American Cinematographer - August 2008 - (Page 64) An Eye-Popping Adventure Hundreds of savage flying fish attack the heroes during their attempt to cross a large underground lake. Visualeffects artists at Frantic Films created the CG creatures mainly with 3D Studio Max, Digital Fusion, Gelato and various proprietary tools. Wide shots featured more than 150 fish — each with multiple layers — in addition to rain, mist and water. For shots of Trevor wrestling with a fish, Fraser interacted on set with a variety of soft, pliable objects, including a Nerf football and foam crosssection of a fish that was dubbed the “salmon steak.” a second-unit director for 20 years, and during that time, I learned what actors need in terms of physical reality to get in the moment.” Schuman adds, “Having some rough topography gave reality to the actors’ body language and gave us surfaces that would interact with the characters’ flashlight beams.” Running with Brevig’s decision to make the set pieces as realistic as possible, production designer David Sandefur created molds of rocks that he found in the Montreal area and built craggy, sloping concrete sets with no flat floors. Camera operator Philip D. Schwartz, SOC, recalls that in one instance, the only way the crew could rig a dolly shot was to lay plywood on the set surface, then put him on an office chair and push him down the plywood ramp. The nature of the story also demanded some innovative lighting techniques. In one scene, the three characters find themselves hanging on the walls of a deep vertical shaft, eventually plummeting into its depths. Schuman knew conventional lights would be very bright at the top of the shaft and too dim at the bottom. “To prevent that falloff, we put 4-by-4 mirrors right over the set and shot Xenon Pars into them from about 80 feet away,” he says. “Putting a brighter source farther away made for less falloff and gave it a dramatic look of ‘god rays.’” The trio’s fall ends in a large lake, and to achieve that shot, the actors had to jump from a 20' tower into a tank of water that was 50' deep. The particulate matter in the water enhanced the effect of the 3-D, and the crew augmented that by creating a wall of bubbles, backlit by 1.2K HydroPars, through which the actors could swim. “We put a black cyc underwater and created a bubble curtain in front of it with flame bars that had air pumped into them,” says Schuman. “As the silhouetted actors swim forward, they come into a 64 August 2008 Effects breakdown courtesy of Frantic Films.
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