American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 61) Far left: The Pignose amplifier, one of Edlund’s early creations. Near left: The visualeffects crew prepares a creature shot for Ghostbusters. Below: On set for Alien3, Edlund and actress Sigourney Weaver discuss a shot that will feature a miniature of the actress. lens as a unit, which enabled us to eliminate matte lines primarily by subtly softening focus of the mattes without changing size.” Next came two films that further pushed the limits of visualeffects technology, chiefly because they were set in the real world: Raiders of the Lost Ark (AC Nov. ’81) and Poltergeist (1982). “On Poltergeist, we used all our tricks to get images that worked,” recalls Edlund. “I shot the ghost coming down the stairway with a 500-fps 16mm camera, then blew that image up to VistaVision on a printer I kluged together. It was my most difficult project ever because it was not fantasy; it was happening in the present, in what could be the house next door.” Poltergeist marked the first appearance of “ASC” after Edlund’s name in the credits. He notes, “As soon as I had the required five years as a director of photography, I was, of course, anxious to join the ASC, and I was sponsored by Joe Westheimer, Lin Dunn and Harry Wolfe, who was then the Society president.” On Raiders, Edlund and his collaborators were tasked with creating something audiences had never seen before: the wrath of God. “[Producer] George Lucas’ edict was that we should all con- sider Raiders a B movie, and we were on a tight schedule with X number of pages to shoot per day,” says Edlund. “If you didn’t get those pages shot, you had to rip them out and make the scene work with what you had. That philosophy gave the movie its verve, I think.” But they couldn’t tear out the ending, which peaks with the opening of the Ark of the Covenant and numerous melting and exploding human heads. For the “hero” ghost that comes straight at the camera, Edlund’s idea was to dress a woman in silky, white rags and put her facedown on a trapeze rig, then film it backwards at high speed to give her hair and clothes an ethereal slowmotion look. “Then, we repeated the same motion with a skull on that rig and did a wipe-dissolve transformation as the skull burns its way through,” he explains. Bingo — another Oscar on the shelf. The tough part of Return of the Jedi (1983; AC April ’84), the final chapter of the original Star Wars trilogy, was figuring out how to shoot the rebels’ attack on the partially rebuilt Death Star. “Lucas always said Star Wars was high school, Empire was college, and Jedi was our master’s degree,” notes Edlund. “I worked with Bill Neil [ASC] on designing the VistaCruiser camera, which had a 20-foot boom and a tiny camera with a tiltable lens on the bottom and two little, opposing, pieshaped shutters slung from a Trojan-helmet-shaped head that American Cinematographer 61
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