American Cinematographer - January 1987 - 76

Ideal for

Busy Sound Editors

Acmade

the creature to move up and down
and forward and back. The advan¬

working that way is that
underneath the entire
creature even though its weight is
supported by the platform. The
idea is that you can see right be¬
hind it, you can see underneath it,
so it looks like it's supporting its
own weight when, in fact, it's all
tage to

Pic-Sync

you can see

mechanical. It's a combination of
almost every trick in the book!"
One of the most success¬
ful of Shostrom's "tricks" was to
picture &

16mm one

four sound tracks

*
*

Fast in-line track

laying
Searching and syncing on
machine
10 plate facility

one
*

35mm,

one

four sound

picture &
(all triple

track)

give all of this strange creature's

creature, we

appendages movement - some¬
thing one doesn't expect to see
in a low budget film, and which
really made the monster come
alive. Also, Kindlon designed the

The miniature contained a fully ar¬
ticulated cable-controlled mecha¬
nism that is capable of simulating

mechanics for three different
heads of Pretorius that attached to
the monster's neck, so the crea¬

And that," he smiles, "is all I had
to do with From Beyond!"
Mark Shostrom, echoing
the sentiments of all the artists in¬

appeared to be metamorphos¬
further from cut to cut.
Because this particular
phase of the Pretorius transforma¬
tion was composed of more di¬
alogue exchanges than any other,
Shostrom devised a way that
Sorel's head could be spliced onto
the body of the monster for closeups in which he had to speak.
Sorel was made up using ap¬
pliances that conformed closely to
ture

ing

*

Syncing up dailies

*
*

Portable - use on location
35mm or 16mm

*

Low cost

Over 3000

supplied worldwide

even

the various mechanical heads, his
neck and shoulders were draped
with black fabric, and the shot was
framed very tightly.
For Pretorius' final trans¬

figuration Buechler and his crew
removed the last vestigial traces of
humanity from the perverted form
so, using yet another fully articu¬
lated miniature,

bridge

some

It

Acmade West
now

Tel:

in

Hollywood

(818) 963 6928

he

able to
between

was

gap

was

shrimp-headed brain-thing.
very strange looking, and it

combination of a miniature
and a full-scale creature. The full
sized monster had an eighteenfoot wingspan, bat wings and
was a

Acmade New York

shrimp-type scales covering its

212 West 48th St.,
New York 10036

back. We used the miniature of
Mark's creature. The back of it

Tel: (212) 757

8855

Acmade Canada Inc.,

starts to

of

our

409, King St. W., 3rd Floor,
Tel:

(416) 598 0722

bulge

out

creature

Toronto, Ont. M5V 1K1 Canada
74

the

Shostrom's monster and his own.
"I did a sort of transition from this
wonderful tendril creature to

35mm Twin Pic - 2 pictures
and 2 sound tracks

cut to Crawford as he says,
'Oh my goodness!' and then
there's this wonderful blue screen
shot of the miniature flying down
towards Crawford from the top of
the staircase, using its huge wing
claws to bat him down. The full
sized version then grabs him,
'chows down' on his head, and
then twists it off. Any time you see
the two of them together, it's the
full scale model, but for any of the
intercut scenes between
Crawford's point of view and the

We

January 1987

and the wings

start

to

emerge.

used the miniature.

flight, all the pincers worked, the
brain pulsated and the jaw moved.

volved,

were all en¬
though we were
working with a pretty limited bud¬
get, we had a chance to really do
something that we wanted to do,
so we
put in a lot more than
ioo%." John Buechler adds: "I
think you can attribute that basi¬
cally to the camaraderie Stuart
brings to a production. Nobody's
the star, everybody works for the
good of the project and I think

says,

"we

thused. Even

that in itself is what makes his
tures

pic¬

outstanding. He makes the

technician and the artist feel

at

he works with the talents
each person has and he coordi¬
nates everybody. That experience
ease,

and that attitude helped us to
work together. We had to on a

picture like this: it had a short
shooting schedule and some of the
most

ambitious effects

motion

picture."

ever

in

a

A
American Cinematographer - January 1987

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 1987
