Hand Cranking
by L. Sprague Anderson
Click thumbnails for larger
view |
While the scene was being photographed,
Mr. Sennett noticed that the cameraman was cranking very
slowly. When asked why, he explained that the company didn't
have much money; the film cost four cents a foot; and he
was trying to be economical. -- Virgil E. Miller
The JN-4 Jenny biplane banks and wheels in
the thin winter air 1000 feet above the rugged California terrain.
Cameraman Norman De Vol has been airborne for over an hour with
pilot Dick Grace; they've just finished making aerial shots of
a specially constructed cabin set on the ground below for the
Tom Mix film The Forest Ranger. (1) Now De Vol hunches behind
his Akeley in the open rear cockpit of the fragile ship, cranking
out a few more feet of film before they turn back for civilization.
He shivers in the chill blast of the prop wash.
Suddenly the bitter breeze dies away; the propeller
kicks and pinwheels to a stop. A contact point has burned out
in the engine. The plane loses airspeed and noses over into a
steep, rapid glide. After a few moments, the pilot realizes there's
no chance of regaining power. "We're going in!" says Grace over
his shoulder, and in the unnatural silence, he clearly hears
De Vol's cool reply, "Let 'er fall."(2)
Still turning his hand crank at two turns per
second, the cameraman looks down over the cockpit's edge; he
can see the plane's expanding shadow skipping over the inhospitable
countryside below. Quickly he adjusts the mount to bring the
shadow into his finder. He concentrates on keeping his cranking
on tempo. (One-and-two- and-one-and-two...) They're fifteen miles
from the nearest airstrip and falling fast. The shot is spectacular--two
men dropping to destruction.
His center of gravity is changing rapidly now
and he shifts his balance in the lurching cockpit, trying to
keep the movements of his right hand steady. (One-and-two-and-)
In his finder, the black smudge on the sunlit slope is leaping
up to meet them, far too fast. With his free hand, he adjusts
the camera as smoothly as he can to hold the image in the frame.
At some point, De Vol realizes the plane can't possibly survive
the coming impact. Does his heart beat quicker? Do his fingers
tighten on the handle as he turns?
The plane slams into the ground, burying its
engine in the earth; the cowlings fly into the air; the wings
collapse. De Vol and Grace stagger free of the wreckage. It takes
them a few minutes to realize that they are miraculously unhurt.
As they rejoin the crew, everyone is amazed
at their good fortune. But the real astonishment and admiration
comes when they see the film from De Vol's camera. All during
that fateful plunge--which looked certain to end in maiming or
a violent death--De Vol's pressure on the camera crank remained
absolutely steady, and the speed of his arm never wavered from
the beginning of the shot until the moment he braced himself
for the crash. The film is a silent testament to his courage,
as well as a dramatic illustration of a cameraman's ability to
master his most fundamental skill--hand-cranking.
The year is 1923. On October 6, 1927, The Jazz
Singer will open in New York City, and everything will change.
But until then, hand-cranking remains an absolutely indispensable
camera skill. Electric motor drives are available, but batteries
are bulky, and stable 110V power is non-existent on location.
Even in hazardous situations, most cameramen prefer to crank
by hand.
Delivered by the hand of an experienced operator,
the crank's action is the only completely reliable motive power
there is. He can carry it in his pocket; it never needs batteries
or winding; never "shorts"; weighs only a few ounces; is ready
to operate in an instant; and allows him constantly to monitor
the camera speed.
This last point is important. In 1923, no one
is even fantasizing about microchip speed controls. They don't
have to: hand-cranking allows the cameraman total awareness and
control over the pacing of the scene, which he can speed up or
slow down at will. If some activity in front of the camera is
taking too much time, he only needs to slow his crank, and when
shown, the action will "zip" by on the screen.
Let's say our star, Lance Goldfleece, intends
to put on a display of fancy swordsmanship. He walks across the
set at normal rate, draws his sword with a flourish, and then
(as the operator slows his crank) executes a rapid series of
thrusts, parries and ripostes with the blade. His swordsmanship
completed, he sheathes his weapon (the operator now returns to
normal rate) and exits before the awed eyes of the watching crowd.
When the positive of this scene is projected, Lance's dexterity
will be greatly enhanced by the accelerated rate of his performance
during those crucial seconds. No one will suspect the helping
hand of the cameraman.
In practice, however, this selective variation
in cranking speed is one of the most delicate tricks in the cameraman's
repertoire; it's a skill that can be executed reliably usually
only after many thousand twirls of the crank. What makes it such
an enviable trick is the need to keep the exposure constant while
altering the frame rate and consequently the shutter speed. If
the scene suddenly brightens by half a stop or more during the
swordplay, then returns to normal, the trick is exposed--or,
rather, it's over-exposed. To prevent this, the operator must
compensate for the changing exposure as he changes his cranking
speed, either by simultaneously decreasing the angle of the dissolving
shutter or by simultaneously decreasing the stop. Most professional
cameras make some provision for changing the shutter opening
or the stop or both from the back of the camera, and this--plus
the operator's skill--makes the trick possible. Although it looks
simple, many a cameraman can attest to the hours and days he
spent when he first set out to develop his cranking technique. "First
breaking in, my trouble was in cranking the camera," remembers
Rollie Totheroh, Charlie Chaplin's cameraman for 38 years. "As
a rule, for comedy it was 14 frames a second, and sometimes you
drop to 12 frames a second, for instance if somebody's running
away from the camera and you wanted to speed it up. The cameraman
regulated everything!"(3)
The two ingredients of proper cranking are
uniformity and correct speed sense, and they can only be acquired
with experience over time. How much time depends on the individual;
it took the author a month, practicing an hour or so a day with
a Bell & Howell Standard, before he gained enough confidence
to walk onto a movie set and simultaneously expose film and control
the tripod head by hand. With a less forgiving camera, it probably
would have taken longer, but he has no way of knowing whether
his example is typical. It's a fact that some would-be cameramen
never mastered the necessary smoothness of technique, no matter
how much they practiced.
This all makes cranking sound like a very daunting
process, but for most it's as easy as breathing, and it becomes
just as automatic and simple to regulate. Just as the singer
learns breathing control, the cameraman learns cranking control.
Of the two, the singer's voice will be far more taxed during
a typical day than the cameraman's cranking arm.
UNIFORMITY
When a neophyte operator first turns the crank
of his camera, he often starts by using his entire arm, holding
the wrist rigid and pumping the arm at the elbow and shoulder
on each revolution, like the driving rods of a locomotive, or
he'll start his turning motion at the elbow and transfer the
power with his lower arm. With the whole arm being acted on by
gravity, he quickly discovers a natural tendency to increase
speed on the downstroke as the arm drops and slow on the upstroke
as he lifts it again. This causes fluctuations in the pace and
exposure of the scene being taken, most clearly seen as a "pulsing" of
the overall light level at half second intervals. It's a very
unpleasant effect.
The first step in eliminating this problem
is to reduce the overall arm movements, so that you have much
less mass to lift against gravity on each turn. Hold the shoulder
still, keep the forearm nearly motionless, and rotate the crank
by turning the hand round the wrist, rather than the forearm
round the elbow. In this way, only the hand itself is making
any large movement, and it's far easier to keep the rotation
smooth. In doing so, you'll find yourself holding your elbow
up and to the side, with the forearm aligning itself naturally
along a line extending straight out from the crank shaft; this
position may seem awkward and overly fatiguing at first, but
the improvement will quickly become evident on the screen. This
assumes you have room to take the described position, that you're
not jammed up against a wall or wedged in some other peculiar
space. Even in the great outdoors, you never know when you might
have to change your cranking style at short notice. Steve Smith
Jr. vividly remembers a quick change in strategy while filming
the destruction of the Arabella during the making of Captain
Blood:
"It was a shot that caught at the throat
of even the oldest cameraman. If he did not get the stuff it
was lost. There could be no retake the next day on any of it.
When the 169-foot boat went to the bottom that was the end.
No one failed. But with the terrific explosion that ended the
life of that stately old timer of the sea came a rain of wood
and bits of iron that made the most hardened of the crew seek
shelter under the tripods and crank with an off-set elbow movement.
A slip here would have been all too costly, or the failure
to operate properly would have resulted in ruin." (4)
Another point in passing: you can grip the
crank handle any way that feels comfortable, though if you follow
the above advice, you'll probably be holding it with just your
fingertips to allow the wrist freedom to turn. However you hold
it, don't squeeze (too tiring), but be sure you have firm contact
or you may lose your grip on the handle during the take and find
yourself chasing the crank and trying to grab it again as it
spins. Not only does this spoil the shot, but nothing looks quite
as silly as a grown person stabbing at a spinning crank with
his fingertips, trying to get his fingers around it and hoping
against hope that no one has noticed. A removable crank makes
possible another source of embarrassment: inadvertently pulling
the crank free from the shaft and spinning it in the air while
the camera runs down to a stop. This is slightly less humiliating
than losing your grip, because it looks for just an instant like
it might be an equipment failure. (No such luck.)
You can fine tune the regularity of your movements
by listening to the sound of your camera as you crank. It's easy
to pick out relatively small changes in speed by noting the rising
and falling tone of the camera in action. An empty camera is
harder to crank smoothly than a loaded one, so practice with
a dummy roll of film. You should keep at it until you can detect
only the slightest rhythm or cycle in the hum of the machine.
CORRECT SPEED SENSE
In addition to being extremely regular in action,
it's important to hold your overall cranking speed within fairly
narrow margins, except where you're striving for an effect.
Studies have shown that every individual marks
time at a different internal tempo. Where asked to count seconds,
some will count 50 to the minute, some will count 70; very few
people have such a perfect time sense that they count to 60 in
a 60 second period. Each person, however, is quite accurate to
his or her own time sense. Stand a variety of people behind moving
picture cameras and ask them to make two turns to the second,
and they will quickly fall out of sync with one another, each
cranking at a different rate that he perceives to be two turns
per second.
An experiment will quickly give you a sense
of how far the speed of your cranking departs from the standard.
Zero the footage counter on your camera and crank for exactly
thirty seconds at a rate that you believe to be two turns per
second. Stop the camera and see how much footage has been recorded
on the counter--if your cranking is right on, the counter will
read thirty feet.
Even if you're way off this mark when you start,
it's possible to retrain yourself gradually until you're hitting
reasonably close to the magic one foot per second rate. The author
was more than 10% off when he first tried this exercise, but
by dint of prolonged practice, he reduced his error to a consistent
two feet in sixty, an error of just over 3%. Looked at another
way, this amounts to a deviation of one frame every two seconds,
entirely satisfactory for any silent film work (especially since
silent projectors were commonly hand-cranked or regulated by
rheostat).
To settle themselves on the proper tempo and
stay there, most cameramen had a song that they rehearsed in
their heads as they cranked. One well-known cameraman liked the "Anvil
Chorus," making two turns for each bonk! of the anvil. The author
presently cranks to a more contemporary tune, the theme from
the Addams Family TV show, which keeps him right on the mark,
and which on some days is a peculiarly satisfying way of keeping
things in perspective.
If you crank 24 after cranking 16 for a while,
the camera seems to be roaring along--in fact, you have to push
yourself to get up to speed. The "Skater's Waltz" was a popular
tune to hum at three turns per second.
Gradually, you'll become familiar with the
pitch of your camera's whir when it's running at speed, and holding
speed by ear will become second nature. This can lead you into
trouble, though, if you switch to a different make of camera.
Famed cameraman Joseph Walker discovered this on his first professional
assignment in 1913:
"I glanced at my hand on the camera crank;
with a sickening thud I realized I was breaking the cardinal
rule I'd been practicing all these months--my hand was literally
spinning that crank!...
"Now I dared not change speed; none of
it would match. I continued my fast clip. Fortunately, the
dance ended shortly.
"I rationalized what had happened: The
new camera was strange; quieter than I had been used to, the
sound of the gears unfamiliar." (5)
Luckily for Mr. Walker, the director was impressed
by the resulting slow-motion effect and assumed that he'd intended
that all along. Actually, Mr. Walker was as surprised as everyone
else that his fast cranking had caused this slow-motion; it was "a
fact little known in those days."
What happens if the director has ordered the
customary violin and piano to play mood music during the taking
of the scenes, or if some other insistent rhythm is pounding
at you as you crank? You have to detach your mind from the conflicting
sound, be aware of it, but not respond to it. It's a sure test
of your skill: to be able to crank steadily while another steady
beat, slightly off-tempo, washes over you. Even veteran cameramen
sometimes struggled with this mental exercise. Victor Milner
had the exceedingly rare opportunity to film the Hopi Indian
snake dance, and it was all he could do to crank the shot successfully:
All the Indians on the reservation were
in attendance at the dance, but only fourteen took an active
part in the ceremony. The fourteen, led by a chief, began a
chant so wild and wonderful that Mr. Milner declared it almost
hypnotized him, and he had to look away into the landscape
frequently to keep steady.(6)
When you're starting to feel cocky about your
cranking skills, try cranking a smooth rate on the camera at
the same time you're cranking your gear head in the opposite
direction at varying speeds for a pan or a tilt--that should
humble you again pretty fast. Clerc, in his classic "Photography:
Theory and Practice," makes a remark that is very much to the
point:
In general, the camera is supported with
the left hand while the right hand turns the handle, that is,
unless the left hand is employed in adjusting the panoramic
head or the swing around a horizontal axis, both of which operations
are better done by an assistant.(7)
In touching on this fundamental issue, for
once Mr. Clerc misstates himself. Look at any picture of a silent
crew at work; you'll never see a cameraman cranking his camera
while his assistant pans and tilts, making framing decisions.
In fact, you'll seldom see an assistant at the camera during
shooting. Very occasionally, where three hands are essential,
the assistant will be found cranking the camera while the cameraman
performs pans, tilts or performs other operations, but the far
more common practice was for the cameraman to assume entire responsibility
for the functions of his camera during a take. This is one reason
that for most of the silent period the camera didn't often change
its point of view during a shot. When it did, it made sense for
the cameraman to surrender the camera crank to his assistant
and devote himself to the far more critical operation of changing
the frame. After all, anyone could turn a crank. In fact, the
term "crank turner" or "crank winder" was used as an insult to
refer to operators who had no knowledge or talent with their
cameras beyond their ability to act as a motor.
The reliance on a static camera was a major
aesthetic attitude through most of the Teens and Twenties. Even
big-budget features from those years often have only two or three
camera moves during the entire unfolding of the story, and where
a move does occur, it's usually a trucking shot, taken off the
back of a vehicle. Less often, you'll see straight pan or a straight
tilt--nothing that requires turning both tripod handles at the
same time. In spite of these limitations, there's nothing second-rate
about the camera work in Sparrows (one pan in the entire film)
or The Phantom of the Opera (one hand-held shot and one pan to
follow an overturning carriage) or Broken Blossoms (one trucking
shot).
We'd be forcing the point if we assumed that
the preference for static setups was dictated or even greatly
influenced by the combination of cranked cameras and cranked
tripod heads. After all, if directors had begun clamoring for
their cameras to move more freely, the technology would quickly
adjust--as indeed happened in the last couple of years that silents
were made, with the adoption of the "free head." It's more likely
that directors and cameramen were satisfied with their tied-down
shots until they saw the imaginative, fluid pictures coming out
of the European market.
If they wanted movement, they could always
get slow moves by putting on an assistant or running the camera
with a motor. Where action demanded rapid adjustments or oblique
moves they'd bring in an Akeley specialist, who could track the
action solo while he hand-cranked his unique camera, hewing still
to the unwritten rule "one camera--one man."
POST-SILENT CAMERAS THAT YOU CAN TURN
BY HAND
If you don't have an old Universal around the
house, you may have to find yourself a later model camera that
lets you do the driving. Best bets among studio cameras are the
Mitchell Standard, NC, and GC models; after all these years,
they still have their crankshaft in the center of the right side,
though you may have to clear a lot of motors out of the way to
get at it. A Mitchell crank may be harder to find than the camera
itself, and a Bell & Howell crank won't work (even though it
looks like it should). A less commonly available camera is the
#2709, especially in unmodified condition, but even if they've
been heavily hacked for special effects use, they usually retain
their crank shaft and necessary innards. Mitchells have been
evaporating and ballooning in price in recent years. Bell & Howells
are cheaper, but still sell for several thousand dollars. A $400
Mitchell is as rare as a good $200 car, but it's been known to
happen. (Once.)
Bell & Howell Eyemos (35mm) and Filmos (16mm)
were always sold with cranks; they can be used to drive the camera
forward at any speed, but first you have to run down the spring
completely and lock on the mechanism. The cranks are short (the
Eyemo crank is 1-5/8", half the ideal 3" length of the 2709 crank)
and there's no flywheel in these cameras, so you may have a harder
time cranking smoothly than you would with a Pathe Studio or
a Mitchell. However, the governor prevents you from exceeding
the speed set on the exposure dial, which helps a lot. Set the
governor to 16 fps and you'll be able to crank slower than that,
but no faster.
The first Bolexes were sold in the 1930s with
a crank about twice as long as the type provided today, and at
that time the instruction manual gave directions on hand-cranking;
nowadays the only use suggested for the crank is rewinding for
effects, but the spring-wound Bolex is as crank-worthy now as
it ever was. Cranking a Bolex isn't as fun as it should be, because
even the longer crank is very short, but the Bolex governor provides
stability, same as the Bell & Howells.
There are other 16mm spring-wound cameras that
physically permit you to crank them, but with most of them it's
an exercise in drudgery that you'd only try in an emergency--when
the electric motor's dead, and you know the shot's going to be
longer than the spring can handle. I don't promise you'll love
hand-cranking these littler guys, but try it with one of the
big machines and you'll be hooked for good. Ask Stanley Cortez
about the lure of cranking; he was first drawn into cinematography
when he stopped on a New York street to admire the artistic cranking
style of a Pathe news cameraman. "[On my first job in Hollywood],
I wasn't supposed to touch the camera. But in my spare hours,
I'd crank it, see what made it tick. It fascinated me."8
© 1996 by L. Sprague Anderson. Sprague
became interested in silent film methods while he was teaching
a course at the San Francisco Art Institute on the history
of film technology. This article is part of a book he's preparing
on 1920s production techniques. He presently works at Pacific
Video Resources in San Francisco. His work number is (415)
864-5679.
FOOT NOTES
(1) Farmer, James H.: Broken Wings: Hollywood's
Air Crashes. Pictorial Histories Publ. Co.; Missoula, Mont.,
1984; page 6. This book gives the cameraman's name as "Devoe," but
at least two American Cinematographer magazines have it as De
Vol.
(2) "Films Own Shadow as Plane Falls," by Dan
Clark, ASC. American Cinematographer; Dec. 1923; page 7,8.
(3) "Roland H. Totheroh Interviewed." Film
Culture, Spring 1972, pg. 242.
(4) "Pictorial Side of 'Captain Blood'," by
Steve Smith, Jr., ASC. American Cinematographer, 5:6; September,
1924; page 20.
(5) Walker, Joseph & Juanita: The Light on
Her Face. ASC; Hollywood, 1984; page 50.
(6) "The Lost Snake Dance," American Cinematographer;
Oct. 15, 1921; page 13.
(7) Clerc, L.P.: Photography Theory and Practice.
New York: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd.; London: Henry Greenwood & Co.,
Ltd., 1930; page 535.
(8) Higham: Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of
Light. Garland Publishing, Inc.; New York and London, 1970 (1986);
pages 100-101.
|
