TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 62, 15 March 1938, Page 10

TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY

'JVRICK photography is spoken about

interestingly by Mr. Ned Mann, an experienced photographer at motion picture studios. “I dare say you have seen a man dive into a swimming bath, then jump back again on to the divingboard. That is simply done by reverse photography. In one of my most interesting films, by H. G. Wells, ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles/ there was an incident which was done in exactly the same way. “You may recall that Roland Young threw his walking-stick on the ground and said, ‘Let there be a rose-tree growing there/ Immediately the stick stood upright and a rose-tree in full bloom sprang from it. We had forty men working on that shot and the way it was done was this. We started with the rose-

tree in full bloom and worked back* wards. We took a few frames of the rose-tree—stopped the camera; pulled a few petals and a few leaves off, and shot it again. And so on gradually breaking down the tree until nothing was left but the stem. Then we took ninety-five walking sticks, each one a little smaller and a little thinner than the last. We photographed each one. We then broke the walking-stick and photographed that. Next we photographed it slithering towards Roland Young. When all this was cut and joined we photographed it in reverse—that is, the right way this time, and you saw the result in the film. This incident took four seconds in the completed film. It took thirty-six hours of hard work to get it right