American Cinematographer - October 1989 - 78

r Clairmont Camera

have preferred to use Fuji Tungsten 64 in his
stage work too, but decided the amount of

is hiring two

light it required would have overtaxed lowbudget limits of the crew.
"When you double the amount
of light, you double the amount of cables,
double the amount of lights, double the
amount of heat," Haitkin points out. "You

perfectionist Lens
Technicians
We need two people (one senior,

time and

lot of times if I make a

one

need

and maintain

commitment like this, I could wind up torpe¬
doing myself production wise or having
focus problems because I don't have enough

slightly less senior) to repair
our professional
motion-picture zoom and prime
rental lenses. Excellent pay,
based on experience. Profit-

don't have enough light on the film, you
have to open up the aperture, then focus
starts to become a serious problem."
Haitkin also took the time to
make copy negatives and prints off the copy

use a Zeiss MTF machine,
Richter collimators, a Zimmer¬
man T Stop bench and a Century

We

projector (in its

own

negatives of test shots of each film stock to

darkroom) to keep our lenses like
new or

better than new.

simulate what the films would look like in
the theater.
"Some of the films, I double-

We're perfectionists here, so you
have to enj oy working to that high

standard. Please mail a resume
and salary history to Clairmont

Camera, Personnel Dept., 4040
Vineland, Studio City, California
91604. No

phone calls, please.

J

ISONOSAX
The BEST
Portable

mixer-period.

a

stop to have enough depth of field. If you

sharing, medical benefits.

Precision

more

have both characters on the set at the same
time so I can have a transparent man picking
up that
without

stool over there and throwing it
having to have the stool wired or
anything. He actually does it."
"Our traveling mattes are not

what

we call articulated mattes," says
Haitkin. "The persons we're matting are
affected in such a way that they stand out
from the scene anyway. So if there are

duped because I have a lot of opticals in this

hangnails in the matte work, it doesn't
affect us. We're not trying to make someone
look seamlessly part of the scene. That's

be duped as opticals and then duped when
they're made for theater prints."
Because Haitkin wanted to keep
the camera moving, George decided a com¬
puter-driven motion control camera was
necessary for the matte process. "My bit of
foolishness," he calls it, because though the

motion-control camera was effective, it was
also cumbersome.
"It's not the hardware, it's the
communication. It's the human software,"
says George. "It's just not right yet. I hear
there is a new generation of live motion
control systems coming out and maybe that
will be the answer but it is still new stuff
and it's a little bit intimidating."
The learning curve for motioncontrol work is high but as directors and
directors of photography learn how to be¬
come comfortable with it as a tool, George

blue screen or sodium screen with no
screen," Haitkin says. "We're just doing it

right in the

camera

which is

a

tremendous

why it works for us. I don't think this
technique would work in terms of really
trying to put someone in a scene where
they look perfectly normal."
But for horror pictures, the tech¬
nique is a budget boon, therefore, a tech¬
nique Craven expects to see used
frequently.
"If we did these opticals on the
set in the standard way," Craven says, "our
budget for opticals would be probably five
times what it is."

Things to

October 1989

▲

come

...

Our December issue
will once again reflect the magic
of special effects. This time we
cover some of the spectacular
effects movies released during
1989. Our stories will be Bat¬
man,

Indiana Jones and the Last

Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Back to
the Future II, and The Abyss,
among

PROFESSIONAL SOUND CORPORATION

(818) 760-6544

of which I wanted to be
transparent. The typical way would be to
put one actor on a black set and then super
him over. Bruno's made it possible for me to
two actors, one

film," says Haitkin," so that means they'll

predicts that the systems will become both
speedier to use and more popular. In the
simplest terms, the way motion control
works is: On the first camera pass, there's a
human operator who follows the scene and
follows the actor. On the second pass, the
camera plays itself back on an empty set,
frame for frame, and always in perfect
registration. In post-production the two im¬
ages are put together.
"So basically we're doing trav¬
eling mattes that would normally be done

76

advantage to the director. His actors are
allowed to act. They're not acting before a
blue screen to nothing trying to coincide
with a video-tape of something that was
shot on an empty set somewhere else. It's a
tremendous advantage to the director."
"It's been fascinating to me,"
says Craven. "For instance, we would have

others. *+
American Cinematographer - October 1989

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