In scores of feature productions models or miniatures of various kinds have been resorted to to obtain startling or novel effects, and have saved the outlay of thousands of dollars in the production of certain pictures.  Double photography, or superimposure, is a ready ally when the director wants to get an effect showing a specially arranged fictitious scene played against a real and frequently well-known background, as in the North River scene just described.  In the same picture, “The Eagle’s Eye,” the Whartons, who produced it, displayed a new feature in photography—­a genuine photographic device rather than a trick—­in what they described as “the triple iris”—­three diaphragms opening at once and disclosing the heads of Boy-Ed, Von Papen and Dr. Albert, and then fading and showing a scene in which these three characters were seen grouped in conversation.

Another effect which might, perhaps, be classed as a trick was used in the Mary Pickford feature, “Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley.”  It was in reality merely a clever scene intended to take the place of a leader, while being also an improvement on a leader because of the fact that to almost everyone in the audience it instantly “put over” the idea back of the action at that point of the story.  At the time that Amarilly’s good-hearted but socially impossible mother, with her little brothers and sisters, are being entertained by the rich hostess who desires to shame the little girl from the tenements in the eyes of her son, there is flashed on the screen, against a dark background, an empty glass gold-fish bowl with the fish themselves wriggling and gasping on the table beside it.  The idea of “fish out of water” was very apparent to the spectators.  Later, when the tenement-bred family had returned to their humble home, another picture showed the gold-fish contentedly swimming about in a well-filled bowl.  It is such an effect as this that any clever writer might think of suggesting in his scenario, and it is legitimate in every way—­far more so, in fact, than some of the tricks of diaphragming and fading so frequently made use of by certain directors.

A startlingly novel effect was shown some time ago in the Vitagraph Company’s production of Arthur Stringer’s story, “Mortmain.”  Just as Mortmain was put under ether the scene proper faded out, giving place to a dull blur in which the faces of the doctor and his attendants were brought right up to the lens of the camera and then withdrawn for several feet, the action being extremely rapid, and being repeated several times, by means of the camera mounted on a truck, as already described.  This was accompanied by another dark-background strip of film, across—­or rather down—­which shot fiery streaks, like the tails of discharging sky-rockets.  The whole effect of anaesthesia was vividly reproduced, and the effect on the audience was most marked.  The idea of what Mortmain experienced in his last conscious moments “got across” in no uncertain way.  Especially startling and realistic—­to those who have been there—­was the effect of the patient’s feeling himself dropping, dropping, dropping through space into—­oblivion.