American Cinematographer - February 1984 - 79

O'CONNOR
FLUID HEAD

Highest Quality
Service and Repairs

by Factory Trained
Technicians.

FAST
wooden stakes, some of which were
over six feet long. Cinematographer Pe¬

Anderson utilized a remote control
device, which could be used up to 75
feet away from the computers, to fill in
the camera movement, which was pro¬

ter

cessed into the computers

Mosier,

camera

a

last-minute

adjustment to

one

of

the miniature
submarines.

by Richard

repeated as often as necessary to
facilitate a smooth movement between
each of the points.
The sets were built in forced
scale, with the desert starting out at
one inch to a foot, reducing to Vi inch
scale in the middle of the move, and
inch to the foot toward the end.

Although this kept the set from becom¬
ing too large to deal with, it also com¬
plicated camera movement pro¬
gramming.
count

Model Maker Bob
Mollison makes

technician. The process

was

one

turn-around time.
Call or write:
June Sosnow

Another factor taken into ac¬
was how close the lens could

approach the set. In the middle of the
set are rows of "lorange" trees,
designed by Alex Taylor at WED to
appear about 12 feet high on screen.
desert

lowered

far

it could

The lens

was

be with

safety and the height of the

as

as

determined so that the lens
could appear to pass below treetop
level. From this scale, the rest of the
set was built. The f.11 stop allowed a
trees was

depth of field of two-and-a-half inches
on the miniature trees in the foreground
to larger scale hills some 80 feet away.
To complete the illusion of a hovercraft
flying through the desert, winding

through rocky canyons, past lorange
tree groves and thousands of cacti and
a power station before setting down on
a landing pad, the camera shutter was
kept open during exposure to create
natural motion blurs. For the landing,
live-action dust

was

burned into the

during the video stage. The cam¬
lens ranged from three to nine feet
above the stage floor.
A microswitch at the bottom

scene
era

of the lens was rigged to cause a light
bulb in the back of the lens to light up if
the lens moved too close to the set.
When it came time to actu¬

ally construct and shoot the desert and
ocean sets, all the Disney sound stages
were occupied with the production of
Something Wicked This Way Comes.
A large hangar - 200 feet square and
55 feet high in the center of its curved
ceiling - was rented at the Burbank air¬
port. This proved a hard trial for the
otherwise beautifully designed system,
as strong radio interference from closely
passing planes occasionally caused the
two-ton gantry, which has a stopping

"We can engineer the effects to
solve any problems you've got."

inertia of six inches, to move spon¬

taneously

across

the set before

(415) 495-4428
860 Second St.

San Francisco, Ca. 94107

February 1984

77
American Cinematographer - February 1984

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