Draft:Akeley Camera

Body and form

The Akeley was distinctive in both form and function. Where most camera bodies of the era were rectangular or square, Akeley designed a round profile with a cylindrical aluminium body, approximately 7½ inches in diameter and only 13 inches tall with its base, far lighter and more portable than its contemporaries.^[1][4] Its round profile earned it the nickname the "pancake" camera.^[3] A contemporary journal remarked that to the uninitiated, its base resembled a large pie pan.^[1] The rugged construction was designed specifically for field use under harsh conditions; the camera was known to survive incidents that would have destroyed other equipment.^[3]

Shutter

The Akeley's shutter mechanism was unlike any other in the history of cinema technology. Conventional cameras of the period, from the Kinetograph and Cinématographe onward through the Bell & Howell 2709 and Debrie Parvo, used a rotating disc shutter, a partially open metal disc placed in front of the film gate. The Akeley instead employed a full disc resembling a rimmed lid, nearly the diameter of the camera body itself, with an opening cut into the rim. This opening rotated around the entire interior circumference of the cylindrical body, producing a 230-degree shutter angle, far wider than the 180 degrees or less typical of other cameras.^[3][4] This design had no equivalent in cinema technology and allowed the camera to admit significantly more light, making it effective in the low-light conditions of dawn and dusk that were common in wildlife filming.^[3]

Viewfinder and lenses

On early models, the viewfinder was a tube positioned behind the film gate, allowing the operator to frame the image by looking through the film itself, possible because early film stocks did not yet have an opaque anti-halation backing.^[4] On 22 June 1918, Akeley patented a prism-based articulating viewfinder to replace this system.^[4] The new viewfinder was coupled with a secondary lens of the same focal length as the taking lens, and both lenses were mounted on a single sliding plate. This allowed the operator to swap the entire lens pair, taking lens and viewfinder lens together, in a single motion, far faster than the two separate adjustments required on most other cameras, where the taking lens had to be changed and the viewfinder then independently matched.^[4] The camera was supplied with a case containing several paired lens sets, including Zeiss lenses for normal and semi-long focal lengths and a 432mm Dallmeyer telephoto.^[4] It was the first motion picture camera to offer an articulating eyepiece, a feature that became standard on later cameras but was unavailable on any other camera of its era.^[3]

Film loading

In its original form, the Akeley opened like a large pocket watch, splitting into two halves to accept a 60-metre spool of 35mm film loaded directly into the body, with both the unexposed and exposed film reels housed side by side within the casing.^[4] A cam and claw mechanism provided the intermittent film movement required for exposure.^[4] A built-in punch could mark the film with a small perforation, detectable by touch in the darkroom, allowing the operator to flag satisfactory or unsatisfactory takes before development, saving both time and money.^[4]

The commercial models of the 1920s introduced a cassette loading system that dramatically simplified operation. Film was pre-loaded into self-contained cassettes, each fitted with its own sprocketed feed mechanism. Loading required only pulling a short length of film from the cassette, threading it through the gate, and clicking the cassette into place, an operation that could be performed in daylight and took only seconds.^[4] This system also reduced the camera's width by half, to approximately 20 centimetres, since the film no longer needed to be housed in the main body.^[4] Operators could carry several pre-loaded cassettes, allowing rapid reloading in the field, an obvious advantage for the demanding conditions of documentary and newsreel work.^[4]

The camera's film mechanism was notably silent; as the Photographic Journal of America noted, because the turning of the handle could not be heard, operators could photograph wildlife without alarming their subjects.^[1] On the opposite side from the main crank, a small foldable crank allowed single-frame exposure with each turn, enabling the operator to take still photographs alongside motion picture footage.^[4]

Gyroscopic head and tripod

The Akeley's gyroscopic tripod head was considered as significant an innovation as the camera itself. The head used gears spinning a gyro flywheel, so that the operator could produce smooth pans and tilts simply by applying pressure to a single handle on the back of the camera, rather than cranking separate levers.^[3] The operator could also shift between pan and tilt gears with the push of a button.^[3] An incorporated ball-and-socket design permitted immediate levelling of the camera, allowing the operator to set up and begin shooting quickly.^[3][4] A quick-release mechanism allowed the camera to be mounted on a vehicle or aeroplane within seconds, and moved between a tripod and an aircraft wing with equal speed.^[3]

Wildlife and documentary filmmaking

Akeley himself used prototypes on his African expeditions for the American Museum of Natural History. In 1921, in present-day Zaire, he became the first cinematographer to film gorillas in the wild, using his camera to shoot the film Meandering in Africa.^[2] The pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty used two Akeley cameras to shoot his 1922 film Nanook of the North in the Canadian Arctic, taking advantage of the rapid cassette-loading system to work in harsh field conditions.^[2][4] Naturalists Osa and Martin Johnson, who met Akeley at the Explorers Club in New York in 1921, went on to use the camera to produce some of the earliest nature films, with funding from George Eastman.^[2]

Newsreels and combat

The Akeley became the preferred camera for newsreel work during the 1920s and 1930s.^[5] Its rugged construction made it well suited to dangerous assignments. Fox News cameraman Russell Muth, filming over Mount Vesuvius in early 1922, reported that when his aeroplane lost power and crashed into a tree, he threw the Akeley from the plane before impact. The camera survived undamaged, and his colleague used it to photograph the wreck.^[3]

Hollywood

The Akeley was frequently used in Hollywood for specialty action work. Its gyroscopic head made it particularly suited to aerial cinematography, and it was used extensively on Wings (1927), the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Over 200 cameras and nearly as many cameramen were employed on the production; aerial cinematographer Faxon Dean, ASC, was widely regarded as one of the foremost Akeley specialists of his day and served as principal cinematographer on the film's aerial sequences.^[3] Other notable Hollywood productions that employed the Akeley include The Ten Commandments (1923), Ben-Hur (1925), Hell's Angels (1930), and Only Angels Have Wings (1939).^[3]

The camera made a specialty class of operators possible. From the mid-1920s, American Cinematographer magazine carried classified advertisements placed by "Akeley Specialists", owner-operators who specialised in action shoots.^[3] By the 1930s, these operators were in sufficient demand that they were listed as a separate category on the American Society of Cinematographers roster.^[2] The distinctive look the camera produced, a sharply focused, rapidly moving subject against a blurred background, became known as the "Akeley shot" and was written into film scripts by name.^[2]

The Akeley's reputation as a symbol of advanced filmmaking technology was such that Fritz Lang, for his 1929 science fiction film Woman in the Moon, included a scene in which the character played by Gerda Maurus uses an Akeley camera to film landscapes on the lunar surface.^[4]