Special effect gets even more dated

FOLLOWING up on F. William Parker’s letter [Sept. 16] stating that the extensive use of moving the camera over still images dates to at least the late 1960s and was influential in his own work. We used to call the technique “Stoumenvision” when I was a student at UCLA after photographer-filmmaker Louis Clyde Stoumen, who used the technique in his 1957 Oscar-winning documentary “The True Story of the Civil War.”

Robert S. Birchard

La Crescenta

Birchard wrote “Silent-Era Filmmaking in Santa Barbara” (Arcadia Publishing) and “Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood” (University Press of Kentucky).

I was glad you published F. William Parker’s letter, which pointed out that the “Ken Burns Effect” started long before Burns. Parker dates it only to the mid-’60s, but it was first done, brilliantly, in the 1957 National Film Board of Canada film, “City of Gold.” Filmmakers Wolf Koenig and Colin Low discovered a collection of about 200 glass plate negatives from 1898. Koenig had been thinking about the use of stills and wanted to go beyond what Louis Clyde Stoumen had done with them in “The True Story of the Civil War,” the forerunner of Ken Burns’ epic, “The Civil War.” Low had animation experience moving the camera over graphics, which he applied to the stills.

Tom Stempel

Los Angeles

Stempel teaches the history of documentary film at Los Angeles City College.

RE: Ken Burns’ “inventing” “the Burns Effect,” I learned to pan and tilt and zoom a film or TV camera within the frame of a still photograph to produce the illusion of movement in the picture while a TV major at UCLA in 1963. At the time, Mr. Burns was in elementary school.

Bob Shayne

Los Angeles