American Cinematographer - September 1992 - 74

The term "big
Hollywood
director" takes
on a

literal

meaning as
Kleiser and
actor Robert

Oliveri
demonstrate the

effectiveness of
the

split-scale
living-room set.

split-scale technique occurs in a
scene
involving an outdoor birth¬
day party, which was shot during
a two-week stint in Simi Valley. The
party takes place in front of a wall,
but is interrupted when the rapidly
expanding cherub clambers over
the partition. In order to create the
effect, Hora filmed two separate
setups - one with a life-size wall
and

one

with

a

miniature wall and

the baby-almost simultaneously,
so that the
sunlight would be con¬

from his
babysitter by breaking through a
window of the Szalinski house,
Hora had the crew install a window
from the stage set into a house in
Simi Valley. The separate se¬

painstakingly lit to
ensure
matching cuts. To facilitate
sequences involving full-scale and
miniature pieces of furniture, Hora
set up a miniature camera unit right
beside the regular camera on the
stage. "We'd have to go back and
quences were

doing the real

forth between them to make sure
the windows and all the other ele¬
ments were the same," he said.
Hora felt that the most in¬

miniature wall set

triguing portion of the shoot in¬

up just out of sight over a hill, so we
could do a matching shot in
VistaVision with the kid climbs
over it. That was then combined
with the first shot so it looks like a

volved the film's climactic scenes in

sistent in both shots. "We had to do

them within thirty minutes of each

other," he recalled. "At the
time that

wall,

we

we were

had

a

same

Las Vegas and its outskirts.

birthday party to get the coverage

As baby
city's
glitzy downtown, hordes of police
officers and U.S. Army soldiers at¬
tempt to prevent the diapered dy¬
namo from
advancing in a goofy
sendup of campy 1950s sci-fi films
like The Amazing Colossal Man, War
of the Colossal Beast and the unfor¬
gettable Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.

and the reverses!"
For a scene in which the

According to Hora, the
prospective difficulty of shooting

giant baby is coming over the wall.
We'd do the live-action part first,
and then run over the hill where the
VistaVision camera was and do the
kid. Then we'd run back to the

72

infant Adam escapes

American

Cinematographer

Adam toddles toward the

September 1992

the downtown

area was

alleviated

by the famous Las Vegas neons and
Eastman Kodak's 5296 film stock.
"The speed of the 96 was very con¬
venient. It made it possible to shoot

downtown

Vegas with little
supplemental lighting," he said.
"We were covering five city blocks,
with

a lot of extras, but we didn't
have to do that much in terms of

setups. That saved hundreds of
thousands of dollars, because we
didn't have to drag in all that extra

equipment. What I normally do is
take a still camera loaded with the
film stocks we're going to use, and

photograph the locations at various
f-stops. From those test shots, we
found out that many of the Las
Vegas locations looked almost per¬
fect without lighting, provided that
we

wanted that realistic look. We

just had to provide a key light for
the actors, to brighten up their eyes
a little bit, or
maybe a police spot¬
light."
Hora found
tion to

a

clever solu¬

King Kong-like sequence
developed by Kleiser that involved
a

sweeping Xenon spotlights. In the
scene, an

ice-cream truck catches
American Cinematographer - September 1992

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