American Cinematographer - July 1997 - 40

unit [headed up by director Peter
McDonald and cinematographer

Primo 4:1 and 11:1

zooms

quite

a

wards from it.
"We rehearsed those

bit, but if we were doing a lockedoff shot, I preferred to change over

types of moves very carefully on

first unit did very well. The entire
first-unit schedule was about 90

to the

this

days."

age

Goldblatt shot Batman and
Robin with Panavision cameras (us¬

quality of those lenses was sim¬
ply better than the wide end of the

to

zooms."

ing, ice hockey, and so on. We have
ice vehicles, freezing rays, you

Jamie Anderson], but overall, the

ing a Platinum as his workhorse),
generally without any filtration.
To fully exploit the height of the
picture's enormous sets, the film¬
makers shot in the standard 1.85:1

format rather than wide-screen,
but wide lenses helped to achieve

optimum edge-to-edge framing.
"We often found ourselves work¬

ing at around 24mm, but we'd
often go to 17mm," the cinema¬
tographer says. "In the Gotham
Museum set, we found
10mm lens was a bit too
we

went to

a

that the
wide, so

14mm. I used the

straight Primo primes - the

17mm

or

14mm

-

because the im¬

This lens selection

helped
Goldblatt compose the type of
framing favored by Schumacher.
The director notes, "I like large
spaces with the actors in the
middle of the space, so they're al¬
most in limbo
as
opposed to
them being against walls. Even in
'realistic' movies, I try to have large
enough spaces so that I can put
people in the middle of them. I
don't like people standing up
against things. In action scenes, I
-

like to start in the middle of the
room

and

move

upwards and out¬

Warner

Digital Creates Glacial Gales
position for the duration of these
Overseen
visual
effectsASC,
su¬
simply of the
pervisor by
John
Dykstra,
shots

Batman and Robin features

more

than 400 effects shots that
divvied up between Pacific

were

Data
Images (PDI) in Palo Alto, Warner
Digital (WD) in Burbank, Cinesite
in Hollywood, and Buf in Paris,
France. Some of PDI's extraordi¬

shots include a computer¬
generated Robin astride a CG ver¬
sion of his motorcycle, the Red
nary

Bird.

Buf, best known for its work

the Gallic sci-fi film The City of
Lost Children, was responsible for,
on

other shots, a big "freeze
ray" emanating from Mr. Freeze's
observatory lair.
among

A team of 54 artists at WD
relied on Alias/Wavefront and
Renderman software in handling

just over 100 shots: a rooftop chase
sequence involving numerous

computer-generated vehicles (the
Batmobile and the Freezemobile

among

them); some tricky CG ex¬
complex Gotham City

tensions to

miniatures; and two versions of
Mr. Freeze's

freeze-gun: a handgun
and a larger weapon that the villain
fires from his truck.
But the most

was

out

tion. "With

shot

a

test

woman

to

a

ques¬
camera, we
of how to get a

moving

scene

freeze," explains WD

visual effects

supervisor Wendy
Rogers. "But nobody can really
hold a frozen pose that perfectly.
They'll move slightly from frame to
frame. Very small motions will be
registered by the camera."
One seemingly obvious
solution would be to take a single
still frame of the actor, cut it out
from the start of the sequence, and
then paste it back into the actor's

position in the subsequent frames.
But the camera was not going to be
locked off in any of the 12 "frozen"
actor shots, and a moving image
impedes any subsequent pasting of
a 2-D
image. "You need the per¬
spective to change on that person,
so
you can't just take one still
frame," explains Rogers. "The only
way we found to achieve the abil¬
ity to move the camera around the
person was to re-create a [digital]
model of that person."
Creating a 3-D CG model
that would maintain its correct

intriguing of

WD's tasks was "freezing" those
unfortunate citizens of Gotham

re¬

lationship with the scene's moving
camera was a

quired

challenge that

re¬

creative solution. The WD
team combined stereo imaging and
a

City who have been zapped by the
icy beams of Mr. Freeze's weap¬
onry. Asking an actor to hold a

photogrammetry, a mathematical
formula for taking multiple images

American

July 1997

Cinematographer

picture. Because one of our vil¬

lains

was Mr. Freeze, we were able
[base certain action scenes on]
extreme winter sports - ice skat¬

it. I tried to create stunts that
don't belong in any movie but a
Batman movie. We kept the things
name

that were the most spectacular,
funniest or cleverest, and took
out the things that resembled tra¬
ditional martial arts or normal

fights."
Goldblatt adds,
made

good

which

was

Loon. He

"We

of the Steadicam,
operated by Mark van
use

was

the second

camera

operator on the first unit, so he
could

always jump into his harness

and

using triangulation to recon¬
geometry in a given space.
Stereo imaging and photo¬
grammetry may not be a common¬
place method in the visual effects
community, but it is not a novel
practice. Most research on the sub¬
ject stems from architectural and
geographical studies. According to
Rogers, several papers on these
techniques have, in fact, been pre¬
sented at Siggraph. WD also inves¬
tigated the analyses of a UC Berke¬
ley doctoral student who, working
from still photographs, used the
struct

formulas to re-create the geometry
of buildings. "It's much easier
when you're dealing with an object
that's not moving, because you can
move around and take
images
from all angles," observes Rogers.
"When you're trying to use the

techniques to capture action from a
character who'll be moving, it's
more
logistically complex. You
need multiple cameras, and they
have to be synced."
WD filmed the soon-tobe-frozen actors from numerous

angles using anywhere from two to
four cameras (depending on the
scene), all of which were syncedup to the taking camera. "With the
images from multiple angles, we
able to piece together a com¬
plete image and build a CG model
from all of that information," says
Rogers. "We're able to solve [the
problem of] where in space a
are
American Cinematographer - July 1997

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