Watch the pictures on the screen and you will see what effects are produced; and it follows that if a thing can be done once it can be done again.  But will it be worth while in the case of your story?  This is a point that you must determine before venturing to specify that particular effect.  Do not be carried away by the fact that it is your work.  Weigh the importance of that scene and compare it with the dramatic value of the scenes which precede and follow it; if the scene with the unusual and difficult effect is the big scene of an unusually big and interesting story, write it in.  The chances are that the director will be only too glad to stage it according to your original idea.  But do not ask him to waste his time or the company’s money in producing a scene the expense and bother of obtaining which is out of all proportion to the importance of the rest of the picture.  And do not forget that the camera, wonderful as it is, cannot and does not do everything that it seems to do.  In other words, do not mistake an effect produced by trick photography for one that is merely the result of exceptional care and work on the part of both cameraman and director.

CHAPTER XIV

HOW TO GATHER IDEAS FOR PLOTS

1.  Watching the Pictures

Unless you are already a successful fiction writer when you first determine to write photoplays it is not going too far to assert that you have never yet really watched a motion picture.  You have witnessed many, but only the playwright and the theatrical man may be said to watch plays, whether on the stage or on the screen, with every faculty alert and receptive, ready to pounce on any suggestion, any bit of stage business, any scenic effect, or any situation, that they may legitimately copy or enlarge upon for their respective uses.  This keen attitude is partly a matter of inborn dramatic instinct, but it is even more a matter of training and habit—­therefore cultivate it.

Not only does the professional photoplaywright remain wide awake when watching real photoplays, but he often finds as much plot-suggestion in other classes of films as there is in the story-pictures, for plot-germs fairly abound in scenics, vocationals, microcinematographics, educationals, and topicals, as these several sorts are called by the craft.  A certain successful writer has sold no less than thirty photoplays, all the plots of which sprang from scenics and educationals.  One, for example, was built upon an idea picked up in watching a film picturing the making of tapioca in the Philippines.