American Cinematographer - March 1987 - 68

Experts Test New Blue-Screen Film
by Bob Fisher
Now you see
visual effects

it

don't. Most
sleight of hand. You
give the audience a quick glimpse: A
starfighter streaking across intergalactic
space in Star Wars, or the hundred-foot
marshmallow man stomping down
Broadway in Ghostbusters.
-

now you

are

If the audience doesn't

ac¬

or a nearly imperceptible shift
in color, sharpness or contrast between
different elements of a composite, and

ground,

plant a seed of doubt - something
ring true. All it takes is one
suppressed giggle where the director

you

cept these illusions, the movies don't
work. It's that simple. And that applies

doesn't

film, not just science fiction. At
conclusion of Poltergeist visual ef¬

needed

to any

the

fects artist

Richard

Edlund, ASC,

squeezed the breath out of audiences as
they watched a house violently implode.
In fact, what they were watching was
the precise destruction of a carefully
crafted miniature composited against a
background plate designed to establish
the authenticity of the setting.
The whole

than

68

for error. Theatrical audiences have sen¬
sitive "antennae" which are finely
tuned to the reactions of people sitting
around them. Show them a flat back¬

a

scene

minute. But there

American

Cinematographer

took less

was no

margin

nity if a scene composites a matte
painting with one or more live-action or
miniature sequences. Each 35mm frame
is magnified 700 times and is projected
onto a screen stretching 60 feet wide.
In the earliest days of
moviemaking, composites were created
in the camera by double exposure, com¬
bining different picture elements re¬

be devas¬

corded at different times in the same
frames. The traveling matte was intro¬
duced around 1918 via the Williams

tating, since word-of-mouth is the most
powerful weapon in the movie mar¬

Williams and Joseph Walker, ASC. The

a

gasp.

The aftershock

can

keters' arsenal. Remember, half of all
revenues for feature releases

domestic

typically

come from 100 theaters. An¬
other 25% comes from the second hun¬

dred busiest theaters.
"The golden

rule for most vi¬

sual effects is 'less is more,"' says
Edlund. A minute can become an eter¬

March 1987

Composite Process, invented by Frank

foreground element was photographed
against either black or white and a
silhouette was generated on a contact
printer. The silhouettes were used to
provide protection mattes so that the
original, normally exposed element
could be printed into the background
element without ghosting.



American Cinematographer - March 1987

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