DARK ROOM MYSTERIES

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 8, 26 December 1928, Page 6

DARK ROOM MYSTERIES

HOW films abb produced. Elaboniate laboratories equipped with the very latest and best of devices for developing ,printiug, drying, joining, cutting, editing and titling of lihns have just been completed at the British International Studios as Eistree, Hertfordshire, England-

Hitherto it has sometimes been necessary for the studios to wait as long as 10 or even 14 days beioro it was possible to see on the screen the film being produced! there. Recently a film taken at noon was printed in the new laboratories, developed and on the screen before tea time.

To the non-expert the laboratories are uncanny in the extreme, says a writer in the London “Daily Mail.” Black velvet curtains brush across tho visitor’s face as he is inhered into a tiny passage black as the . nethermost pit. A door is mysteriously opened and admits him into a large room, smelling of strange chemicals. Thi s room seems to he pitch dark, too,, hut the eye gradually realises the existence of dim squares of red light set round the walls. Beneath each red square someone is winding lengths of exposed film on spools, but), it. is hard to see what goes on.

Other rooms contain strange, machines for developing, for drying tend winding, riartlien vats largo enough to contain 40 .'thieves each ditp chemicals' into pipes that disappear, to reappear* far away in other woirc receptacles. Tire wizard in charge of all these all-important operations is Mr GSchwartze,. an expert of many years experience in all branches of photographic; work, trick and laboratory operations. He wa. one of Edison’s proteges. *J® practical men in actual chaige of work are all Englishmen.