American Cinematographer - October 1989 - 84

DEPTH OF FOCUS.
As you

what's
a

look to

minimum of camera movement. Most of
the shots in the film are lock-offs from the

Cooke, focus on ZGC.
Consider its depth of experience
in these legendary lenses. From

eye-level of Tinny. The opening sequence
is a nice overhead view of the bag, box,
and toys on the floor that ends as the
camera cranes down to look squarely at
Tinny's profile. When Tinny attempts to
escape from the monster, the camera

hereto

infinity, afield filled with lenses,
including the new Varotal 18mm-100mm
zoom. In the background, sharp
ZGC service engineers who

dollies with him as he flees, which in¬
creases the feeling of speed. In another

know Cooke lenses from
every

angle. No

sequence, as Tinny emerges from under
the couch, the camera gives an overhead
view of Tinny coming out to meet his

won¬

der when America's
eyes are

going on. It makes it easier to tell
story."
The story is told simply, with a

drawn to

doom, showing us exactly how small our
hero is compared to the enormous baby.
Ostby went on to explain, "The

Cooke they see
ZGC. Pretty

picture,

program that defines Tinny also includes
information like, 'This is the front of the
head. When it comes time to paint the

head, look and

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sense that when he moves across the
floorthere are gears driving him and they
all run in unison. We wrote some soft¬
ware that takes John's animation, plots
out how far he moved Tinny and in what

path he moved him, and makes all the
gears run and the instruments play in
sync. The faster John moves Tinny, the
faster the instruments go. It is a fairly

small set of programs that can read this
information and we will use that same

technology in a different way. We could
use

Film-VIdeo-Lights-GHp

82

are

Tinny is a wind-up character. There is the

VELCRO® CABLE

Telex 51-9348

software, individual models

let him stick around so we can use him
for tests. There is some technology that
we have come up with for making Tinny
look and work the way he does that we
will probably use again. For example.

underwater

Q305/945-1111

our

particular to a particular production. We
may not do another film with Tinny. We'll

IN TER NA T/ONA L

/

simple as, 'Paint him white.' Or it
might include, 'If a light hits him, make
the light reflect as if he were a very shiny
surface, but put a blush on his cheeks
here.' There are many extremes." And a
seemingly endless list of descriptors.
"Even though we re-use some
of

IMAGEDEVICES

u/w

what color the front

as

201-746-4428 Fax 201-746-2105

We

see

of the head is supposed to be and paint
this object that color.' It is a reference to
another description in another language
that says how to paint him. It might be

All

rights reserved. Patent #4700432

it to make the wheels

on a car turn

in the right amount and the right way. It's
hard to get the wheels to match the
motion of the car if you do it by eye. But

it's

a

trivial

problem for the computer. All
American Cinematographer - October 1989

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