American Cinematographer - December 1986 - 94

define the perspective to achieve depth?
Do we need shadows? Do we need flat

WMD6

light? Should the action

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a

leg up

The mechanics

%

or a roof line. You'd never cut in the
middle of a bush. How would you ever
be able to match it? But that, in fact,

proved to be the easiest thing."
"Don't try to match hard
edges," Luster explains. "You have to
make the

matte

tend it into

ex¬

source

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not

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to

fully layering the elements in the

scene,

he could

depth.

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"We tried
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in order to create per¬
he says.
He discovered that by care¬

canvas

spective,"

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you

The perspective problem, al¬
though magnified in the matte scenes,
was a consideration throughout the pro¬
gram. From the beginning Kuerten had
worked on developing ways to over¬

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line free form and

element in the

an

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in

placement were fairly easy to deal with.
For ground level shots, the Ikegami
HL79-D was locked down and weighted
with good results. A camera platform
was built on top of one of the produc¬
tion vans for higher angles. On location
the van was hoisted up on jack stands.
Once the shot was framed up, the cam¬
era was again
locked down and
weighted, and everyone, including the
camera operator, ordered well away.
Disguise was the key to the
line crawl problem. Kuerten, Davis and
Luster had initally assumed that the
border between the painting and the
foreground scene could be a hard hori¬
zontal line. Not so. "That was the funny
thing about it," Kuerten says. "We
thought we should cut along a shadow

footage. Then

the

competition

*Velcro

of

real

us

finish out that color
field and go on to the rest of the paint¬
ing. As long as you've matched the
colors, the textured pattern will hide the

on

*

aid

a middleground element that
shooting to, and a background
that was filling in the scene."

element
In addition, he found that if these ele¬
ments were lined up on diagonals, they
forced the perspective and drew the eye
to an artificial vanishing point, much
like the familiar image of the railroad
tracks disappearing on the horizon.
Kuerten further sought to give
the image texture and richness of color

by using

camera filters
sometimes stacking

for every scene,
several in se¬
quence. A Tiffen 812 was used to add a
pale rose hue, helping to eliminate
of the excessive blue to which
video is so sensitive. In addition, a fog
some

plus either
depending

to

the illusion of

make

sure

frame of video that

foreground element that

that almost

we

shot had a
shoot¬

we were

December 1986

or

less critical than it would have been had
Kuerten gone for a harsher look.

Having leaped the major hur¬
dles, Kuerten began working with Luster

storyboard the eleven scenes which
require mattes, still not certain
that the process would ultimately work.

to

would

"You'll notice that

none

of the

matte

the narrative line of the
program," says Kuerten. "They're es¬
tablishing shots. They set the scene
well, but you really don't have to have
them. The only thing you'd miss is that
cinematic payoff to the viewer."
From storyboarding, Luster
produced a series of color drawings of
the background scenes and the com¬
posite images. These were revised as
scenes

carry

locations

were
selected. Luster,
Kuerten, camera operator Robert
Bouchillon, and field engineer Cedron

Wynn worked closely on location to in¬
sure that camera positions conformed to
the perspectives in the drawings. Once
shot, the 1" field tapes came back to
the studio where a working copy was
made. The master itself was tucked in
the vault for safekeeping.
In the first step of the pro¬
cess,

Luster attached

a

large piece of

white paper to the matte stand and
drew the matte line. This was accom¬

plished by half-dissolving between the
source footage on the work tape and
the image of Luster and the matte stand
as seen by the camera. This composite
was

ships anywhere in the world

soft

low contrast filter,
light situation, soft¬
edges. Besides en¬
hancing the quality of the image, the
filtration served a further advantage in
the matte scenes. The slight loss of
resolution which it produced meant that
the level of detail in the paintings was
a

on the
ened video's hard

line

The Film Group

Get

our matte

we use

to

ing past,
we were

fed to Luster's monitor. He could
American Cinematographer - December 1986

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