Formerly, the mobile value of the camera was little appreciated, but gradually the camera, even during actual photography, was moved about more and more. This mo bile quality of the camera is invaluable in making certain effects convincing, as may be realized when one considers that the camera is the eye through which the audience sees. To illustrate : When the camera is moved from one position to another, or during a scene, it is as if in a theatre the audience were picked up and moved en masse from one side of the stage to the other; moved closer to certain characters or farther away from others as needed for accentuation of certain action. A moving camera gives a stereoscopic feeling that is never obtained with a stationary one. Also, the motion picture set is seen from many more angles than is the stage set. The camera continually moves from long shot to close-up, from close-up to cross-angle, etc. Hence, the motion picture set must be designed to fit an ever-shifting camera, and the result should be, and is, of advantage because this very move ment gives a certain sense of plan and stereoscopic quality.
Just as a good photograph must look like a photograph and not like a painting, a painting should not look like a photograph. Con sequently, that which is photographed should represent some thing real or something that can exist; not necessarily something someone has seen or encountered before, but something not purely abstract. Generally, a set must be as normal as the peOple in it. It is doubtful if pictures will ever develop a stylized set, as the modern stage has done, because the range of sets in a single pic ture usually covers so many more and such different scenes. On the stage, an audience sees with its own eyes. On the screen it sees the set through the eye of the camera. It will accept and believe much more on the stage than it will on the screen. On the stage, if a slammed door shakes the wall the audience will accept it, but on the screen this would be resented as false.
A set designer should be a combination of three things—painter, architect, and dramatist. The screen set calls for the application of certain architectural principles to a given subject. This must be done more with the eye of the painter than with the eye of the architect. Take, for example, an interior to be used as a nursery. A practising architect knows that the airier and brighter such a room is, the better the nursery. When the same interior is required as a set, none of these things is con sidered. In the story, for instance, the child is neglected by his parents, leaving him in the care of nurses. The set must then embody the following : It should be cold in appearance—no warmth or sunlight. The toys scattered around should be too advanced or complicated for the child, or toys which he has out grown. In other words, it should really be a playroom in which he cannot play—almost a prison—which is quite a different problem from that confronting the practising architect. And so with other interiors. In real life the most fashionable night club might not be particularly rich or ornate. On the screen, however, such a set would fail miserably, because when Lord Blank takes his theatre party to a club, its appointments must necessarily be exceedingly smart and modern. The rapidly unfolding screen story has no
time to explain that the drab, unattractive night club is popular and fashionable solely because of its excellent music and cuisine. Architecture is designed to be seen with two eyes. The camera has but one lens (one eye) and hence obtains no stereoscopic view of anything. The architect swells a column slightly to off-set the optical illusion of a top-heavy feeling in a straight shaft. For the camera no swelling is necessary, as the column will be seen with but one eye—that of the camera. And so on through many other architectural formulae.
The movement of the camera is so sus tained that it is practically impossible to design a whole set so that in each set-up the composition is good. The designer learns to know intuitively where the grouping of actors will be most effec tive photographically. In the early days of motion pictures, a director in photographing his action would start with a long shot showing the entire set. Today this is seldom done. The designer pays less attention to the position of long shots and more to the individual camera positions. After the set has been designed and constructed upon the stage it must be dressed. By dressing is meant the placing of furniture, hanging of draperies, accessories, and appointments. In the larger studios this is done by the prop erty department under the general supervision of the designer. In the smaller studios, with a lesser organization, the designer enters into the actual dressing of his sets to a much greater degree.
Through some distortion of the lens, a couch placed directly in front of a side-wall fireplace would appear to be several feet up stage. To correct this, the couch is placed several feet downstage so that it is not directly opposite the fireplace but facing the wall downstage. Also, a table which is to appear as if in the centre of the room should be placed much nearer the camera than to the back wall. On the stage, an open foreground is considered an ad vantage. It has little or no effect upon the appearance of the set, and gives the actors a chance to move about more freely. On the screen, the opposite holds true. The foreground should be rather well dressed with two or three pieces of furniture silhouetted against it to give roundness of composition and the feeling of a fourth wall. An interior in a real home might be decorated in the height of taste, and with complete balance of composition. Trans ferred to the screen, however, it would seem greatly over-crowded with furniture. On the screen, actors, in a sense, form part of the dressing since no set is photographed without them. Therefore, the tendency in pictures must be to under-dress the interior since no composition is complete without the placing of the actors. Set dressers also have their handicaps. They have too little time for careful arrangements, and the consideration which most sets re quire. Only rarely does the set-dresser have more than a few hours to complete an assignment. However, more time is allowed in the dressing of exterior scenes such as villages, streets, etc.
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