American Cinematographer - September 1992 - 66

Romance of the

road: James

Hurley

(James Marshall),

a

Brando/Dean hybrid,
tries to

save

his

tragic love from
herself.

pilot, but to give the house the same
general feeling," Garcia reveals. "I
thought about when I used to come
it was sunny outside, if d be dark in

Chapman's vibrating isolator head,
which is a simple mechanism that
takes the shock out of small bumps.
It was not an easy shot, especially

the house!

They wanted to keep the

with all of the shadows. We shot it

house cooler, but it made the inte¬
rior seem secluded and a bit eerie.
I tried to use that mood in the film
for a scene in which Laura comes
home from school. We followed
her around the house with a

forwards, but David did consider

home from school and my parents
had yellow shades drawn. Even if

Steadicam, then upstairs to her bedroom, where Bob the maniac is

waiting for her."
Garcia also designed an¬
other Steadicam sequence, but was
forced to find an alternative
method due to special effects. In the

SkymoteAnd
Hot Head

Supplier to the

Fifteen Skymote Cranes 1992
and
pan

together

forty Hot Head
and tilt units join

as a

winning team

for the '92 Summer Games.

SUMMER
GAMES

Barcelona

the winning edge for your future
productions contact us for more information.

To get

Egripment U.S.A. West
(818) 787-4295 FAX (818) 787-6195

Lynch has used the back¬
wards filming technique to great
effect in the past, and found espe¬
cially appropriate applications on
the Twin Peaks film-most notably
for a sequence in which a group of

into blackness,

the finished film, we used about

a

dark

room

with

an

open

door, from which light streams
forth. After dozing off, she finds
herself roaming through the

then moves toward

another room where an old woman
beckons from a doorway. Once in¬

side, Laura confronts

an

ominous-

looking boy in a tuxedo. "The shot
originally ended with the boy ges¬
turing toward the corner of the
room, where a ring of fire ap¬
peared," says Garcia. "David was
going to use an optical, but he just
didn't like the way the ring of fire
was coming out; he felt no one was
going to believe it, and substituted
a dissolve instead.
Normally, we'd
have done the sequence with a

eight Unilux lights," says Garcia. "It
huge 10mm shot, and I
wanted to have some depth of field
for the optical effects. The Unilux
lights were hooked up to the
was a

Panaflex Platinum camera, but no
one had ever shot Unilux
lights in
reverse and we didn't know if it
would work! The Unilux units
drive the camera with their elec¬

tronics, but we were in reverse, and
on
top of that I decided to add a
second

Steadicam, but the move had to end

camera for the
dialogue
The Platinum had to drive
the second camera because we

with

were

a lock-off for the
optical. We
would've gotten a bump no matter

Egripment U.S.A. East
Dealer

the lock-off."

painting's interior world. The cam¬
era dollies
through the first door,

Laura Palmer gazes at a pic¬

ture of

(516) 546-7392 FAX (516) 546-7391
64

doing it backwards, beginning with

otherworldly evildoers gather in
their decrepit hideaway over a con¬
venience store. In a reprise of a
revolutionary scene from the series,
the room's occupants find them¬
selves speaking in reverse. The se¬
quence was again designed to end
with a ring of fire, as Bob and the
notorious "dancing dwarf" leap
through it backwards. "In that
scene, which is part of a montage in

scene,

Reach For The
Gold With

what we did, so I decided to use a
Pee-Wee in conjunction with

inquiries invited
September 1992

scene.

synced up to all of these lights.
We used the Cinematography Elec-
American Cinematographer - September 1992

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 1992
