American Cinematographer - August 1987 - 67

bine it with a normal sized front
and line it up in perspective.

seat

Joe and Mike couldn't quite visu¬
alize it, and they found it kind of
scary because it wasn't what they
were used to. So, 1 built a couple
of mockups to show what the
scale would be, and 1 told them
about the advantages: It would be
finished in the camera, we could
shoot it four-perf, and, since the
car was

supposed

and down the

cisco,

we

to

streets

be racing

up

of San Fran¬

could shake the

camera

add realism. Well, they loved
the idea. Andy Laszlo suggested
to

putting the entire rig, which would
be ii feet wide by 25 feet long, on
a gimbal so that all of our actors
would be reacting to the motions
of the car in unison. Mike Woods
and his crew built the car and gim¬
bal and everything worked out
great.

"The trouble with shoot¬

ing forced perspective is that
you've got to be really prepared
because the producers can't afford
much waiting on the set while
things are tweaked. Knowing that
we could really get burned if we
weren't careful, I had everything
built, set up, and roughly lit when
the crew came in, so there was vir¬
tually no wait. 1 had never actually
done anything quite like this on
such

a

tors

involved. The

Top: Marc Thorpe
pod model

holds 8'

within underwater
set. Below: Tuck

approaches entrance
to

inner

ear.

grand scale with all the ac¬
production
people were wondering just what
was going on: in effects films to¬
day, everything tends to get done
one step at a time, and it's all com¬
posited at the end in optical. Using
this technique, we had the whole
sequence finished in less than a
week."

Half-sized and double¬
sized puppets were used to really
pay off the sequence. Creature

had perfect miniatures and
double scale likenesses of

shop supervisor Evan Strongquist
experimented with a new way to
replicate facial forms. Muren re¬
ports: "Life masks were taken

some

from the actors' faces and the

the vastly minute
human body and to

cast¬

laserscanned using a sys¬
designed specifically for mak¬
ing minature busts of people. We
ings

were

tem

first used this technique on Star
Trek IV. They use a laser to scan
the features, then that information
runs a mill to make any size. We

and then

tors,

up

work

the

eyes

on

our

sculptors did

the busts

When it

came

open

time for

develop
vistas of the
place a minia¬

crew

pod in those

to

very strange en¬

vironments, he decided

through the

to

and add skin detail."

Muren and his

ture

perfect
our ac¬

to carry

live, improvisational, in-camera approach he
used so successfully in the forcedperspective
August 1987

same

car

situation. "It's

harder to do with miniature sets
and models," he admits, "and it
made the shooting harder, but the
look was much more organic and
real. The main reason we did as
much of our effects live was to give
it

a

feeling of

My approach
shots

as

we

spontaneous reality.
was to do as many
could in-camera as

practically finished shots, because
I

thought that style was more in
keeping with a Joe Dante film.
Joe's a very spontaneous guy and
his films show that. 1 wanted this
stuff to look as if it were pho-

American

Cinematographer

65
American Cinematographer - August 1987

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