American Cinematographer - December 1989 - 88

"We had the model shop
build us a miniature of the base of
the statue as a guide, and we even
went so far as to put miniature

lights

on it before we shot it, so it
could be lit as if the crew was out
there lighting that set. We projected
those photos onto the masonite

panel

painting on and
guide to paint from,
so we weren't
making things up as
we went
along."
we were

used that

as a

The next shot in the

se¬

quence was a reverse angle look¬
ing over the shoulders of the Ghost¬
busters towards the Statue of Lib¬

erty. "That shot was a blue screen
composite that used a matte paintingby Caroleen Green to represent
the Statue of

Liberty in the back¬
ground," Sullivan says. "The

Above and

right: In
the "ghost nanny"
sequence, the long
arm

Ghostbusters were blue
matted over the painting
cal."

of actor Peter

screen

in opti¬

Finding the best way to
bring the Statue of Liberty to life
was Dennis Muren's next
objec¬

McNichol steals

Sigourney
Weaver's baby,
with a little help

tive. Like the Marshmallowman in
the original Ghostbusters, Muren felt

from ILM.

that

a man

in

a

suit

was

the best

way to go as far as repeatibility and
budgetary limitations were con¬
cerned. The only other way to
handle the effect was to use Go-

motion, which would have

re¬

quired

a finely articulated puppet
and taken much more time than
ILM had. "The Statue was a suit
created in the creature shop under
Tim Lawrence's supervision,"
Gorman explains. "At first we

what

to be

the world's

big¬
gest Chapman crane," Sullivan
explains. "Since objects that are
seems

closer

to

camera

move

more

quickly than things in the back¬
ground, we couldn't paint the
Statue of Liberty into the scene-

last shots
it in

we

did, and

we

finished

representing the pavement around
the statue-into a 4' x 8' painting
depicting the abutments around
the base of the Statue of Liberty. In
front of that we placed our 4' model

really last ditch attempt."
Due to the urgency of the
pace at this point, Sullivan at¬
tempted something he had never
tried before: working on the paint¬
ing for the over the shoulder shot
of the Statue of Liberty with an¬
other painter: "It really helped to
speed the process up," he remarks,
almost surprised. "It was an inter¬
esting experiment for me, although

of the Statue's head and torch, and
shot the entire scene on the

I know it's been done here before.
I worked on the right side of the

we

had

a

model built instead. We

rear
projected a small image of the
Ghostbusters-which was shot in
Burbank on top of a 20' section

we

which

a

pro¬

painting and Caroleen Green

grammed to move so that the
camera pushed in very little to¬

worked on the left. She helped draw
a lot of it in, and blocked in a lot of
the colors. It worked out well be¬

automat camera,

we

ward the painting while the statue's
head appears to be moving a lot.

Since

86

laterally to create the effect,
all the lights around her had to be
on a
gimbal that would move with
her. This ended upbeingoneof the
statue

we

American

also had to

Cinematographer

move

the

cause our

painting styles are pretty

similar.

December 1989

thought we'd have a small person
do it and keep the scale down, but
thatdidn'treallywork,sowescaled
everything up to the size of a nor¬
mal person, a local actor named
Jim Fye, who's a tall, skinny fellow
about 6'3"."
Muren toy ed with the id ea
letting the man in the Statue of
Liberty suit wander through a
miniature cityscape ala Godzilla,
then rejected it for budgetary con¬

of

siderations. "There were 13 shots
in that sequence," Gorman relates,
"and every one of those shots used

background plates except one in
which the statue is heading right at
us and
looking around. That was
shot high speed with foreground
miniature buildings. We re-used a
couple ofthem we'd made for other
films, and built most of the high
in the foreground."
Editing the Statue of Lib¬
erty sequence proved to be a prob-

rises

seen
American Cinematographer - December 1989

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 1989
