American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 36

no one

whole

the snake

piece of snake. When

comes

Charles, that's

in and talks to

two-thirds scale

a

puppet, shot at 12 frames per sec¬
ond, to a dialogue track run at half

speed and blue-screened into the
shot. All of the cinematography has
such strong directional lighting that
we had to
put in shadows. For one
shot,
and

we

took the matte of the snake

repositioned it, diffused it and

used that

as

the shadow

wall. We had to do
shot because it is
shadow within

on

the

split density
going through a
a

"To get

the eye movement
puppet," Munro continues,
"we shot it with blank eyes and
rotoscoped the eyes in to get the
rapid snake-like eye movement and
also have the pupils dilate. If there
was ever an
object totally unsuited
to all the drawbacks of stop motion,
on

The world's

brightest
controllable

V

light source

V

'

*

$

%

iv

r

the

the snake is it. A snake wants to
move

in

sion.

Given those

beautiful, smooth preci¬

requirements,
extraordinary job. There
are a lot of subtleties, like
having
the head remain stationary as the
body coils up behind it.
Rae did

an

"We shot all of the back¬

ground plates on 35mm," Munro
says. "One of the myths in the in¬
dustry is the use of big format
plates, but unless you have a printer
that is able to reduce and composite
at the same time, what you gain in
image size, you lose in extra gener¬
ations. I haven't found the differ¬
ence

worth the trouble of

another

camera

One of the

and

having

camera

crew.

things worked
standpoint of
shooting plates was that we did reg¬

out so

reasons

well from the

istration tests

on

the Panaflex Gold

and found it to be

extremely steady.
basically, all the plates were shot
during principal photography with
the same camera we were using for
everything else. There weren't any
problems with compatibility of
So,

lenses and it made it very easy

to

just tell everybody to stand still. It
afforded

musco
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us

ability to shoot

plates

as protection in case we de¬
cided to spruce it up a bit."
The opening of the movie

required

a

town

a

to

there is

a

Ft. Lauderdale-FilmTrade: 305/989-5999

34

the

December 1988

transition from

a real
model within which

very

large spider and

hands.

According to

Munro, "The decision

was

to

try to

blend live action

footage of the real
town and be able to seque into the
miniature without being too obvi¬
The method

ous.

to build

was

section of the miniature in
that

a

a

scale

considerably oversized in
comparison to the final spider and
final house. Knowing that the scale
portion would be able to stand up
to greater scrutiny, we also built a
quick forced perspective transition
that could be hidden by the tilt of
the

shadow.

a

human

was

camera.

A big problem was that
spiders don't perform on com¬
mand. "Having had previous expe¬
rience toying with spiders, I knew

real

that

we were

in for

an

endless

ber of takes before we'd

num¬

get an ac¬

ceptable result," Munro winced.
"We tried everything to get the spi¬
der to move on cue: heat, puffs of
air, people blowing on them off
camera,

little wires and sticks to

prod them, but, alas, spiders don't
want to do anything unless they are
damn good and ready."
Munro feels that the opti¬
cal effect that offered the biggest
challenge and yielded the most
memorable shot

was

the Beetle-

guese head spin. "This was
achieved by first shooting Adam
and Barbara

looking in horror at an
empty set. We recorded this on vid¬
eo and, several weeks later when
we

stood Keaton in front of the blue

used the video to line up
get the scale right.
shot a clip of the actor

screen, we

the shot and
First

we

starting and finishing the action of
the head spin, so he would whip
his head to the side, straighten up,
pause for seveal beats, then grab his
head and pretend to stop it.
"After we got those
pieces of film which we also re¬
corded on video, we put Keaton on
a turntable on the
stage. We cen¬
tered him up and basically ran him
like

rotisserie,

spinning his whole
body around. We shot at four
a

frames per second, and got about a
dozen good revolutions before he

got too dizzy. We took the spinning
head and rotoed out the rest of his

body and shoulders and had an
element that was just Keaton's head
spinning.
American Cinematographer - December 1988

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