Now, the principal difference between the regular and the moving-picture stage is that, in making photoplays, natural exteriors are used, in almost every case.  Consequently, landscape and other exterior drops are almost unknown in moving-picture work.  As actual drops they are unknown; when such painted backgrounds are used, they are usually painted on canvas or a sort of heavy cardboard, which is stretched over or tacked to a solid framework.  So that even in making out his working scene-plot diagram, a director finds that there are many technical terms which he constantly used in his theatrical work but seldom or never employs in his capacity of photoplay producer.  Nevertheless, he still uses a scene-plot diagram, drawing it himself on regular printed forms.

As may be gathered from the foregoing, the scene-plot diagram for a photoplay setting is entirely different from the diagram of the setting for a scene on the regular stage.  The former shows, printed, the comparative shape and dimensions of the “stage,” and gives, in figures, the depth of the stage and the distance from the camera to the “working line,” below which (toward the camera) an actor must not step if he wishes his feet, therefore his whole body, to show in the picture.

To say “the depth of the stage” is to say that the printed diagram is marked off in a scale of feet from the camera’s focus.  The figures at the right side of the sheet indicate the distance in feet from the camera, while those at the left show the width of the field, or range of the camera lens, at different distances.  Only that portion of each piece of furniture which is marked a solid black in the diagram is supposed to show in the picture.  Thus half of a table may be “in” and half “out” of a picture, or scene.  This diagram-form is made out by the director for virtually every set that shows an interior scene, and he frequently draws one also for exteriors, where a building, or even what appears in the picture to be a complete, permanent structure, is set up by the carpenters and mechanics out of doors.  Such a scene-plot diagram is reproduced at the end of this chapter.

The scene-plot which you as a photoplay author are called upon to prepare, however, is simply a list of the scenes used in working out your scenario.  Here you must distinguish between “scene” and “set” (or setting) in photoplay writing.  We know that the scene is changed every time that the camera is moved.  One scene or ten may be taken, or “done,” in the same set—­that is, a half-dozen scenes might be taken successively in a business office without changing the set at all.  Therefore, although you have two hundred scenes in your five-reel scenario, only twenty sets may be needed in which to play them.

3.  How Scenes and Sets Are Photographed

We know that a scene is ended when the cameraman stops “grinding;” we understand, also, that a change of setting is brought about by moving the camera, even though, in the case of taking two exterior scenes, the camera is only moved enough to take in a new “stage” three or four feet to either side of that shown in the last scene.