The studios of the larger photoplay com panies are marvels of scientific adaptations of means to end. Some of them are enclosed with and the scenes photographed in daylight. thers are fitted with electric lights of great power, which can be grouped for any desired effect of lighting. For small scenes the actual space within which the play is enacted may not be more than 8 or 10 feet wide and about 6 feet in depth. In a large studio, 50 to 60 feet long. it is not uncommon to have three or four scenes in action at one time, each attended by its own director and camera man.
In these establishments a permanent com pany of actors is in constant attendance, and each studio has its list of special actors who can be called on at any time for special service. A staff of artists and mechanics — carpenters. masons, smiths and scene painters is also a permanent part of the personnel; the prepara tion of the scenery for a single 20-minute play occupying the time of several men perhaps for three or four weeks. In the property room of such a studio is gathered a collection of the oddest description, ranging from the primitive bow and arrow of the aboriginal Indian to a modern quick-firer; from the New England wheelbarrow to an oldtime °prairie the dobe hut of the Mexican, and the rose-cov ered porch of an old Virginia mansion — any thing and everything which may. add impressive reality to the detail of any possible story. In the costume room are literally thousands of garments of •every age and nationality. Some studios, in addition to all these, support exten sive stables to provide horses of certain re quired training, beside cattle and other lesser livestock called for by the play approved by the editor.
Mention has been made of the very large proportion of photoplay manuscripts rejected by readers and editors as compared with the very few accepted. Scores of books have been pub lished to aid those who have the ambition to write photoplays, but beside the mastery of the technique of expression peculiar to the photo play, a genuine gift for story-telling is a sine qua non of the successful writer's equipment. The great difficulty of getting really good plays which are new as well as effective on the screen has led the large film companies to employ a regular staff of skilled writers to produce the bulk of the plays eventually exhibited, the small sup ply received from the outside public being unde pendable when compared with the constant and importunate demand of the trade — amounting to an aggregate of 5,000 to 6,000 new plays annually. The literature of all countries is searched by staffs of translators for plots which, though not new, may be at least made to ap pear so by presenting them in varied settings.
This matter of changing the setting of an origi nal story has developed business enterprises of great complexity. Some of the larger photo play makers have traveling companies of actors who wander about the earth enacting the scenes of plays to which they are assigned—in the Western Plains, in the jungles of the tropics, among the palms of the West Indies, beside the pyramids of Egypt, in the white snowfields of the Arctic, or within the hallowed precincts of the Holy Land. The same plot worked out in such widely varying environments, with ap propriate costumes and with characteristic per sonnel, will give a whole series of plays hardly to be recognized by the ordinary photoplav audiences as being of even remote relationship.
A more intimate knowledge of the subject will require the concentrated study of the very extensive literature of the photoplay, of which only a few titles may be mentioned in this article. See also MOVING PICTURES, for descrip tion of the instruments and processes used in making and exhibiting the films.
Bibliography.— Consult Bernique, J.,
a novel process used by sculptors for producing statuettes by the aid of photography. It was invented by M. Villeme, a French sculptor. The model stands in a studio of special construction, in the centre of a circle of 24 cameras, by all of which he is photographed at the same moment. The 24 negatives are then projected in succession on a screen by means of an optical lantern and the artist goes over the outline of each with the tracer of a pantograph, a cutting tool acting upon a lump of modeling clay, mounted upon a turn-table, being substituted for the usual pencil. After each photograph is gone over, the clay is turned through 15°, and after a complete revolution it is removed and finished by hand.