American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 35

■a

r
Short's

created

crew

a

foam rubber

appliance fitted with a tube
through which smoke could be
blown. "This presented a problem
in the

office, when temperatures

soared to

jaws apart. We intended it to be
shocking, but not shocking in the
sense of
'gross.' The decision to use
replacement animination was made
for aesthetic, rather than economic

nearly 100, making it ex¬
tremely difficult for the make-up

or

technicians to maintain the

had," Munro continues, "was to

seam

lines," Short says.
"With the football

players
we found ourselves
toeing the line
between gross and offensively
gross," Munro remarks. "That was
part of the notion behind making
them bright blue, to sort of take the
edge off. They were cast late in the
production and their generic ap¬
pliances were made up well in
advance. The body pieces were

technological,
"The

reasons.

only option

we

sculpt a series of individual heads
and shoot them. Tim Lawrence was
hired to do this. Aside from the

obvious
was

hair

sculpting problems, there
difficulty of keeping the
and clothing from chattering.
the

If each statue had its

own

individu¬

al

wig and clothing, then in every
frame, the hair and clothing would
just crawl all over the screen. We
worked out a system so that the

attached to the uniforms and actu¬

heads could be moved in and out,

ally became

part of the costumes
rather than being glued to the ac¬

but the

tors' skin."

"They were sculpted in
roughly half scale, so we had to
work out a lighting scheme that
tried to be faithful to the set light¬
ing but didn't scream out that they
were scaled
puppets. That neces¬
sitated adding a bit more diffusion
and bringing the light level down a

seemed

a

Ironically the task which
simplest at first turned out

to be hardest. The uniforms sup¬

posedly trashed during the crash
that killed them, in fact were vir¬

tually indestructible. Short's crew
spent hours hacking away at jerseys
and pads with knives, files, ma¬
chetes and

even a

the best methods of

bit from what

was on

set."

Munro describes the pro¬

distressing the
dragging

cess of
shooting the fly in the grave¬
yard sequences: All the main
graveyard sequences were shot on

accomplish the

shallow sets with black back¬

in which Adam and Barbara

grounds. We had planned a much
complicated set with slots for
puppeteering, but we realized that
since the set itself was simply shot
against black, the most straightfor¬
ward way to shoot the fly was to
recreate the set and photograph it
against black.

them behind

a

car!

How to

distort their faces into monsters
the

object of considerable dis¬
explains: "The originial intent was to do the scene
with clay animation, but one of the
shortcomings of this method is that
you start at one end and kind of let it
go. In this case we had to go from
an obvious
point A, the live actors,
to a very precise point B of the
was

wigs and clothing stayed

place.

chainsaw. One of

helmets turned out to be

scene

in

cussion. Munro

finished transformation, a mask
that had already been constructed
and shot in live action. So

we

had to

get from one point to another in a

specific number of frames. We
possibility of doing
them as make-up effects, but we
couldn't see a way to use that meth¬
od for a single master, as Tim
wanted. There is also something
inherently grotesque about people
sticking their hands in the back of
their throats and pushing the backs
looked at the

of their heads out, or

pulling their

more

"The trick became to

con¬

centrate the

light on the fly, not on
background. The puppeteers
are
literally in frame on film, but
you can't see them because of their
black ninja outfits. We ended up
shooting everything at four frames
per second and tried to coordinate
and time the head and leg action so
that it didn't get too frantic. The
result is that the fly looks very
the

frenetic."
snake is described

use

of

was

a

you put wheels where you want
them. Lowest gear ratio: 94 turns
for 360° pan.

New Mini weighs
only 38 lbs. Works with 35BL.
big zoom, 1000 foot magazine.

talking

by Ted Rae, who

animated the snake: "The

stop mo¬

built one-third

scale, in three sections; there

December 1988

Moy has made gear-heads for 60
years, still uses gears onlyno cables. Extension boxes let

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J

33
American Cinematographer - December 1988

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 1988
