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Three Histories: Roll Your Own

Nov 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Jeff Kreines

A Personal Look at Camera History

Billy Bitzer and D.W. Griffith shooting Way Down East (1920). The bicycle lamp hanging off the right side of the camera was Bizer's anti-static totem.

Have you ever picked up a new video camera, and, after a few minutes of trying to understand the illogical controls and poor ergonomics, muttered, “Who the hell designs these things?”

A recent thread on the Cinematography Mailing List tried to make sense of one manufacturer's inexplicable decision to calibrate its focus scale in percent. Not feet. Not meters. Percent. Another discussion, about a different camera, complained of terrible ergonomics, flimsy connectors, mediocre color reproduction, bad manual overrides, and the fact that the camera powered down automatically after five minutes.

So what should you do with all your gripes and feature requests? What about following the fine tradition of your filmmaking ancestors, taking matters into your own hands, and going where manufacturers fear to tread?

In the early days of film, things were simple. Cameras were not inscrutable black boxes stuffed with circuit boards. They were beautiful wooden boxes containing sprockets and gears, a shutter and a lens. Anyone could understand exactly what each part of a camera did — and users could modify their cameras easily, making them do things the manufacturer never imagined.

The great Billy Bitzer (best known as D.W. Griffith's cinematographer) modified his Pathe camera so radically that it was nearly unrecognizable. The most bizarre addition was a carbide-fueled bicycle lamp hanging off the side — not for light, but to funnel warm, moist air into the camera — to try and keep static flashes (common when shooting in cold, dry environments) from marring his film. (This was such a problem back then that the American Society of Cinematographers was originally known as The Static Club.)

Bitzer can be credited with inventing much of the film grammar we now take for granted, as he pioneered the matte box, the iris effect, and the in-camera fade and dissolve. His modifications became standard features on the next generation of cameras from Mitchell and Bell & Howell.

In 1914, explorer Carl Akeley needed a camera that could withstand the rigors of an African safari. He wanted to use telephoto lenses, reload quickly, and make very smooth camera moves. There were no commercially available cameras that came close to filling his needs.

So he designed and built his own camera — which, due to its unique shape, was nicknamed the Pancake Akeley. The round body was integrated into the camera's gyro-smoothed pan/tilt head; the camera could tilt straight up while the orientable viewfinder (35 years ahead of its time) remained in a fixed position. A viewing lens (identical to the taking) was used for focusing and framing, like the later Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. The quick-change internal magazines let an operator reload in fifteen seconds.

The author, in 1973, shows off his "big" one-person rig (note the Nagra around his waist), on the cover of the obscure fanzine Finders/Keepers.

Cinematic adventurers quickly adopted the Akeley. Robert Flaherty took two to Hudson Bay to shoot Nanook of the North (considered the first documentary film). Ace aerial cameraman Elmer Dyer used his on Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels and many other films — and even advertised himself as an “Akeley Expert.” The Pancake was still being manufactured in the '40s — because Carl Akeley knew what he needed in a camera and found that others shared those needs.

In the early 1950s, there was a sudden demand for portable 16mm sound cameras to shoot television news. Bach-Auricon tried to push its Pro-600 camera to the industry, but cameramen preferred its diminutive Cine-Voice — designed for sound home movies. It was small, cheap, and lightweight — but accommodated only 100ft. of film.

So cameramen modified their Cine-Voices, cutting a hole in the top to accept a 400ft. magazine. A more radical faction devised the “choptop” conversions — they literally cut the top off the camera, creating a smaller, lighter rig. This became the industry standard, but rather than make a new camera, Auricon ignored its users while others made a cottage industry out of chopping down Cine-Voices. (Years later Auricon still ran ads warning people of the “marginal results in dependability” of the conversions.)

In the late 1950s, filmmaker Ricky Leacock grew frustrated shooting documentary films with immobile equipment and large crews. He and D.A. Pennebaker, with the aid of funding finagled out of Time-Life by producer Robert Drew, invented a system that made it possible to capture what Leacock called “the feeling of being there.” This required a portable synch-sound rig that could be operated by only two people.

Their first workable system was used to shoot Primary, a groundbreaking look at the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary that pitted JFK against Hubert Humphrey. Though the equipment barely worked — and much of the film was shot with non-synch cameras (the spring-wind Kodak K100 blimped in a leather shaving-kit bag is a classic) — Primary gave the world an intoxicating look at the future of non-fiction filmmaking.

D.A. Pennebaker shooting Monterey Pop with his classic shoulder-held slantback Auricon conversion. This was the first handheld synch camera with truly good ergonomics.

A big problem with the early rigs was the umbilical cord between camera and tape recorder. Simple things, like going through a revolving door, were impossible. Visiting a friend who was making a promotional film about the new Bulova Accutron watch, Leacock had an epiphany. The Accutron — worn by astronauts and railroad engineers — used a tuning fork, vibrating at 360Hz, as a super-accurate timebase.

Leacock realized that image and sound synchronization was merely a timing issue. He figured that if he used one Accutron to control the speed of the camera motor, and a second Accutron to generate a synch pulse recorded by the tape recorder, cableless synch was possible. Working with camera engineering genius Mitch Bogdanowycz, they built new cameras, each with an Accutron on its back. They could forecast synch problems (and there were many) by checking to see if the camera's and tape recorder's watches remained synchronized.

Pennebaker wasn't happy with the ergonomics of the camera. It was essentially a choptop Auricon conversion, fitted with an Angenieux zoom lens and side finder. The eyepiece was at the rear of the camera, putting the camera in front of the user's face. To support the weight of the camera, a short pole attached to the bottom rode in a leather flagpole holder, worn around the user's neck. It was portable, but hardly elegant.

Ricky Leacock shooting with an earlier Auricon conversion.

Penny came up with something so simple and ingenious that it remains with us to this day. He shortened the viewfinder so the eyepiece was at the front of the camera. Then he added a simple handgrip to the front of the camera. Suddenly, everything sat beautifully on his shoulder. He could steer it with his right hand, leaving his left hand free to zoom and focus. To improve the balance, the magazine was placed at a 45-degree angle, which they called a slantback camera.

Al Maysles, who had also worked on Primary, developed his own camera, which some said resembled a “dumpy bazooka.” It was much longer than Penny's camera, but was perfectly balanced, so that one's right arm merely steered it, without supporting any of the weight. Al used this camera to shoot Salesman and Gimme Shelter. Penny used his camera to shoot many films, including Don't Look Back and Monterey Pop. These filmmakers didn't let the lack of a commercially manufactured camera stop them from making the films they wanted to; they pressed onward, using tools they designed themselves.

Cameras like Pennebaker's became so popular that Cinema Products codified it all into a commercial product: the CP16 — essentially a slantback Auricon with a crystal-controlled motor (far superior to the tuning fork motors), onboard battery, and a handgrip on the front. The lightweight and reliable CP16 was the standard TV news camera until the ENG takeover of the late '70s.

So why do I care so much about this stuff? I started making films when I was fifteen, back in the late '60s, and had an odd set of influences — I was around underground filmmakers like Tom Palazzolo, George Landow, and Stan Brakhage, who all made films by themselves using Bolexes — but I wanted to make cinéma vérité films. Working solo made sense to me, as there were times when I didn't have a soundperson available, or needed to film intimate scenes where an additional person wouldn't fit in.

Of course, there wasn't anything commercially available for one-person synch shooting, so I took my big Nagra tape recorder, which weighed 15lbs., and wore it around my waist. I held a Sennheiser shotgun mic in my left hand. I used a 10mm lens on my Auricon, with an optical finder from a Leica (cheap and bright). I discovered I could shoot quite well with this 35lb. rig — I was much younger and stronger then — and made a film about my family (The Plaint of Steve Kreines as recorded by his younger brother Jeff) with it.

The next year I started working at the MIT Film Section, a hotbed of cinéma vérité activity headed by Ricky Leacock. Leacock was devoting his efforts to developing a Super 8 synch sound system, in a belief that “everyone has at least one film in them.” (I think the digital video revolution has proven that this was not necessarily the case.)

Others at MIT (notably Ed Pincus) were also experimenting with one-person synch sound. We all became users of the tiny Nagra SN tape recorder, originally developed for the CIA. It weighed only a pound, and fit in your pocket — but was nearly as good as the big Nagra — a marvel of Swiss engineering. I built an SN into the side of my camera, getting rid of the big Nagra forever. The result was a very compact and user-friendly rig.

Joel DeMott, who'd been a student of Leacock's, was shooting a film about her little sister, and wanted to shoot it solo. We started working together — late nights in the old MIT building where radar was invented — and developed a more sophisticated rig. It consisted of a CP16, 10mm Switar lens with optical viewfinder, Nagra SN — and we shot with the camera on our right shoulder, and a cardioid mic in our left hand. It was quiet, simple, affordable, and reliable. For a filmmaker, it was the closest thing to shooting still photographs with a Leica. DeMott first used this rig to shoot her film Demon Lover Diary. We've made many films together with it since, including Seventeen.

Joel Demott shooting Demon Lover Diary with her one-person synch-rig.

It seems so obvious now — a simple camera/tape recorder combination that let a person shoot synch sound movies in low light, working solo — but in 1974 people thought we were crazy.

1974 is notable for another reason, as it's the year that portable video gear began replacing newsfilm cameras. But how did these video cameras evolve?

To cover political conventions, NBC and RCA developed the Walkie-Lookie vidicon camera of 1952. (Believe it or not, these conventions once made for fascinating television, and the networks preempted regular programming to cover them gavel-to-gavel.) The camera was quite small and had a three-lens turret. Of course, it required a 50lb. backpack filled with support electronics and batteries. But it was truly portable, and the images from these cameras felt, well, new.

In the '60s, Ikegami worked with CBS to develop a camera they called the Handy-Looky. It was a box camera that sat on the shoulder, with an electronic viewfinder and a large backpack filled with electronics. Fast-forward to the mid-'70s, when it morphed into the HL (for you-know-what) -33 and -35 — color cameras, but still burdened with a large backpack.

Lose the backpack and poof! It's an Ikegami HL-79 or an RCA TK-76, tethered to a 40lb. U-Matic deck. Lose the external deck, build a Betacam deck into the camera, and — aha! — you've got the first of the one-piece broadcast camera-recorders. Replace the camera tubes with CCDs, upgrade the tape format to digital, and presto! You now have a portable DigiBeta camcorder like the DVW-600.

Increase the resolution, but compress and filter the signal so it can still be recorded on a Beta-sized tape, and — voila! — it's HDCAM.

Digital cameras have a video history. And that's one way to do it. But could there also be digital cameras designed for filmmakers, building on 100 years of film camera design principles? Why can't there be a digital Bolex? How about a high-resolution, low-light monochrome camera for infrared shooting? How about a truly variable-speed camera — so variable that it could be hand-cranked, if one desired? How about a camera that can be used to shoot HD, PAL, or NTSC — whatever format you need that day? Why not a camera that lets you use all your film-camera lenses? (Dalsa and Arri have shown prototype single-sensor cameras with a PL mount, which I think is the way of the future. However, these cameras don't yet include any recording system.) How about a camera that records raw, uncompressed 10-bit log data, so all color correction decisions can be deferred until after the shoot, without compromise? (The new Viper camera does output a raw signal, but, again, there's no integrated recorder.)

And finally, why not a digital camera that looks and feels and operates like a film camera?

The author tests a prototype of his new camera.

Back to me and why camera history, specifically improvisational, homegrown camera history interests me so much. Taking inspiration from Akeley, Leacock, and Pennebaker, and my own past, I began looking at new technologies and thinking about how they could be used to make a modern camera. There are some very good CCD and CMOS sensors that are ideal for a high-resolution digital camera. The new generation of tiny hard drives make a good recording medium, freeing one from the fixed frame rates mandated by tape-based formats. The latest field-programmable gate arrays make it possible to fit an entire camera's electronics into a few chips. So why not build a camera from scratch?

I didn't have a good answer for that one, so that's what I'm working on. It's not as simple as it was in the Auricon days, so I'm very lucky to be working with Martin Snashall, a pioneering designer of digital video equipment (he designed the Abekas A64 and A84, among other things).

So how's it going? Film people really like it. They pick up the prototype, put it on their shoulder, and say, “Ahhh…” That's a good sign. With a little luck, you'll be able to judge for yourself at NAB 2004. If nothing else, I will have added a small footnote to the long history of filmmakers who stopped grumbling and rolled their own.

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Jeff Kreines has been making non-fiction films for over 35 years. His new company, Kinetta, which debuts at NAB 2004, makes cameras, telecines, and film recorders for filmmakers and archives. He apologizes to his friends in Europe for not having room to write about their cameras in this piece.

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