In a 58-second comic short subject, police hold a woman for a mug shot. As the camera dollies in, she makes faces at it to render her unrecognizable.
Although the trivia of the Internet Movie DataBase claims that "PHOTOGRAPHING A FEMALE CROOK, possibly, contains an early rendition of sequences of tracking-in shots that leads to a close-up of one the characters", this weasel-worded assertion is clearly wrong. Melies' studio at Montreuil had been equipped with tracking set-ups from its completion in 1899, and he used this for many of his elaborate effects. Nonetheless, it was a novelty for American films, and director Wallace McCutcheon and cameraman A.E. Weed used the technique to offer a joke..... that in the context of a criminal who did not wish to be identified from police photographs, made absolute sense.
Although the trivia of the Internet Movie DataBase claims that "PHOTOGRAPHING A FEMALE CROOK, possibly, contains an early rendition of sequences of tracking-in shots that leads to a close-up of one the characters", this weasel-worded assertion is clearly wrong. Melies' studio at Montreuil had been equipped with tracking set-ups from its completion in 1899, and he used this for many of his elaborate effects. Nonetheless, it was a novelty for American films, and director Wallace McCutcheon and cameraman A.E. Weed used the technique to offer a joke..... that in the context of a criminal who did not wish to be identified from police photographs, made absolute sense.
