American Cinematographer - January 1987 - 64

After the ring of fire en¬
the demon's body, Baker cre¬
ated a weird spiderweb-like
substance that emerges from the
wound in the demon's belly. The

equipment
starting point. I pick a point
on the horizon, like a mountain
peak, and I make an "X" on that
mountain peak in frame one.

sticky mass begins to encase the
creature, and as his movements get

away

ters

more

frantic, he becomes

more en¬

tangled in his cocoon until he is
completely engulfed by it and
disappears.
Scott Farrar

was

the

cam¬

responsible for plotting
of the demon through a
row of telephone poles, using a
bounce program designed by Craig
eraman

the

course

Hosada. Hosada's remarkable

fulfills

program

a

similar function

that of the Tondreau system,
the difference being that while
Tondreau allows a computer to re¬
cord a camera move as it's being
to

filmed, Pasoda lets
the

recreate
camera

a cameraman

of the

movement

after the plate has been

shot. So, in cases where the
Tondreau system may be impracti¬
cal for on-location use, Pasoda's
bounce program provides another
viable alternative for locking ef¬
fects into a moving background.
"We
The Golden Child is

elevated in front of
blue

screen

ILM

crew

with

member

Dave Heron in

foreground. Above:
The child floats in

completed
composite.

which slowly
his body. He

spread down onto
then took a trans¬
parency of the demon which lined
up exactly with Sardo and matchmoved the demon so he would fill
in those exposed pockets. As
Sardo starts to break away we see
the demon building up from un¬
derneath his skin. Gordon then
animated cracking lava pockets
that split open in Sardo's face like

potholes with embers burning Qnderneath, and optical will end up
putting a lava element behind it to
give a more textured look to the
effect."
The animation depart¬
also added several effects for
the demon's destruction. The first,
ment

a

ring of fire

Knoll,
and is

camera

effect by John

twice in the film,
ultimately sucked into the
appears

demon's fatal wound. The effect
consisted of
camera:

animation

raling

62

arc

American

two

passes on

the

soft, pale yellow diffused

spinning behind
of licking flames.

Cinematographer

a

spi¬

can

go

out

and

shoot with any plate camera on a
standard head, bring it back here,

on our

motion control

as our

When the

camera

tilts and pans

from that mountain peak in
frame two, I turn the joystick to
bring that mountain peak back in
line with my original "X" from
frame

and in all the subse¬
when the camera
else, I steer it back
so my "X" remains centered.
What this does, in essence, is allow
one,

quent frames,
goes someplace

to record this
bouncing and
rolling and panning and tilting.
The major limitation is that my
"X" has to be on an infinity point
or close to an
infinity point. I can't
use telephone poles or little bushes
up close, so it's only practical for
certain types of background
plates. If there's a monster coming
into a room that's shaking, for ex¬
ample, it would be a lot easier to
use the Tondreau system. Still, this
opens up a whole new door for us.
If a director says, 'We don't have
all this fancy equipment. If we go
us

and shoot this shot with

an

ordi¬

nary plate camera, can you make it
fit in later?' Now we can say ves."

Once Farrar had plotted
of the bouncing

and spot every move¬
ment the plate makes," Farrar ex¬
plains, "and by doing that, we can
record exactly what kind of a gyra¬
tion the camera went through. In
this case, we are looking out the
back window of Eddie Murphy's
car, which is racing down the
twisty turns of L.A.'s Mulholland
Drive, and the shot is bouncing be¬
cause the car is on a gravelly, rut¬
ted road, so we've got rolls and
leans, plus the camera is tilting and
panning to follow the section of
sky where the demon will even¬
tually fly when we get done shoot¬
ing it. In order to plot the
movement of the plate, we project
that plate up using our Vista-

actly the right moment, and that's
why recording the bounce pro¬
gram became so critical. When we

Cruiser motion control

added the bounce program over

project it

(It's

a

up

VistaVision

nameplate off

an

camera.

camera

with

a

old Oldsmobile

the side of it.) Projecting one
frame of film at a time through the
on

lens,

we

zeroed

out

the first frame

the

plate, there remained the task of
adding the demon to the shot,
which meant that the recorded
bounce of the plate had to be laid
over the movement of the
flying
demon to incorporate the de¬
mon's basic path into the bounc¬

ing plate. Complicating

matters
the fact that the demon had to
arrive on its mark on time to clip
the tops of the telephone poles in
the live-action plate. "That was
one of the most difficult shots that
we've done," Farrar affirms. "The
demon had to hit the poles at ex¬
was

the demon
chance that
a

bit of it

footage, there was a
might have to redo

we

so

it would skew prop¬
to keep trying to

erly. We have
trick the
we

January 1987

movement

were

machinery! Also, when
doing this flying demon
American Cinematographer - January 1987

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