American Cinematographer - March 1989 - 68

and you

hear the sound of her
slowly realize you're
looking at her mouth. It looks like a
process shot, but it's not," Rush
says proudly. "The camera literally
travelled twelve feet through this
12" tube and ended on a closeup of a
woman's mouth. We used the peri¬
scope and attached it to the body of
the Pogocam. The advantage of the
Pogocam is its small size. We were

deliberately set the focus close so
the near part of the tube was in
focus, and as we moved through it,
gradually the mouth at the end of

able to mount it

was

voice, and you

on

the end of

a

12'

aluminum

pole hung on the end of
a
dolly. The pole was very nicely
engineered by Bill Yoak's company,
The Metal Cage. We used a small,
inexpensive industrial laser to align
the periscope so it would track
straight through the tube basically, it was a perfect straight
edge. We mounted it up where the
lens would be and lined everything
up to it.
"We actually lit through
the tube. It was translucent to begin
with and then we painted it and laid

Top: Effects techni¬
cian puppeteers
the kitchen tenta¬
cle creature.

Right:

Result is, tentacle
creature attacks
Mr. Crabneck

as

he

bullies the youn¬

gest Hollowhead.

some

frost

like it

it. It doesn't look

over

was

lit from behind

-

can't actually see the light com¬
ing through. It was a way of doing it
simply."

you

There

cations,

as

problem is

can't boresight this
no
way to look
through the lens, so we had a prob¬
lem focusing it. It was difficult be¬
cause her mouth was very
bright,
and the tube itself was very under¬
exposed. We were using a wide
lens, a 20, originally positioned 12
camera

tubes

bulge and flex

in theory,
piped along.
In order to create as much depth
as
possible to this series of beauti¬
fully detailed miniatures, Rush em¬
ployed a periscope camera devel¬
oped by Clairmont. "The periscope
simply allowed us to penetrate tight
areas," he says. "It offsets the lens
by about 2Vi feet so that it can move
through things. It's the equivalent
of a Peashooter or an Endiscope,
as,

their conversation is

but it allows

us

to work at

more

reasonable

f-stops. With an Endi¬
scope, you have to work at an f-22,
whereas you only lose one f-stop
with this device. We

were

still

working at around 5.6,

so

it's

very

convenient."
The sequence culminates
spectacular shot in which the
camera travels
through a long tube,
only to discover a mouth at the
in

a

other end,

belonging to Mrs. Hol¬

-

you

there's

feet from the end of the tunnel. Her
mouth
across
were

only a couple of inches
you couldn't tell what you
looking at, which made it
was

-

hard to focus

on.

controlled focus

We used

that

a

remote

into focus. Once

we

the mouth, we
tracked with it. It was a method of
on

diffusing the background

a

little

bit, and distancing ourselves from
it

by using

a

wide lens."

The Hollowheads' home

the

primary location for 75% of

the film. It

was

constructed

as

a

practical set including the living
room, the dining area, kitchen, and
a
hallway leading to the children's
bedrooms and the bathroom, all

designed with the tube motif firmly
in mind. Because all of the inte¬

rior

lighting was supposed to be
pumped in via tubes in the ceiling,
the art direction dictated down-

light, which created a conflict in the
lighting style for Rush: "Unfor¬
tunately, people don't look terribly
good in downlight, their eyes go
dark and it's not very flattering. We
were forced to use
downlight as a
basic theme for the backgrounds,
but

we

tried to cheat it

as

much

as

possible in our tighter shots. We
used the downlight sparingly, and
never for
closeups. When our actors
were in the
background, they
would walk through significant
areas of
downlight, but as they
moved into closeup, we would
bring the light up in their eyes. I feel
that for a comedy to work, you real¬
ly need to see peoples' eyes, so it's
very important to have bright light¬
ing. I've done a lot of TV comedy.
Had this been

a

drama, I would've

probably used harsher lighting the downlight would've been even
stronger."
Both Burman and Rush

that didn't work, because we tried
to correlate it to our videotap. But

Life on the Edge as a film filled
moving camera shots - a real
luxury on a low budget film. For¬
tunately, the production was able to
secure a
revolutionary piece of
equipment - The Panther dolly which enabled cinematographer
and director to put all the motion
they required into their motion pic¬
ture. "It gave a nice, floaty
feeling

the video's backfocus

was

was so

radi¬

cally different that we ended up a
long way off. Of course we had no
way of knowing this until we shot
some film, so the first night's shoot¬
ing had to be thrown away For¬
tunately, I had budgeted that in.
The second night, we were almost
there, but we still weren't quite sat¬
isfied, so we shot it once more. The

thing moving at the end of the tube
American

March 1989

Cinematographer

came

focused

the part

-

third time through, we finally fig¬
ured out how to make it work. We

lowhead. "At first you see some¬

66

compli¬

were some

Rush explains: "The

the tube
were

saw

with

to the camerawork in certain

places,

and it gave us a lot more camera
motion than we had any right to

expect," Rush relates, "and with-
American Cinematographer - March 1989

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