W.N McLaren

At the meeting of the Royal Photographic Society, held at 35, Russell Square, W.C.1. on December 8th, 1936, Mr W.N. McLaren, of the G.P.O. Film Unit, gave the following interesting account of his experiences as an amateur, and showed two films made when he was a student of the Glasgow School of Art.

I was an amateur for about four years before becoming a professional, and in my spare time I still carry on amateur work, on substandard film, because, although an amateur is limited in technical equipment, he has a freedom in certain respects which is not possessed by a professional. He has a freedom of choice of subject matter and treatment of subject matter, and there is no censorship of 16mm film. The only dictatorship that exists in the case of the amateur is the dictatorship of limitation of technical means: but that in itself is not a bad thing. Often limited resources call forth greater ingenuity in the amateur; circumstances encourage him to think of fresh ways of doing things which, if he had more resources, he would not consider.

I am going to show you two of the films that I had a part in making and to describe very briefly my experiences as an amateur with an amateur group. When I was a student at the Glasgow School of Art there was an amateur group composed of about four people, who were very enthusiastic and willing to devote all their spare time to making films, and there were about a dozen people who were interested and anxious to help. We had one Cine-Kodak, a B.B. Junior model, with a 50ft capacity and a 1.9 Kodak anastigmat lens. We had for lighting equipment two 1.000 watt lamps in stands and reflectors. We had to work within £10.

The first question we had to decide was the subject matter of our film. There were a hundred and one suggestions made, because like all amateurs who are about to make a first film, we did not realise the difficulties. After much discussion, I managed to convince the rest of the group that we should treat the material at our own doorstep, for the very good reason that we knew this subject matter well, it would be easy and cheap to film, and we should be working amongst people who we knew and could rely on for co-operation. There were about four hundred students in the Art School, and the institution catered for all branches of art - painting, sculpture, design, architecture, lithography, pottery, embroidery, metal work, modelling, and so forth. That was a very wide and varied subject matter from which to choose, and we thought of many different ways of treating it. We could deal with the subject matter in an impressionist way; we could treat it in an instructional way, by taking one particular subject in the school and showing the processes involved in that subject; we could treat it in a sociological way, by function that it has as an institutions and in a historical way, by showing how the art students and artists had in previous centuries served the dominant ruling class, such as the Church, at one time, then the aristocracy, then the rising merchant class, and today, the industrialists and manufacturers, and showing how the Art School curriculum is adjusted to suit its present function and also how there are in the curriculum today, remnants of outworn functions of former centuries.

For our first film we chose the simplest method, an impressionistic treatment of subject. Thus our purpose was not to show the exact nature of a process, as in an educational film, or the accurate relationship of a set of factors to a situation, as in a sociological film; our purpose was simply to make an interesting pattern of visual material. Our idea was to give an impression rather than an explanation of the subject.

The scenario of that film took a week to plan. It was composed, to begin with, of a series of very small drawings, a rough sketch for each shot. Every drawing fixed a particular angle, distance and lighting.

Then, mentally, I timed the action of each shot and put down against each drawing its exact duration in seconds. By the end of the week I had a very tight script visualized, and timed in every detail. For amateurs, I think the following is very sound advice.

Think before shooting rather than after shooting. This will save time and - which is even more important to amateurs - it will save stock.

The shooting took three weeks; there were three of us engaged on it. We worked in the evenings during those three weeks. In 90 per cent of the film we kept strictly to the scenario, and only in 10 per cent did we depart from it, when we found that the actual handling of the situation suggested a course of action which we had not thought of before.

We always aimed at using lighting to emphasise our points. For instance, when we were taking a shot of pottery, we illuminated it in such a way as to show up the rotundity of the pot. When we were shooting a student's hand painting on a canvas, if we wanted to emphasise what he was painting on the canvas we lit the hand in a flat manner and the canvas more brightly than the hand. Whereas, if we wanted to emphasise the movement of his hand or the way he held the brush, we lit his hand in a modelled manner and more brilliantly than the canvas. Again, in a shot of the polishing of a piece of metalwork, we arranged the lighting to achieve the maximum specular reflection.

As to the duration of each shot, we aimed at avoiding the slightest redundancy at either end. When shooting we calculated in terms of seconds. When editing we reckoned in terms of frames.

The editing of the film took one week, and amounted to a purely mechanical job. We had shot according to script, and as a result had only 20ft of scrap in a 400ft film. With the film finished we were only £8 out of pocket.

The next film I am going to show you took a very different course.
It was our second film, and it was shot with quite a different camera.
A comparison of the film you have just seen with the one I am now going to show you, brings out very vividly the difference of treatment caused by the use of a different camera. We were working with a Cine-Kodak Special camera, a very efficient instrument which has dozens of gadgets all over it for trick work and special effects. To use it after the ordinary Cine-Kodak was like playing on an electric organ after footling on a tin whistle; and our first impulse was to press all the stops and use all the gadgets. I was so enamoured with the possibilities of the Cine-Kodak Special that I designed a film specially to exploit all the possibilities of such a camera. The film, when finished, was appropriately called Camera Makes Whoopee.

The film took about nine months to make and had a very fluid script. We shot about 900ft, 700ft of which we used, so that we had a 30 per cent scrap, due to a much less tight script. We also tried out sound effects for the first time on sound discs, built our own recording apparatus and cut our own records. To cut final sound discs we used three channels, fed simultaneously by a microphone and two turntables.

The theme of the film was the Christmas Carnival Ball, at the Glasgow School of Art, a subject specially chosen to justify extravagant use of trick work.

All the superimpositions, dissolves, bisected frames and effects were done in the camera. We were to a certain extent working blind. In many of the shots we superimposed about seven or eight times and had to plan it all out very carefully before taking the shot.

[Mr McLaren then showed his second film.]

In reply to questions, Mr McLaren said the method by which the musical instruments got into the cases was by the usual single frame animation process. First of all, the instruments were tied on threads and lowered into their cases, but the threads snapped, so the method was adopted of moving each instrument a fraction of an inch and then photographing it, and repeating that process until the whole movement was completed. A great deal of money had been saved by using very cheap sets. None of the film was photographs at the ball; that had been tried, but the material obtained was found to be no use, so it was all built up afterwards.