Ever slam your hand in a door? This is what we played with in the last of the five videos. There’s a way to do this safely and make it look real, using the ersatz sleight-of-hand of the speed-up of silent film We took this at 12 fps, or we…

One of the facets of silent film, and silent film comedy, is that since the film overall is being projected faster than taking speed, you can take individual shots at different speeds. When run together, the viewer won’t see the difference — as long as the appropriate adjustments in performance…

There are a few sequences in Chaplin’s “The Pawnshop” (1916) where Charlie and co-worker John Rand engage in slapstick hitting fights. It’s almost a running theme throughout the film, and they’re executed with precision by two clowns who really know how to hit each other…and be hit by one another.…

One of the gags I’ve seen in silent comedies many times that’s really something you’d typically see in an animated cartoon. The trick is in creating the illusion of someone weighing a fraction of what they actually do. Usually one character is upset with another, grabs him or her, and…

One of my fascinations with silent film is with how it is that it is shown faster than the speed at which it was shot, but doesn’t look it. Once I figured out that the secret is in adjusting the tempo of the performers’ physicality, the next step was to…