[pure-silver] Re: silver in b&w films
----- Original Message ----- From: "Janet Cull" <jcull@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 5:24 PM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: silver in b&w films




On May 31, 2008, at 6:14 PM, Ken Hart1 wrote:
When both Pan and Ortho films were in use, portrait studios had two kinds of makeup available in a 'cake' form, one type for ortho films and one type for pan films. The "pan-cake" was a more natural 
(compared to the ortho-cake) look.
That's pretty interesting. Not to sidetrack, but is that really where the term "pancake make-up" came from? Who'd a thought?? 

Thank you, guys, answering my silver question.

Janet
No pancake makeup describes the appearance of the makeup, i.e., as flat as a pancake. Now, there was indeed panchromatic makup, used in the early days of sound movies. The introduction of sound changed absolutely everything from the very concept of what a movie was to marketing and distribution and everything in between. At the end of the silent era most movie lighting was done with carbon arc and mercury arc of the type known as a Cooper-Hewitt lamp. These looked like large arrays of fluorescent lamps except they put out lots of UV. Both types of lamps were pretty efficient but mechanically and electrically noisy. They could not be tolerated for sound recording and had to be replaced with incandescant lamps Inky's were much less efficient and had lots of output at the red end of the spectrum. Arc lamps put out most of their light in the blue, green and UV areas, so the type of film had to be changed. Also, the light level from the incandescent lamps was much lower. The industry had moved from color blind film to orthochromatic film (sensitive to blue and green) but many cameramen did not like the look of early pan films. However, if exposures were to be reasonable they _had_ to use pan. Because most of this film was what Kodak classified as Class-C panchromatic, a film with quite high red sensitivity, the tone rendition of colored objects was not satisfactory. In particular the combination of the high red sensitivity and the high red output of the lighting instruments resulted in weak separation of skin tones and washed out looking faces. This was cured for a time by using makeup in complimentary colors. The base makup was magenta and lipstick was green. This may also have been the time that sets were painted in unber colors resembling skin tones to that the lighing could be arranged to separate the actors from the background. If there was much color contrast it could be very misleading about the results in monochrome. Within a couple of years more balanced pan film was made available and this bizzare makup disappeared. However, there was later special makup for Technicolor. Technicolor was a very good process but did not always reproduce colors as desired. The idea was to test and find out what the original color had to be to come out right on the screen. So, Technicolor had a large database of information on how to color sets, costumes, makeup, etc. The reason filters were not widely used for tone corection was mostly that the light levels were marginal to begin with. After several years the Mole-Richardson Co., a major supplier of motion picture lighting equipment, made available high-intensity arc lamps that were silent and suitable for set lighting where sound recording was to be done. One of the main reasons for this was the three-color Techniclor process (about 1935) which required copious amounts of light (around 1000 foot lambert) of approximately daylight consistency. Here again there was a motivation for the design of special makeup, mainly to get something that would not melt and run in the tremendous heat. For reference, normal set lighting is around 250 foot lamberts and now maybe no more than half of that. 

---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx




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