Those Awful Hats! (1909)

[robcat2075]

A short movie we watched in Live Answer Time today...

 

A hundred years ago hats were HATS and this film is about the recurring problem of women wearing large hats to the theater.

This film is set in a movie theater and the filmmakers have matted in a movie in the upper left corner to help establish that idea.

 

You can completely ignore what is "on screen". The real action is in the audience!

 

 

https://youtu.be/gezLtRgHAZI


Film fun trivia...

• This is from very early in D.W. Griffith's directing career. He had only been hired as an extra a year earlier.
• The guy in the loud suit and fake nose is Mack Sennett, later founder of the famous Keystone Studios
• The actual finished film is lost. What survived was the original camera negative and the "mask", permitting the complete effect to be reconstructed with the addition of another D.W. Griffith film as "the movie"

 

The traveling matte seems to be an early form of "luminance keying". What I believe happened is that they lit the scene so that the "screen" was the whitest thing the camera could see with everything and everyone else being shades of gray.

They could copy that camera negative and in the developing process force all the grays to black. This made a pure black/white mask that they could sandwich with the "movie" they wanted to insert and run it through their film copying machine so it would always be excluded from the audience area of the frame and when someone walked in front of the screen.

Then they'd make a negative of the mask, sandwich that with the original footage of the actors and run it through the copier again, allowing the live action image only on the part of the frame where the "movie" wasn't.