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Atlantis, a German film based on the Titanic disaster, Schufftan’s process was used in many of
the interior scenes. The director wished to make various shots showing the passengers being
engulfed with the sinking ship. By the old method it would have been necessary to flood the
studio or lot and build an expensive set merely to destroy it. A model of the top of the liner’s
ballroom was built. The actors floundering in a small tank provided the remainder of the scene.
The result is as realistic as would be a picture made at great expense and effort.

Metropolis, the German film which a few years
ago attracted international attention chiefly
because of its futuristic sets that appeared in
gigantic proportions on the screen, employed tiny
models and the Schufftan method. The models
were built for a few hundred dollars. Actual sets
on the scale suggested would have cost a
considerably large fortune.

A most realistic battle scene was produced with a
cheap model. The actual studio construction
involved was our shell crater, in which the actors
played the sequence. Across the small model of
the battlefield a miniature aeroplane moved in
flight. As the toy ’plane crossed a designated spot,
a tiny calcium bomb exploded and brought it
down. The effect was startlingly lifelike, though it
cost less titan 100 dollars to produce.
Another Schufftan set, supposedly made in a great
astronomical observatory. employed an ordinary
table microscope to give the illusion of an
enormous telescope.

According to Hans Nieter, a young German-American camera man, who worked in the UFA
Studios with the Schufftan process since its beginning, 70 per cent, of all German productions
now use the method. To date, 23 British pictures have been made with its assistance. Soon after
his invention was introduced in the German studios, Schufftan was invited to Hollywood to
demonstrate it. He remained several months, but no one seemed to take his work seriously, and
experiments were abandoned. That was five years ago. Meanwhile, however, sound has come
into its own. Now. with the small studios necessary for talkie production and the great difficulty
of reproducing sound in outdoor scenes, synthetic sets have become a vital problem. Thus, it is
expected that the Schufftan unit which arrived in the movie colony the other day will prove the
nucleus from which will grow the general adoption of the system in this country.

These, then, are the three major new developments in movie making technique – colour, wide
film, and the Schufftan process. What are their secrets? To begin with Technicolor: It is the
invention of Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus. a former professor of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, who, with a group of scientists. worked more than a decade to bring it to its present
state of development. This is how an expert explained the process to me:—
"The scene you will eventually see spread on the screen in glowing tints is taken with a special
camera. It is equipped with a prism arrangement, which, because it splits the scene into two
duplicate parts, can take two identical pictures at the same time on succeeding sections of film.

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