American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 31

sis

in-camera effects and matter-

on

of-fact

presentation. "I'm a really
big fan of early British films that
have some beautiful looking stuff
that

done in camera," Munro

was

noted. "Times

being what they are,

however, there's not a lot of call to
try those things. This was our
chance to try some and prove that it
was also feasible,
financially, to do
this kind of work. There were about
a

half-dozen shots that

we

wanted

to do this way,

but there were a lot
people in the pro¬
My first task was to go off

of unconvinced
duction.
with the

cameraman (Tom Acker¬
man) to do sort of a $1.98 version of

some

mirror shots and prove

that

could

get away with stuff that
looked extremely klunky on set,

we

but

were

very

acceptable

on

camera.

"In

Beauty and Beast, the

French film, there is a scene where
a bracelet transforms into a
rag. It is

presented in

a very

matter-of-fact
Page opposite:
Beetlejuice

the person drops the
bracelet, and the camera whip pans
manner;

down to focus

on

(Michael Keaton)

the transformed

sits between the

object. Of course it was achieved by
simply dropping the bracelet off
screen and
having some one else
drop the other object. The whippan covers it. Using this notion, we

Headhunter and the
Shrunken Head
Man in the
room.

large sand

Davis and Alec

nister into the snake, which was

Baldwin. Left: The

just a sculpted piece, rather than
doing an effect of the transition.
The sculpted piece makes the tran¬

small sand

worm

puppet receives

finishing touches
from Doug Turner.

sition from the normal bannister to

body with just

worm

puppet with Geena

arrived at the transition of the ban¬

the snake

waiting

Above: The

a camera

pan, along its length, motivated by
a hand. It worked, the
magic of the
shot
in

being its matter-of-factness."
Mirror shots were de rigeur
the '20s, for ghost images.

Munro had done

some

shows at

Expo '86 which involved mirror
gags. He was intrigued by the pos¬
sibilities inherent in

scenes

in

which characters

disappear. "What
it takes is two things: the person
who is going to vanish (placed off
set), and the real set with the real

people; that is, all of those things
that aren't going to vanish," Munro
explains. "To make the vanishing
person appear solid at the begin¬
ning, it's necessary to selectively cut
out the light on the real background
so

that you

don't

see

through the

body, and also to position in such a
way that one person is not crossing
over another
person. The first step
is not to bring down the light on the
character, but to bring up the light
on the background. That
gives the
feeling that you could suddenly see
through them, which heightens the
illusion.
"The

beauty of the mirror
set up, the camera
is completely free to pan, tilt, dolly,
shot is that,

or

once

whatever, because the image is

actually there. In the

course

of

these shots, there are some very

December 1988

natural

camera

moves.

tried to do these
screen

to go

method,

If

we

had

by the usual blue

we

would have had

with motion control

on

the

set, then motion control match
moves later on with the blue screen

It would have been prohib¬
itively expensive. Just by control¬
ling the light and taking care in
planning how we were to stage the
shots, we were able to get a result
that ordinarily would have been
very costly and complicated. The
other beauty to it is that it's all first
person.

generation film.
American

Cinematographer

29
American Cinematographer - December 1988

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