to get the angle of the camera—that is, place yourself where you think the camera man was standing when he took the “shot.” A waterfall as high as Niagara may be only a few feet high in reality. You frequently see a “distance” shot of a man or woman jumping overboard from a ship. A moment, and there is a “close-up” of the swimmer in the water. Mark the condition of the sea—rough or otherwise —in the first case and compare it with the condition in the second. The first was really the sea; the second was probably a tank, with which most up-to-date studios are equipped. A \ naval battle has been done with small cardboard models of ships fitted with ordinary squibs. A “shot” was taken of a lone sea and the “battle” was superimposed. The picture was most realistic, with the guns flashing and the ships sinking. A clever “fake” was a scene showing the famous Grand Canyon with horsemen galloping through the defiles and up the slopes. The Canyon in the first place was a model less than two feet square! You may be surprised to learn that real tears in the heroine’s eyes are not desirable —they run too fast; to get a “close-up” of those fine* fat tears sliding slowly down the cheeks you must place a little glycerine and water on the lids and in the corners of the lady’s eyes. If she is an artist she can produce real tears, but, as I say, they are not always desirable. A film actor scaling a tall chimney, “hanging on by his eyebrows,” as they say, is the simplest thing in the world, because the chimney is laid flat in the studio, and the camera is pointed down--ward, from above, as he crawls over it. The limitations of the camera are often talked about; as a fact, they are few. Try to think of some apparently impossible feat; it is “ten to one on” that the brainy fellow in the studio will find a way of accomplishing it. He Bill pay for the