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Topic: Need help with questions about the silent movie era

William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99

posted 08-22-2003 12:38 AM

quote:
As to speed, prints were run in advance and the machine speed set up by eye, what looked right, prior to screening

That's how it was done originally, when projectors were hand-cranked. Taking & projections peeds varied within the film. The projectionist's part was expected to be a little less a reproducer, & a bit more of a performance. For example, you'll not that projection speeds were specified to the projectionist as being faster that camera speeds. It gave the films a bit of extra crispness (shades of turntable speeds fudged upwards in the ratings wars heydays of Top 40 radio).

Audiences noticed, but didn't have the vocabulary or education to describe exactly what they were seeing. In Brownlow's _The Parade's Gone By_, he referenced interviews with folks who'd watched movies at the end of the silent era into the sound era. They remarked how the movies really slowed down - not just a reference to things getting a little more stodgy due to mic & staging neccessities, but due to the fact that camera & projection were then both locked to 24fps. In the silent era, projection speeds were *expected & spec'd* at a few fps faster than camera speeds.

The trades & technical books for projection of the era have lots of info for the operator in regard to *interpreting* the picture & providing the correct speed for a scene. Here's a copy & paste of a previous post typed from _Motion Picture Handbook for Managers and Operators", 1910, by F. H. Richardson, 1910:

"The matter of speed is of much importance, but no rule can be laid down governing it. Speed must be left entirely to the discretion of the operator, except that with inflammable film forty feet per minute is as slow as is safe, with ordinary light. Theoretically, the machine speed should be the same as that of the camera which took the picture being projected, but in practice this is often far from true.
The camera man grinds out a set speed, supposed to be sixty feet per minute, though often he varies widely from the mark. The actors act the scene as seems best to them, but ofttimes when the scene is projected it is discovered they have misjudged the speed of action necessary for best effect. Right here is where a realy good operator who closely watches such details becomes of great value, helping out the scenes amazingly merely by changing speed on different scenes.
Take, as an example, Pathe's "Faker's Dream." If run straight through at camera speed the film is dull and of comparatively little effect. Where the actors are moving about their speed is too great and while on the various amusement devices of the park the speed is altogether too slow. But by running about a fifty foot speed in the first instance and close to seventy-five in the other, the film creates much laughter, but it is necessary to change speed radically many times on this film. Another example is "A Ride for a Life," by Edison, I believe. If run at normal speed while the auto ride is on, the "Ride for a Life" develops into a howling farce, but if speeded up just as fast as you can run, it is excellent, but as the ride is cut three or
four times in its length by other scenes, you have to slow down for each of them or the farce would be reversed. As an example the other way, we all know that the slower the Passion Play is run the more impressive it is. Forty feet per minute is best for it. The only rule for speed, except in starting the machine, which should always be done slowly, is, "Watch you subject and be governed entirely by its action." Twenty-five minutes is the extreme limit of time for 1,000 feet of film. Fifteen to twenty minutes is ordinary time for most subjects."

FYI: to convert feet per minute to frames per second, divide feet per minute by 3.75

(That's 3.75 foot-seconds per frame-minutes.)

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 08-22-2003 07:18 AM

quote:
The projectors (Vic 8's) had fire extinguishers fitted after a fire distroyed one mech!

When I was at the NFT in 1990-92 there was an urban legend that the reel which ignited was from The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: charming if true.

quote:
Silent prints were run, if I remember rightly we altered the optical centre of the lens to cater for the full frame (no soundtrack).

We used (I think it was) 49mm diameter lens mounted in an eccentric 'offset ring' with which it slotted into a 70mm turret or holder: this corrected the angle to make the full-width frame appear centre on the screen without having to physically move the projector. Very easy and straightforward. At the last place I showed full-gate prints this operation was accomplished by inserting a large chisel between projector and floor, and levering accordingly!

quote:
Whether or not the NFT still runs nitrate I'm not sure, as when funds permitted new safety prints were being made due to the unstable nature of nitrate.

NFT2 still did when I was there (although I very rarely worked in 1 or 2, being based mainly in what was then MOMI and what is now NFT3), but 1 no longer did because the spoolboxes had to go when digital sound was installed.

quote:
If you have film that is shrunken but otherwise ok is it possible to project it using special sprockets and if so who makes them?

With shrunk acetate, I found that using Fox Hole sprockets helped a lot to reduce the possibility of perf damage. I've never tried this with nitrate, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work, unless the film has got sticky. In that case I for one would not put it anywhere near a projector.

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Robert Harris
Film Handler

Posts: 95
From: Bedford Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2003

posted 08-22-2003 08:13 PM

A bit more "illumination" to Steve Guttag's answer (Hi, Steve...)

When were were sceening Napoleon in a number of venues going back to the '20s, I recall a theatre...

I want to say either the Landmark in Syracuse or the Midland in KC, which still had a tachometer system in place which was installed between the booth and the conductor's podium, which gave a readout for fps.

If you review a score from the "silent" period, you'll note that certain scenes are specifically annotated to be run at a specific speed, which would be modified throughout the screening.

RAH

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 08-23-2003 11:10 AM

I remember when we did a series of the Kevin Brownlow/Carl Davis 'Thames Silents', the soundtrack was played from VHS hi-fi wild with the projected films. We had two monitors side by side, one showing the VHS, and the other showing a CCTV picture of the cinema screen. Next to them was an inverter control for the projectors, and we constantly adjusted the speed of the film to match that of the video, normally using the moments at which intertitles came and went as a guide. On some of them (The General sticks in my mind) we had to make some quite radical speed changes when you could quite clearly see the two diverging on the screen. It occured to me later that we must have been doing a slightly higher-tech version of what went on in the projection rooms of the 1920s.

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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99

posted 08-25-2003 01:43 AM

quote:
I want to say either the Landmark in Syracuse or the Midland in KC, which still had a tachometer system in place which was installed between the booth and the conductor's podium, which gave a readout for fps.

There were a number of those installed at various theaters. I was told that at the Stanley in Utica, NY there is a knob on the conductor's stand which is assumed to have controlled projector speed, but I doubt the AFM would have stepped all in the IA like that. I'd guess that it's an annunciator system to 'request' speeds from the operator.

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Dominic Case
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 131
From: Sydney NSW Australia
Registered: Aug 2003

posted 08-26-2003 03:02 AM

In the mid-20s, the ASC & SMPE were recommending camera speeds of no more than 60feet/min (16fps) while theatres and SMPE recommended projection at no less than 80 feet/min (>21fps). That's right, SMPE recommended different taking and showing speeds. (Though not without some internal argument.)

Production people were concerned with getting enough exposure, and the cost of stock if you ran faster. Theatres argued that flicker was worse at slower speeds, and also they could get one extra house per night if they sped up. Evidently naturalistic representation wasn't as important then as we might expect now, and slightly fast action was expected and considered normal.

It was sound that eventually led to standardisation.

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Jim Spohn
Film Handler

Posts: 95
From: Bakersfield, CA, USA
Registered: Jan 2003

posted 08-27-2003 10:59 AM

I had lunch with Hal Roach at Catalina Island during one of our Silent Picture Festivels, he indicated that the cameramen were all over the place between 16 to 22 fps. He said that a good cameraman would give a scene "English" with his cranking. He said that two cameras were standard but on larger scenes they would use three or four and that you would have to watch the dalies like a hawk and advise your cameramen because trying to edit together films from different fps rates was a bitch!!...Jim

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Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 08-27-2003 11:23 AM

Leo, I saw that print of 'The General' at the NFT; the picture quality was incredible. There was a modern caption on the beginning, stating that it was a print from the camera neg. I don't know if it really was.

Do you know what speed the video transfer was done at?

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John Pytlak
Film God

Posts: 9987
From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922
Registered: Jan 2000

posted 08-27-2003 12:15 PM

Dominic: Welcome to Film-Tech! [Smile]

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 08-27-2003 03:58 PM

AFAIK the video transfer was done the same way as the film projection, by varying the speed according to the original cue sheets supplied by the studio to cinemas along with the prints. Our instructions were to adjust the speed of the film to match the video, and if memory serves me correctly it went right down to 16 in places and all the way to 27-28 in one or two shots (though very rarely above 24). I do remember that you had to watch those monitors very carefully because the speed changes were sudden and unpredictable.

And AFAIK, Brownlow's print (which was also used as the telecine elements for the Thames/C4 broadcasts) really was struck straight off the camera negative. I presume that the thinking was the same as with the recent rerelease of Mildred Pierce: a float test revealed that sections of the camera neg were likely to start going sticky within the next couple of years, therefore someone thought that there would be nothing to lose by making one or two very nice projection prints from it before it was gone forever.

Edited to remove typo

[ 08-28-2003, 02:13 AM: Message edited by: Leo Enticknap ]

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