An even more important development was the use of the Point of View shot. Previously, these had only been used to convey the idea of what someone in the film was seeing through a telescope (or other aperture), and this was indicated by having a black circular mask or vignette within the film frame. The true Point of View (POV) shot, in which a shot of someone looking at something is followed by a cut to a shot taken from their position without any mask, took longer to appear. In 1910, in Vitagraph's Back to Naturewe see a Long Shot of people looking down over the rail of a ship taken from below, followed by a shot of the lifeboat they are looking at taken from their position.
However, the Vitagraph film-makers continued to be a little uneasy with the device, as a true POV shot is introduced by an explanatory intertitle, “What they saw in the house across the court” in Larry Trimble's Jean and the Waif, made at the end of 1910. But a few months later, Trimble made Jean Rescues, another of the popular series starring the fictional exploits of his Border Collie, which has Point of View [POV] shots introduced at an appropriate point without explanation. After this, un-vignetted POV shots began to appear fairly frequently in Vitagraph films, and also occasionally in films from other American companies. However, D.W. Griffith only used them in a theatrical situation, to show what the audience in a theatre were looking at, as did European film-makers.
