American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 68

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matte would have to

explosion to be printed
into the relatively bright pattern of
the actual building.
"The
explosion that
McTiernan picked was the first one
we

did and, because it was meant

only as a test, the lineup wasn't
quite right," Edlund recalled. "He
said, 'I like that explosion; can't you
use that?' I said 'okay,' because
even though it was a little crooked,
it actually was the most dynamic
shot. But it had a big dark spot of
smoke in one part of it, which
from it. When

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be extracted

from the

meant that we

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up."
Originally, Neil had pho¬
tographed a test explosion before
making several additional takes, al¬
ways with the knowledge that a

that transparent'
knocked back in
your seat, which was what this shot
had to do.

Joel was relentless: 'It's
got to be great!'
"Dennis Michelson, our
visual effects editor, picked out
frames for

we

us.

Editorial is

really piv¬
getting

otal in this field in terms of

all the different elements to work
and

being able to pull out little

tricks at the last minute. He had to
find frames of

explosion that could
flopped or manipulated in order
to get them into the right position
to composite together with the first
explosion. Because this was shot in
35mm anamorphic, we didn't have
a lot of
repositioning capability.

be

Then it went in to A1 Cox, the opti¬
cal supervisor of this show, whose

nickname is "Diehard" because
there

was so much
difficulty in get¬
ting all the scenes to look real, get¬
ting the matches perfect, doing
focus changes on miniatures in the
background, and working with fo¬
cus
changes that were done on the
plate. Also, there was a lot of tricky
things that were sort of thrown
away as part of the shots, but these
are the kind of
things that can be

done with

a

live

camera

and if you

don't do that with the effects shots

the audience starts

picious,

being

sus¬

even subliminally.
"The director wasn't

going to let us or the audience get
with that, so he pushed us to
the limit in getting all these little
tricks out of us," Edlund grinned.
"He came up with a number of
demands, but they were demands

away

of

a

creative nature and

we

appre¬

ciated that. In any case,

A1 was able
to put the incredibly complicated
matte together in stages from all
these 'grab a frame here - match it
to

this shot

over

there' elements,

and it would have looked terrible if
we

hadn't done those six

or seven

frames of fix.

couldn't get a matte

got it into opticals
there was no way of pulling a matte
out of it, and you can't really rotoscope explosions - it just doesn't
work. We had a big transparent
spot right in the middle of the shot,
and your eye goes right to that -

December 1988

you say, 'Why is
instead of being

"So, that was the last shot.
It

was

redone and redone and

redone. It took

eight or maybe nine
it right. We got that
transparent spot out by taking
takes to get

frames from different takes and

finding those frames that would
putting them in, but the

work and
American Cinematographer - December 1988

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