American Cinematographer - December 1986 - 80

rapped it, little air bubbles that
trapped inside it would come
to the surface. We deliberately left

The villainous

anaconda.

were

hole in the skin to create that
effect." Though simply conceived,
the effect is startlingly realistic in
the finished film.

a

Pennington's full size dol¬
phins had no articulation built in
to speak of, since they were de¬
signed primarily to double for the
live dolphins in the scenes where
they attack a crocodile or for the

modify
while

some

we were

of the mechanics
there and there

was

literally nothing available. 1 really
like the "low-tech" approach. It's
much better, it's much cheaper to
manufacture, it's much more reli¬
able and easier

to

fix if it breaks."

the
approach of the mechanics, Pen¬
nington and Steve Dunham com¬
pleted the components for the
Having decided

on

various creatures. "Steve did the
mechanics for the crocodile and I
pretty much did the mechanics for
the snake," Pennington says. "The

dolphins were real basic, they just
required a hinged mouth for the
two close-up heads we made, and
Steve and I worked on those. We
didn't have time to sculpt two dif¬
ferent heads, so we just turned the
mold vertically and filled it up as
far as we needed it ahead of the

flippers. I made a mold of the inner
core to fit the head we pulled from
the outer mold, and then we cut
them up and put the jaw move¬
ment

in."
For

a scene

requiring the

presence

baby dolphin that

had

to

to

of a
be able

appear to

swim

alongside its mother, Pennington
had a smaller dolphin sculpture
made and then cast it in solid
Skinflex. "We hogged out the in¬
side of it and filled it full of Ping

Pong balls to get the desired buoy¬
ancy," Pennington relates. "Then,
by putting monofilament line on
the

flippers and the tail, and by
using a puppet stick under the
water, we made it move in a realis¬
tic fashion. As I

ter, we

pulled it underwa¬

had designed it

when I turned it

78

American

so

that

upside down and

Cinematographer

climactic confrontation between
the dolphins and the film's villain,
Orlando Santos, portrayed by Castulo Guerra. "They didn't want to
train the real dolphins to do that
for two reasons," Pennington re¬
calls. "One, they didn't want to

give them a trait where they would
actually swim at a person and two,
they didn't have time because they
had problems catching the dol¬
phins. As it turned out, we filled a
lot of gaps with our dolphins that
the real dolphins couldn't just be¬
cause of time. There again, our
full-sized dolphin was really lowtech. We just tied ropes to the dol¬
phin, and with Jim on one side and
me on the other, I'd push it while
he'd pull it through camera at the
same time to give it a real sense of
speed.
One of Pennington's
most surprising "low-tech" effects
is his virtually non-mechanical
giant snake that appears to attack
and constrict about the body of
Father Mahoney (Peter Horton) in
one of the film's most disturbing

Though

could
actually
wrapped by the snake, Pennington
insists, "It didn't wrap up. We
sculpted it wrapped. For the coils
that were wrapped around Peter,
sequences.
swear

Horton

one

was

that it wouldn't float. The

so

open-cell foam made the snake
neutrally buoyant in the water so
that when we wrapped it around
Peter, it would

move

real slow be¬

of the weight mass, which
made it look real, rather than ap¬

cause

too light or too heavy,
which would have resulted in too
fast a movement. Open-cell foam

pearing

is

polyfoam, similar to a kitchen
that will absorb water
which can then be squeezed out
easily. As it fills up with water, it
actually gains the weight of that
water, so we wound up having a
realistic weight for that size snake
portion. We wrapped it around
a

sponge

Peter and fastened it to him so
that when he was fighting with it
in the water, the coils would move

slowly and the action would
semble that of

a

snake that

re¬
was

constricting. We didn't know for
whether it would work or not
when we left, but it worked out
sure

really well. We also made

a

small

puppet head for tight shots and we
had a six foot high puppet head
which was mechanically con¬
trolled and designed to give the il¬
lusion of a striking snake."

When it

came

Pennington and his
to

time for

crew to move

the film's South American loca¬

tion, they

were

pleasantly

sur¬

to find that shooting in the
Amazon did not live up to their

prised

expectations. "Of course, when
you go down to the Amazon, you
read all these stories about the
snakes and the crocodiles and the
caimans and the little critters in
the river that bite and eat, so we

expecting the

were

worst

when, in

actual fact, the whole time I was
there in the water, one snake

really needed

underwater and that
only thing I ran
across. Although,"
Pennington
laughs, "there was one time we
were all in the water
shooting the

ent

scene

made an oval section of the
snake's body and we just cut it up
and wrapped it around him. We
we

three differ¬
sculpted for
what they wanted, but because
they didn't have time, we created
two mechanical puppet heads, a
tail, and then Mike sculpted an
two or
sections of snake

oval snake section about four feet

long by three feet wide and

ten to

twelve inches in diameter. We

the oval section in

an

foam that would absorb the

December 1986

cast

open-cell
water

swam
was

by

me

about the

where Peter is in the boat

being attacked by

our

giant snake

and we stirred up stuff that hadn't
been disturbed for probably hun¬
dreds of years, and we all came out

with a red line around us where
we'd been eaten alive by godknows-what. It itched like crazy

and didn't go away
three days!

for

two or
American Cinematographer - December 1986

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 1986
