LOUIS F. FIESER Hamard University, Camb~ldge,Massachusetts
INTR~DUCTI~N last year of a new set of experiments for the laboratory work of a class of 250 beginners in organic chemistry presented more of a problem than I had anticipated. We adopted not only the new experiments described in the third edition of my manual,' but also all the new equipment, and some of it was late in arriving. I had little direct contact with the sixteen assistants, many of whom were first-year graduate students. The more experienced assistants tended to look askance at techniques and apparatus foreign to their own experience. All the students presumably had read the instrnctions, but their setups often bore little evidence of an appreciation of the written word. I decided to put on some demonstrations, as I had done with reasonable success some years ago when the class was smaller. But in two groups of 125 students each, anything much smaller than a 1-liter flask could not be seen by those in back. The lecture table had no steam bath or proper kind of sink and suction pump. Innumerable items of equipment and chemicals had to be assembled in my laboratory and transported from the second floor of one building to the basement of another. What was done for the Tuesday sections had t o be repeated for the Wednesday sections. I then thought of a movie, and the idea became more and more appealing as I looked into this possibility. Photography could insure perfect visibility to a student group of any size, even of phenomena on a micro scale. For example, a sample melting in a capillary tube could be shown in a close-up. Striking phenomena could be demonstrated ideally by color photography. A.n experiment lasting many hours could be shown in a few minutes of film. The demonstrations could be done with all the facilities of one's own laboratory. A photographer friend went over a tentative script estimated t o cover about fifty minutes of film and figured that he could make the movie a t a total cost of ' FIESER,L. F.. "Experiments in Organic Chemistry," 3rd ed., D. C. Heath and Ca., Boston, 1955.
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$3000. We would shoot the photography first, and could talk back and forth during the process; I mould later make a, narration to fit the film as we edited it. He was sure he could make a perfect picture on the first t a b and was allowing for no wastage. I applied to a ioaal fund for a grant to meet the estimated cost and eventually got it, but in the meantime I had visited a n experienced producer, viewed some educational films, and learned enough about the techuiques of picturemaking t o get some impression of the problems and' difficulties involved and to fear that the production. my friend and I had contemplated ~vouldbe amateur:. ish. He could do his part, but I began to realize that T could not do the acting required without professional direction, and that the narration had best be done by a professional skilled in interpretative reading and timing. Motion picture production is a specialized business, and the standard cost of $600-$1000 per minute of finished film is amply justified. The film I wanted to make, if done by a professional producer, would cost ten times the grant available to me. In feeling around for the large subsidy needed, I was pleasantly surprised to find that The Fund for the Advancement of Education was just at the point of announcing appropriation to a Committee on Utilization of College Teaching Resources of $500,000 for one year for support of "experimentation in colleges and universities with respect to more effective utilization of teaching resources in providing undergraduate instruction of the highest quality." My project seemed directly in line with the stated objectives, and an application for support received favorable action. The project actually involves two responsibilities: (1) to make a satisfactory training film, and (2) to collect information derived from the experience that may be of use to others considering projects in audio-visual education and starting with no more of a background in movie technique than I had. This paper is thus an open report to the major sponsor.
quences for preparation of a finished production. I revised the tentative script after each conference and thought, after the second one, that I was all set. I realize now that later difficulties and delays might have been avoided if the preparative period had included indoctrination from the cameraman in the problems with which he is faced and the experience of looking through the camera viewfinder. I naively thought that my job was to do the experiments and that the cameraman had the independent job of photographing them satisfactorily. I was to learn that a successful outcome requires cooperation and understanding on both sides. RECOGNIZING PRODUCTION PROBLEMS
Countercurrent Distribution: A Scene f r o m t h e Film
The film was t,o be in four parts, to be shown at suitable stages in the laboratory work of a beginnin2 organic course. I t would demonstrate usual and novel uses of standard and accessory equipment, and show advantageous ways of arranging and operat,ingassemblies for fractional diet,illation, melting point determination, and Rast determination of molecular weight. Part 11, devoted to crystallization, mould show the st,ndent efficient ways of carrying out solubilit,y tests, gravity and suction filtrat,ion, rlarification, collection of crystals, vacuum drying. It could also include phenomena of great beauty, such as spontaneous separation of cryst,als and the seeding of a supersaturated solution. Color photography would make possible demonstration of the rapidity of action of decolorizing carbon, the ratio of activated carbon to a colored adsorbate, and the dependence of speed of filtrat,ion of mother liquor on the particle size of the precipitate. Experiments for Part I11 on extraction, countcrcurrent distribution, and elution rhromatography offered particular opportunity for use of colored compounds, both for easy visualization of the phenomena concerned and for added interest. For example, a green ethered solution on extraction with alkali affordsa blue upper layer (azulene) and a red lower layer, and acidification of the latter liberates the yellow acidic component (lapachol). Distribution of t ~ v oyellow pigments between ether and an aqueous buffer in ten separatory funnels, shown merely at the initial and terminal stages, mould show a t a glance the efficacy of the countercurrent method. Part IV was to be somewhat different from the rest and can be described later. Owing t o preoccupation with books, I did not deliberate about possible producers but selected the Centron Corporation, whose studio I had happened to visit while on a speaking trip. The distance from Boston to Lawrence, Kansas, did not present any appreciable difficulties. Two executives of the production firm came on for a first discussion of plans, which were further developed in a later visit from one of the executives in company with the man designated as director and charged with the responsibility of deciding on scenes, camera angles, film footage at each exposure, and, in short, of interpreting my original ideas into a sufficient number of satisfactory photographic s e
On t,he first few days of production we were confronted with an outside temperature of 96'. Four 2000watt spot lights and a couple of 1000-watt flood lights not only raised the temperature hut completely destroyed my idea of doing the experiments in t,he comfort, and seclusion of one's own laboratory. A small room littered with cameras and lights and electric cables is no longer a nice private laboratory. We were able to operate at all and to keep perspiration from showing on bands and face only by rigging up a couple of ash barrels of ice vith fans blowing over them. Some initial footage of film was spoiled because of a misconception based on the early discussion with my photographer friend, whose wggestion that in some of the scenes rre would talk to each other for guidance led me, in practicing sequences, to speak the script to myself. But my face showed in one scene of an early sequence, and on seeing my lips move the director ordered a halt and made the point that moving lips obviously not synchronized with sound track to be made later would produce a ridiculous effect. This is just one of t,he nonobvious points that I had failed to anticipat,e. Others were encountered on the following day, when some scenes had to be skipped because my lips, although nov immobile, had been badly puffed up from the heat and from hay fever. We turned to a sequeuce in which my face ~vonldbe invisible if I remembered to lean back, and I arranged the pieces of equipment as I thought they should be and went through the operations as I proposed to perform them. The cameraman seemed awfully fussy. I had put the graduate to the right of the wash bottle, and he wanted it put to the left. I wanted to scrape a sample of white solid out of a white glazed paper with a spatula in my right hand, but' thedirector andcameraman, after lengthy study, wanted me to use a yellow paper, which was less smooth, and either to scrape with my left hand or to screw my hands around into a position which mas very awkward so the solid would be visible to the camera. I mas so mad, hot, stagestrnck, and generally nervous, t,hat I messed up five or six successive trials of the short sequence at, one stage or another. The situation looked so black that I called on an able former student for help. My young double was calm and collected, still accustomed t o taking orders, and ambidextrous, but it took an afternoon of practice and several trials under the camera before he finished the sequence successfully. Watching the performance was a revelation. I began to see the problem objectively, and to think about production of a movie and not just about the laboratory techniques. I looked through the viewfinder for the JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION
&st time and saw the picture as an audience would see it, and this was a good bit different from what the operator saw. Of course the cameraman did not want the graduate to he to the right of the wash bottle, for in that position it was not visible. On seeing the limits to which t,he action would have to be confined, restrictions mhich previously had seemed silly and annoying became perfectly obvious. I am afraid I had been thinking of something like a movie of a basketball game taken by a sports photographer, and had not appreciated that the result ~vouldhave very little instructional value in comparison with a twining film s t a ~ e dto bring out every hit of essential action. Auother lesson learned in this period was the technique of shifting from one scene to another. A. scene is the foot.agefrom the time the camera is started until it is stopped. Suppose a given operation can be demonstrated fully in a single scene of 50 feet and that everything comes off smoothly except for a false movement 5 feet from the end. I had thought that correction could he made by retaking the last 6-7 feet and splicing the corrected film onto the satisfactory part of the first take. However, it is impossible to rearrange all the objects in view, as well as the hands, exactly the way they were the first time, and if anything is displaced by as much as a quarter of an inch the picture will seem to jump and mill be no good. Thus either the whole 50-foot scene is retaken, or correction is made through the artifice of either a close-up or a head shot. If some view a short distance ahead of the fault in the original take is suitable for a close-up shot, this shot can be made later and spliced in to produce a break. The remainder of the scene to follow the close-up is then redone; it can be photographed from the same angle as that of the original take, or from a different angle. The alternative technique of introducing a hreak is to shift from the main seine to a view o f t h e dcmo~.strat.or's head looking down at the work, and then shift to the nelv take. The useful purpose of head shots was not explained to me until, at the end of the mork proper, I was in the process of posing for them. They had me face the camera and look down out of the picture limits a t my "work," which consisted in pouring water from oue beaker to another, turn slightly to the left and pour, and then turn slightly to the right and pour. To meet any possible contingencies that might arise in editing, I had to go through the silly business four times mearing the ties that appear in Parts I-IV. Actually, none of the head'shots was used. A time lapse, for example, while a solution is being evaporated on the steam bath to one-third the volume, is done by a film-processing technique of "dissolving," in which the three quarters-full flask VOLUME 34, NO. 1, JANUARY, 1957
disappears by stages while a one quarter-full flask appears in the same way. The apparatus remains exactly where it was, and hands can be removed, but without the illusion of transition created by the "dissolving," the jump from one liquid level to another mould appear ludicrous. With the understanding and indoctrination acquired from viewing a few sequences objectively, the need for a double vanished and the rest of the production went off at a greatly accelerated pace and with mnrh better results. One early sequence that had taken half a day was retaken in half an hour with at, least 100yo improvement. The troublesome scene showing a white solid being scraped out of a creased yellow paper had not looked quite right because my double, using his left hand, had been slow in effecting the operation and had left a trail of solid along the crease. We thus substituted a close-up in which I operated in a comfortable position and the camera angle was adjusted to secure full visibility. The taking of new scenes mas greatly simplified by revision of supposedly finalized script in accordance with technical requirements of camera work. MARTIUS YELLOW PRIZE COMPETITION
Part IV had seemed at the outset to present a special problem. It involved a sequence of preparations and was intended to shov how time can be saved by dovetailing operations and anticipating needs. a-Naphthol is converted through the disulfonate into the dinitro derivative, Martius Yellow, a - sample of vhich is crystallized and saved. The rest is reduced to the diamine, half of mhich is oxidized and half converted to the N,N-diacetate. Samples of the two products are crystallized and the rest used for conversion t o further derivatives, and event,ually the 5 grams of starting material is transformed into seven beautifully crystalline
5
products: red, orange, yellow, or white. The series of preparations is traditionally used in my course in an annual Martius Yellow Prize Competition for selected students. Some of the steps are a little critical, and in the heat of competition there is ample chance for mishap. Only about a quarter of the entrants finish with satisfactory samples of all seven compounds, and judg ment between these successful contestants is based largely on the working time. I usually run through the experiments along with the students and, with the practice gained each year, have cut down my time as follows: 1950, 3 hours, 16 minutes; 1952, 2 hours, 54 minutes; 1954, 2 hours, 26 minutes; 1956, 1 hour, 59 minutes. The present student record was set by Louis Harris in 1954; his time of 2 hours, 19 minutes, beat mine that year by 7 minutes, and he is the man I called in to act as my double in the movie scene I had thought that the Martius Yellow sequence would have to he photographed like a basketball game, with the cameraman catching impromptu action as best he could. However, the director, cameraman, and I, now functioning as a coordinated team, had no difficulty in working out fully planned action sequences suitable both for adequate photography and for the instructional purposes desired. Three long scenes, one of about 150 feet of film, came out satisfactorily on the first trial and required no retaking. These experiments were done at the laboratory bench, where photography from the side and rear was satisfacatory because the objects were large enough not to be confused by the background of pipes and bottles. I had been disillusioned from the initial idea that the earlier demonstrations could be done in the same way, and in fact we had done nearly all of them in studio fashion on a central table with the camera across the table from the operator. This is what the production men had advised from the start, and I had only wasted time by arguing for something that looked like a laboratory and not a studio. If the producing firm had been located nearby, some of the scenes could have been taken with full studio facilities and we would have been spared trying t o cover up imperfections in the laboratory table top and eliminating reflections from cabinets. EDITING AND NARRATION
The film was edited while I was abroad. The total take of 6,000 feet of film on 15 reels was run through a projector just once, to avoid damage. It was viewed by scenes, each of which was rated for acceptance or re. jection. The satisfactory film amounted to one-quarter of the total, which is said to be about the usual ratio. The sections of usable film were spliced together in random order and a copy was made (in color) to serve as a workprint. Workprint and original were then run together through a machine that marks duplicate edge numbers on the two films so that any frame from one can be identified in the other. The workprint then bears the brunt of the extensive running and rerunning involved in further editing m d eventually serves as model for preparation of a master copy from the unhandled original. When I went out to Kansas in August the scenes of the workprint had been separated, and sections of film at the beginning or end of a scene that seemed excessive were deleted but saved on numbered reels. I t mas
evident that we had the makings of a movie, hut that many adjustments would have to be made to match script and film. I n three places where the film lacked enough footage to accommodate the explanatory narration, we made covering scenes in close-up, which did not require the laboratory background. For example, to introduce an abruptly starting scene showing five ways of supporting a separatory funnel, we made a close-up showing a locally borrowed funnel viewed against the background of my shirtfront and Part I11 tie, and added the line "Extractions are done with a separatory funnel, a device as beautifully proportioned and as generally useful as the Erlenmeyer f l a ~ k . " ~The script required many other revisions, but after three days of projection and reading, rewriting and rerunning, everything was in readiness for the narration. I was somewhat reluctant to defer to a professional narrator, but I doubt if I mould have done the job as efficiently or any better. After practice reading of the script and coaching on pronunciation, the narrator, standing in the projection room beside the director, started reading on a cue from the director's hand and kept his eyes fixed on the manuscript. The director, watching the projection, adjusted the timing bysignaling cues corresponding to break points marked on the manuscript. I watched the film through a window of the recording room where the sound was audible, and noted any imperfections detected. Usually correction was made by electrically erasing the whole 10-15 minute recording from the metallized tape and doing it over. An occasional slur of a word was corrected by recording a retake of a few spoken sentences, which would be substituted for the original after the tape recording had been transferred to film. A clearing of the throat between speeches would he eliminated by painting the film. The Ampex recorder covered all frequencies from 30 t o 15,000 cycles. The narration was completed in a day and a half. A further day, actually the first, was devoted to synchronous sound pbotography: in initial and terminal scenes, I was to appear seated at the desk in my office and address the audience under a microphone. These scenes were done in the studio because of the reqnirement for exclusion of extraneous sound and because facilities were available for smooth transition from an identifying long shot to a close-range detail shot, and for following a moving subject. The camera is mounted on a dolly, which runs silently in laid-out tracks and has equipment for raising, lowering, and turning the camera. An assistant to the cameraman rides up forward on the dolly and adjusts the focus according t o measurements chalk-marked along the tracks. The synthetie office set up with props borrowed from the local university seemed nicer and tidier than my own, but I felt obliged to ask for removal of a periodic table, since I am a one-element chemist. The resulting bare spot on the wall unduly focused attention on a framed diploma, and we were afraid the audience mould be able to read the legend "University of Kansas." The situation was saved by substitution for the diploma of a photograph that Mrs. Fieser and I had persuaded the cameraman to take for use in the preface of a forthcoming book, and in this way our usual cat trademark became inserted in the film. Does any reader know who invented the separatory funnel?
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The spoken scenes went off more easily than I had expected. I could set my own timing, as in lecturing, and a minor departure from the planned script was admissible as long as it made sense. Only the very last scene had to be retaken. Instead of the planned "Perhaps you would like to try your hand. Good luck." I had said "Perhaps you would like to try your luck. Best wishes." Completing work by the producer included interlocking film and sound track, preparation of titles to appear against a background of Cambridge scenery, and addition of a musical introduction, for which we chose chimes from the Kansas campanile. Copies for use in
VOLUME 34, NO. 1, JANUARY, 1957
the current year are available to schools and rental libraries through Young America FilmqJ a distributing firm that assumes responsibility for preparation of an Instructor's Guide and general promotion. For those who may be interested in similar projects, it may he worth noting that although my film was paid for by funds appropriated to the university, officials of both the university and the supporting foundation consider a royalty to me to he just as appropriate and desirable as an author's royalty on a book. I n case you would like to try your hand, I hope that my experiences will be of some guidance and wish you good luck. Young America Films, 18 E. 41st St., New York 17, N. Y.
