American Cinematographer - July 1984 - 67

something in. I've never seen really
convincing lava in a film, and I
know why, now: it's almost im¬
possible to do it. If you can make
one

element of it work there's al¬

another element that doesn't
quite work. We came up with a

ways

'what is this stuff down here?-but
it looks hot and dangerous' mate¬
rial and we had an enormous oil
pump

pumping hundreds of gal¬

lons of this stuff

glycerine

a

minute. It

was

with water to a cer¬
tain consistency that still looked
thick, but was thin enough that
the pump could actually pump it.
There are pumps that will pump
oil but not very fast, but we had to
have speed to create the vortex.
We got a piece of half-inch plex¬
iglass about 12 by io feet, which
cut

flat and curved down like a
funnel in the center; this was our

was

receiving trough. We had about
four inches of glycerine constantly
being funneled down into the
pump system and it would then go
back up to four jets that were all

pumping in the

same

direction, so
lot of work

got a spiral after a
and trial-and-error.
"The set had
we

down at our spiraling glycerine.
Phil Tippett and Tom St. Amand

weight of the glycerine-enor¬
mously heavy stuff-and then we
had to get enough light under¬

sculpted the figures and Ease
Owyeung made the cages. We rig¬
ged those up next to the camera
and we did the shots virtually as
they'd be done full size. We did a

neath it

lot of

to

to

take the

make it look like it's

actually glowing. Paul Huston
made the set quickly using the alu¬
minum foil technique and some
spray foam. It was about 15 feet
tall by nine feet wide. On top of
the glycerine we put a lot of black
chunks so that through the black
you could see the glowing stuff un¬
derneath. I lit the center of it hot,
like a bull's eye, and the chunks
moved into it faster and faster. We
had a lot of steam from the sides
that was going up into the lens.
Dickie Dova, one of the stage

with the idea of tak¬
ing a hi-hat camera rig and lower¬
ing it from the ceiling, about 30
feet, with a pulley system. We
were shooting all this inside a tube
with the camera looking straight
men, came up

July 1984

takes,

some

with the

No, it isn't
from

a

a scene

horror film.

Joe Johnston, Phil

Tippett, and Ira
are checking

Keeler

radio control
movements on a

inch puppet.

camera

tracking down behind the figure,
locked off shots where the figure
enters the frame and goes down
through it; we did tilting to follow
the figure going down-enough
footage so we could approach the
editing from a live action
standpoint.
"There's a really nice
matte shot of the temple at sunset
that Mike Pangrazio did on origi¬
nal negative. He did that in VistaVision so we could overlay the
bats into it afterweards.Then
there's a key of the kid on a bal¬

looking at the bats,
that's also a painting."
The chase through
cony

and

the
proved to be a gigantic un¬
dertaking, Muren recalled.
mine

American

Cinematographer

65

30-
American Cinematographer - July 1984

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