American Cinematographer - May 1988 - 32

frame

the next 53

and Zourdoumis
on

the street in

Katmandu, Nepal.
Below: A

portable

boom is used for

rates. One

might be 20 fps,
fps, and the third 89 fps.
Some of these shots worked really
well in that there were people mov¬
ing on the screen at three different

Reggio, Van Kyke

a

rates. The

temple shot in
Bhaktapur, Nepal.

camera was

off for these shots

so

often locked

that the back¬

ground remained static and people
or objects would move
through
each other as ghosts. Sometimes
run the camera forwards for
the first pass, then shoot in reverse
for the second, and go back to for¬
ward for the third. This created a

we'd

strange effect in that some of the
ghosts moved backwards through
the

scene.

Another variation
shoot

was

to

backdrop, and then put two
moving images on top of it. One
shot like this, in Hong Kong, has as
the backdrop, a frame full of an
apartment building, while moving
up one side of the frame and down
the other are large Chinese letters.
a

Some of the most effective shots

using this technique were taken in
the gold mine at Serra Pelada with
the appearance of amorphous mas¬
ses in the form of the
bags of dirt
the men carried flowing through
each other. Subsequent to the in¬
camera
manipulations of the im¬
ages, the opening sequence uses
the technique of step printing slow
motion to create imagery departing
from the 'usual'

or

'normal.'

Telephoto lenses were
used extensively throughout the
filming, whether trying to get long
shots such as the 1200mm at 125fps
of the airplane taking off from the
Hong Kong airport, or the 300mm
51fps head and shoulder shots of
workers in Mombassa carrying
goods to load a ship. The high
frame rate filming with very long
lenses becomes completely un¬
forgiving. If the focus is out a split
second, it looks soft four times
tic, and used

selectively, would en¬
hance the conceptual interpretation

not

of

had to convey some

a

film.
Of the many

techniques

considered, in-camera-opticals
was one. We worked out the idea of
we

doing multiple passes in the camera
give two, three, or
more
superimposed images on the
which would

frame. The

challenge, of course, is
right the first time,

that it has to be

30

American

Cinematographer

simply in relation to the

sure,

expo¬

but also in content. The shot

idea and not
just a bunch of overlapping images.
We tried a wide variety of these
shots, from the simple form of run¬
ning the film forward, rewinding in
camera, and shooting another one
or more

passes.

The

more

interest¬

ing explorations came in shooting,
say three passes, with different
May 1988

longer at 96fps. The added potential
for disaster
low

was the
ensuing shal¬
depth of field at high frame

rates.

I decided that it would be

unfair to

place the responsibility of
pulling focus with an 800mm or
1600mm lens of unrehearsed situa¬
tions

few

on

my

assistant (with very

exceptions everything was
completely unrehearsed and as it
happened). So I practiced pulling
American Cinematographer - May 1988

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