American Cinematographer - June 1995 - 47

tion scout with Howard to

Canaveral, Florida. He

Cape
im¬

was

mediately struck by the enor¬
mous scale of
everything con¬
nected with the space program,
and was determined to apply this

two
era

a live-action cam¬
motion control."

days with

and

no

One of the plates forced
Legato to push his Pan-and-Tile
technique beyond its limits: an

dimension to his effects

incredible shot that follows fuel
from a tank beside the launchpad
and along the massive fuel-de-

Unfortunately, Digital

livery pipes lining the flame-

Domain hadn't bid to create any

trench walls below the gantry.
The shot ends by tilting up to
reveal the Saturn V as it fuels up.

awesome

shots.

large-scale landscape miniatures,
and there were other problems
with the location that Legato and
Howard hadn't counted

on.

"Be¬

this is a period film, a lot of
things didn't exist quite the same
way as they had back then,"
Legato explains. "The Space
Shuttle gantry is now in the way
of the launchpad; we can't get
cause

around that, so how do we fix it?"

Legato knew he could easily
hance

a

en¬
locked-off shot of the

launchpad using CG and minia¬
tures, but he wanted to fill the
launch sequence with moving,

dynamic shots.
Legato decided to try a
much more ambitious applica¬
tion of a technique he pioneered
for Interview with the Vampire,
where he scanned

series of

a

In

reality, there was no Saturn V

atop the launchpad, just the
Space Shuttle gantry; the first
had to be added, the latter re¬
moved.

Using a Panaflex motion
camera for pin-registra¬
tion and consistency, Legato ac¬

picture

tually tilted up along the location
he was shooting his individual
tiles. That way, all the distortion
and perspective changes that
would naturally occur during
such a move were in the still pho¬
tography. "I started at one end of
the flame-trench pipe, rolled ten
as

seconds of film, tilted down,
rolled another ten seconds,

panned

over and overlapped the
last shot, shot for ten seconds," he
recalls. "Then, somewhere near
the middle of the move, I started

overlapping stills of a miniature
of Pompeii into his computer,
like location photographs, then
blended the seams in Photoshop.

entire

Afterwards, he created

tiles."

an

artifi¬

cial pan across the miniature and
combined that with a motioncontrol pan to Brad Pitt in a boat,

which in turn linked to another
motion-control move of Pitt in a
hotel room. Legato dubbed the

Pan-and-Tile, because
scrolling back and forth across
the composite computer image

process

looked identical to

a

cinematic

The process would have its
most profound impact to date
combining miniatures with real
locations for Apollo 13.
Using a Panaflex camera,
Legato shot locked-off plates on
rolling motion picture film of ev¬
ery conceivable angle at the Cape
pan.

Canaveral location. "This is
the next extension of the Panand-Tile technique of Vam¬

pire," Legato
shoot every

says.

"I was able to

plate in the movie in

tilting

up,

and just covered the
with overlapping

area

Back at

Digital Domain,
tilt-up shot and other back¬
ground plates were made periodperfect via Pan-and-Tile 3-D tex¬
ture mapping. "Because we used
that

a

series of stills to create

plates,

our

could actually art-di¬
background in the com¬
puter, get rid of that gantry and
put in a new sky as if the shot
wasn't moving. Kevin Mack and
digital matte artist Martha Snow
Mack painted out all the anten¬
nas and
things we didn't want
and painted in sky, landscape,
launchpad, or whatever was
we

rect the

needed."

Meanwhile,

a

team of

modelmakers headed

by Pat
McClung and Leslie Ecker built
an entire NASA
space fleet in
miniature. The largest of the
ships

were a

June 1995

Mt-scale Command

Module and Lunar Module

This shot

(LEM). As for the Saturn V itself,

created to look

McClung and Ecker used every¬
thing from a Moo scale, four-foottall store-bought model kit of the
Saturn V rocket for long shots to
various Ms-scale oversized minia¬
tures for insert shots in the

as

if it

was

was

taken from the
camera
on

mount

the out-of¬

control vehicle.
The thrusters
were

created

com¬

digitally and

plex launch sequence.
Legato started shooting
McClung and Ecker's models as
soon as
they were finished. Most
of the launch sequence cuts fea¬

tracked to fit

tured their Mo-scale, 18-foot Sat¬
V rocket and 20-foot gantry

the model. The
gas

and mylar

released in the

explosion were
also created
digitally.

urn

miniatures, which
their sides
camera

were

shot

on

the motion-control
moves could be matched

by the CG

so

camera on

Legato's

plates.

American

Cinematographer

49
American Cinematographer - June 1995

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