Movie Magic

This Invention Made Disney MILLIONS, but Then They LOST It!
Corridor Crew

Here we've got a couple of devices developed by Disney for making special effects. The one above popped up on YouTube this morning, which reminded me of this one:

Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (Filmed: Feb. 13, 1957)
fireurgunz

I didn't remember the name, but it didn't take long to find it.

Serendipity

Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks
wolfcrow

Yesterday at lunch IAman asks Jack what his favorite movie is and Jack replies Lawrence of Arabia. This morning I open up YouTube and this video pops up so natural-mont I gotta post it.

I understand the film stock sizes, but all that business about lenses is beyond me. I keep thinking I should look into it, figure out just what all that jargon means, but I haven't. Maybe because I recognize it for a rathole from which there will be no escape.

Temu

Digital Camera Model

Ordered this very cool model of a movie camera from Temu, $20 for 600 pieces. The parts are just like Legos, but smaller, like 2/3 the size. The whole model is only about six inches long. It has all these dials and knobs that look like they ought to do something, but such is not the case, it's just a static model. Legos are nice, but they have gotten kind of expensive, and they seemed to be aimed at more main stream markets.

Technicolor

The Biggest Lie in Hollywood | Technicolor
NationSquid

Crazy movie making technology. There is an ad for Bespoke Post that starts at the three minute mark and runs until 5:25.

He's right about the cameras.

Technicolor Motion Picture Camera

Same camera mounted on a dolly in sound proof box

Another view of the camera showing the very large film magazines

P. S. For another monster movie camera see Jackie Gleanson's Electronicam

Electronicam

Jackie Gleason's String Orchestra with Bobby Hackett trumpet - I'm Through with Love
I know Jackie Gleason as a comedian and actor, but evidently he was also a musical guy, popular enough that his tunes came to be known as 'Gleason make-out music'.

Reading a little more about Jackie, I came across the Eletronicam, which was used to record the The Honeymooners.

JACKIE GLEASONS'S "HONEYMOONERS" is filmed by Du Mont Electronicam System which incorporates an especially desined and adapted 35 mm Mitchell movie camera. Here are Jackie Gleason and Joyce Randolph, right, peering throught the camera lens at Audrey Meadows and Art Carney.

Some people went to a lot of work to put this machine together. I guess television advertising was really paying off. Here's a brief magazine story about this contraption. It's a scanned PDF, but you can enlarge it enough to make it legible. American_Cinematographer - March 1956 - Arthur_Miller Looks At Electronicam

Coincidentally, just a couple of days ago I posted Veritasium's History of Video.

Mitchell Movie Cameras have shown up here before.

Movie Time

Mitchell 390 35 mm motion picture camera

The basic plot of Mission to Paris is we are making a movie. It's a fine story and I'm reading along and I come across this line:

They were on the set until 5:30, Avila had met his day's quota - two minutes of film - and Stahl, though he ached to go back to the Claridge and get into a hot shower, had one final chore ahead of him.

Two minutes!?! Geez, you've got a full crew, all the equipment you need and a sound stage and all you've got to show for a day's work is two minutes of film? Crimintently. Then I thought about it for a minute and I realized that if it takes you three months to shoot a movie, then all you need to do shoot is two minutes a day. (3 months times 4 weeks a month times 5 days a week equals 60 work days, times two minutes a day is 120 minutes which is two hours, which is how long a movie is supposed to be.)
    Thinking a little more I begin to suspect that making a movie entails a whole lot of waiting for the crew. Everything has to be set and ready to go before you start the cameras, and inevitably there is going to be some aspect (sound, lighting, prop, wardrobe, makeup, etc. etc.) that isn't quite right, so everyone else will just be put on hold until that one little problem is fixed. And when that problem is fixed you need to be ready to go, just like you haven't been waiting for five minutes or five hours.

Strange Days, Part 2

Came across too much good stuff when I was looking up stuff about this movie, so I'm sharing.

Angela Bassett as Mace facing down a thug with a knife.

Mace stowing her gun away in a holster that wraps around her thigh under her mini-dress. 

Mace's gun (from Internet Movie Firearms Database):

Kathryn Bigelow, the director, was married to James Cameron (one of those guys who makes big, fancy movies like Avatar and Titanic), so maybe some of his techno-crazy rubbed off on her. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, she wanted a compact, light weight camera to shoot some of the POV (Point Of View) scenes. Nowadays you could use a digital camera, no problem, but this was in 1995, and digital wasn't up to snuff, so they had to do this with 35 mm film, which meant building a custom camera. So I went looking for some info on this miracle of modern technology and found...well, a swamp full of alligators and techno-jargon. 35 mm hasn't died completely, but it is going away fast. The big problem is the cost of film. It was bad enough when you were shooting snapshots with your Instamatic, but shooting movies is like shooting a machine gun. Only the truly crazy are willing to spend the money to keep the machine fed.

Got some clues about the camera, but did not manage to actually track it down. At least I don't think I did, kind of hard to tell at this point. Did come across this video that gives a pretty good rundown on just what's involved. It get's a little repetitious when he starts talking about the magazines, but it also serves to remind us just how arcane film technology is. Everything involving film has to be done in absolute darkness. Totally black, lights out. One little slip and a thousand bucks worth of film becomes worthless.


And the magazines are the problem, aren't they? You can miniaturize the camera all you want, but if you want to film somebody doing something, you are going to need a lot of film. You need about a hundred feet of film per minute of showtime, which means those 400 foot magazines are good for maybe four minutes, and the thousand foot magazines are good for ten. Admittedly the magazines shown here are not like the gi-gun-do ones you see on the studio cameras, but they are still more than a handful.

Since the truly crazy are so few in number, it has come to pass that movie cameras are a niche market, something like supercars, with corresponding price tags. Now would be a good time to pick one up for posterity's sake, before they find their way to the scrap heap like the printing presses did. They aren't dead yet, as this page shows, and Panavision and ARRI, whoever they are, are still fighting the good fight.

Notes:
Film: a "two reeler" that runs for two hours is going to have a mile of film on each reel.
Steadicam Operators newsletter from 1995. The jargon is darn near impenetrable.
Story about the opening POV shot of this movie, along with hour long audio talk by the director.
STRANGE DAYS Scriptment by James Cameron