With the movie makersStearns, Myron M. (Myron Morris)
General
With the movie makers
Stearns, Myron M. (Myron Morris)
Motion pictures -- Juvenile literature
In the laboratory we visit first the developing-room, feeling our
way cautiously into the dark around many corners that cut off every
possible ray of light from outside. Walking on wet slats we reach
at last the chamber in the middle of what seems to be an almost
impenetrable labyrinth, and in the dim red light can barely make out
the vats where the strips of celluloid, wound back and forth on wooden
hand-racks, are being dipped into the developer.
Nowadays many of the laboratories are equipped with complicated
developing machines, that combine all the processes of developing,
washing, “fixing,” and drying in one. Where prints, made from the
original negative, are being developed, tinting is added. The
undeveloped film, tightly wound in small rolls, is threaded through one
end of the developing machine in the dark-room; it travels over little
cog-wheels that mesh into the holes at the edges of the film, and goes
down into a long upright tube filled with developer. Coming back out
of this, still on the cogs, it travels next down into a tube of clear
water for washing. Then down into another tube containing “hypo,” and
up again for another tube and second washing. Then, still winding along
on the little cogs it travels through a partition and out into a light
room, where it passes through an airshaft for drying, across an open
space for inspection, and is finally wound into as tight a roll as it
started from in its undeveloped state.
In the printing-room, still in the dim red light, we see half a dozen
printing-machines at work, with raw film and negative feeding together
past the aperture where the single flash of white light makes the
exposure that leaves the negative image upon the print.
Next, in daylight once more, we see the great revolving racks of the
drying-room used for film developed by the hand process—with hundreds
of feet of the celluloid ribbon wrapped around and around great wooden
drums.
In the assembling-room we find girls at work winding up strips of film
and cementing or patching the ends of the film together to make a
continuous reel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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