American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 98

there named Rex Recker. I brought him a
stack of tapes with the selected voices and
soundtrack music. Hours of music.
"I showed him the rough cut.
Based on that, we mixed the sound on a

24-track, computerized audio console. We
mixed the music first, then the voices. Alex
had some suggestions and we made the
revisions. We came up with a piece that, if
you listen to it, really works as radio. That
was

key to the strength of it."
For Paintbox artist John Sem-

street."

on

Maple

ing excerpts was
storytelling'.

choosing and edit¬
to avoid 'unintentional

''In film,'' Chris

Harvey notes,
"you juxtapose two shots and you tell a
story. This we sought to stay away from. For
instance, in the clip from 'Five Characters in
Search of an Exit', we used William Windom's line over the clown's face, 'Who are
we?' We had originally chosen his line,
'Where are we?' The next shot in the

montage has Cliff Robertson running into
view from '100 Yards Over the Rim'. We

didn't want to have Windom yelling 'Where
are we?' and Robertson saying, 'Just over
that ridge there, about a hundred yards' It
becomes a story that doesn't exist. The

point was to keep it abstract. It's a montage
in

a

true sense

without any

hand,

we

-

moment after moment

linear progression. On the other

wanted to build

a

mood with

pacing and tension, without telling a literal
story. That was very tricky."
Once the decisions were shown
and approved the next job was to finish the

"From this, we made a custom¬

landscape for every character/' Harvey
explains. "The customization was based on
the lighting of the cut-out character and the
camera angle. So the backgrounds were
always consistent with the treatment of the
foreground character. They move up and
down and are lit from different sources.
There's a pan from the talking doll to the
manikin. That was a lot of figuring out for
John: what is the lighting on this character?
Is it just key and fill? And so on.
"When we went into the edit,
we added time-lapse cloud footage, which
was distorted and stretched with the ADO.
We also matched the lighting and mood of
the clouds to each character. There were
some very subtle effects that were added in
the edit. There's mist flowing across, and

little

changes in the shadow. Sometimes we

took shadows from the actual character and

softly keyed it over the landscape.
are perceived only peripherally
by the viewer, but it makes it more realistic."

very

These details

Their next

move was to

isolate

foreground characters from 16 chosen epi¬

audio. Normally, the picture is cut to finished
sound. In this case, Weil and Harvey wanted
the audio montage to be very strong. They
elected to do the audio first and have much
of the tension reflected in the mix.

sodes and video-matte them over this con¬
trived background of nuclear devastation
and time-lapse clouds. John Semerad began
a tedious operation of "cutting out" the
characters on a Paintbox by tracing their
outlines and electronically opaquing their

Harvey took the audio to Photo¬
Sound in Manhattan. "There's a mixer

shapes as hold-out mattes. The mattes are
then switched from positive to negative -

mag

96

made from frames of the holocaust

ized

had to be solved in

American

Cinematographer

was em¬

stack of Winchester disk drives that can
hold an entire tape clip, enabling the artist
to work on it in a stop-motion mode, picture
a

by picture." In addition, the Harry has

Many rough cuts were screened
with Alex Weil and CBS. One problem that

and down, with a voice-over. Later, I chose a
shot of Gig Young sitting in his car. The audio
was ta|


American Cinematographer - December 1988

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

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