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Invisible technique
Learning the ropes
There have been a number of boy-wonders and young prodigies in the history of film making but the most spectacular debut was when 25-year-old Orson Welles was summoned to RKO in 1939 to make his first movie. He had no experience of film making and Miriam Geiger, a researcher at RKO, explained camera angles to the young Welles by cutting out frame holes in pieces of paper and pasting over a selection of shot sizes taken from a reel of film She added a short text description to remind Welles of the building blocks of film making.
Welles remembers that in the second week of shooting ‘Citizen Kane',
an awful moment came when I didn't understand [screen] directions. That was because I had learnt how to make ...
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