Ben Model’s blog

We know who on the train with us is a conductor by their uniform. When I see a film crew in my neighborhood, I know which of the people standing around drinking coffee is going to stop me from walking… Read More »Trick or Treat!

Another way Silent Film engages us is by telling us very little about our story’s players and events. It’s similar to the way these same kinds of story elements are presented in young children’s books. In Silent Film it doesn’t… Read More »The Boy, The Girl

A ventriloquist isn’t actually throwing their voice, although that’s often how the skill is referred to. The ventriloquist’s voice appears to be coming from the dummy because the artist is creating an illusion. She or he is paying attention to… Read More »Say, Did You Hear That?

What did this aberration of the presence of sound mean to people making Silent Film? While it’s not known who or when this was figured out or came into regular use, it was clearly a known entity of the world… Read More »Selective Sound Frees Up Some Logic

One of my favorite natural laws of the universe of Silent Film involves, of all things, sound. That is, sound that happens in a scene, and whether or not it exists. The acceptance of the sound that should be heard… Read More »If A Tree Falls in the Woods in a Silent Film

The unique combination of the delivering of reality and the elisions of it that we process in that quasi dream-state of experiencing Silent Film is what allows for an altered version of reality. There are several facets of what gets… Read More »The Universe of Silent Film

I’d initially planned for this last series of posts about sub-titles (intertitles) to be about the use of art and drawings as well as the use of textured backgrounds. It has occurred to me that these usages may be more… Read More »Why I’m Using Title Case

Okay, some final words about the appearance of text in silent movie intertitles before I move on to what sometimes appears behind or around it. I’m not sure why or how the rule about quotation marks came to be for… Read More »Leaving the Quotes Outside

The typefaces and hand-lettering styles in films from the silent era do not have a wide variety, and for the most part they were already familiar to audiences. There are maybe five or six that one sees in a majority… Read More »We Had Typefaces Then

Sub-titles in Silent Film are easy to read. They have to be. They interrupt the action, throw us a bone (or two), and hop back off the screen. Along with the economy of the text and the screen-time duration, the… Read More »With Titling, Size Does Matter