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Technological change


Jeff Wexler

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I think we can safely say there have been some pretty significant technological changes regarding the equipment we use today to make movies. On the set of "Cobra Woman", 1944 (and no, I didn't do that movie...  I was asked to do "Cobra Woman II" but they wound up going to Romania and hiring locally).

 

post-1-0-50585900-1373467317_thumb.jpg

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Is that really the camera in the upper left hand corner?

Thanks,

LEF

Yes it is, pretty astonishing, the camera looks like it should be part of the set --- maybe a little gnome house or something. That's why it is so interesting to look at older movies and when they make a camera move, even if it is a simple left to right dolly, you know it was a big deal. Sort of like pushing a set of dresser drawers across the set.

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Ironically, I think that some of those lights, however, are still in use at CBS. ;D

They are Mole Richardson 225amp dc "Brutes". There is a real art in trimming the carbons when they are burning otherwise they squeak because the are advanced by a motor.

Malcolm Davies. A.m.p.s.

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I'm looking a a small image on my phone but the camera looks like a three strip Technicolor. As Peter noted, you are really looking at the blimp housing, not the camera directly. But the camera itself was a beast. The color separations were made on three distinct pieces of film. In modern film cameras, the color images are recorded on three layers of emulsion, one atop the other. But with the original Techicolor system one loaded three different rolls of film, two of them back to back and one off to one side and fed by a prism.

David

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David took the words out of my mouth: that's a 3-strip Tech camera. They have the guts of one in the ASC Clubhouse, and not too many weeks ago, I talked to DP David Mullen about it, and he pointed out how the blue and red image were captured on two pieces of film on one side of the prism, and the green image was on the other side. This explains why reds were always a little fuzzy in the process: the extra piece of film reduced the sharpness. Nowadays, the post houses can scan all three pieces of B&W film and then sharpen the soft red layer, align all the images, and make it look quite a bit better than it did originally. Although... there is something ephemeral about the look of true Tech IB prints that I don't think digital can reproduce. (Not yet, anyway.)

 

3strip_camera_prism.jpg

 

I worked at Technicolor's digital department for a long time, but the lab guys wouldn't even tell me how the layers were aligned in final printing. That's a trade secret that has been carefully guarded for more than 80 years now. What blows me away is that they could align all the images and make high-speed prints, which seems impossible!

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...also none of those pesky Motorola radios (etc).

Victor Fleming and producer David O. Selznick (with cigarette) in photo - Fleming had been brought over from "Wizard of Oz" to replace George Cukor.

incidentally the effective speed of the newly introduced 'high speed' Technicolor system used on GWTW was reportedly around ASA 10 (Weston 6).

The lamps in the "Cobra Woman" still are most likely Mole Richardson type 170 Molarcs, the 150 amp predecessor to the 225 amp type 450 ('brute') arc, which earned MR an Academy Award in 1947. Re: operating noise of arcs Google "How to operate a Carbon Arc" (Mole Richardson video)
 

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