American Cinematographer - May 1990 - 80

millions in

huge

a

The

of relays.

room

statistics that pass

through this room can go to a number of
places-say a car phone. A shot of a
business man talking on his car phone
evolves into

a

shot of

a woman

in

an

office, again relaying information. Behind
her on the wall is

take

a

video

screen

that will

slitscan ride

through a fiber
optic bundle simply bursting with com¬
munications light. Quite a rollercoaster
us on a

ride fora

mere

:30.

The

big challenge for director
of photography David Stump was how to
fit the pieces into a whole. It was a more
complicated puzzle than usual because
this commercial employed a huge num¬
ber of photographic techniques. The
opening shot of the cars, the telephone
lines pulsing with energy and the city on
the horizon

was a

combination of live-

action, stage miniature, and post prodution animation. The sequence
a

trip to Palmdale, Calif, and

began with
a helicop¬

ter shot.

"We found

a straight section
couple of miles long
and seemed to go off into nowhere. We
picked it because we could wet it down
and because it was lined with telephone
poles. We wanted to fly right down
alongside them and still get fairly close
over the middle of the road," Stump
explains. For this shot he used a Preston
Cinema Systems Gyrosphere mount with

of road that
Photo transfer from monitor by Videostill

High Speed, High Tech
Combo for Commercial

a

was a

Mitchell Mark II

"We did

camera.
a

couple of takes, at

both sunrise and sunset, and itturned out
that the sunset shots with the sun to our

backs

by Nora Lee
In the often unfathomable world of ad¬

vertising there seems to be a link be¬
tween high speed and high tech. If you
are selling technology television, the
more you can cram into 30 seconds, the
better. In two new spots for Northern
Telecom, Apogee's Jim Spencer and
David Stump just kept pulling rabbits out
of their special effects hat to sell hard¬
ware

of the communications center. That

image dissolves to a Northern Telecom
microchip planted on a board. A dramatic
pullback reveals that this board is one of

for voice and data transmission.
The first spot,

called "Combo,"
begins with aerial footage of a very
straight piece of highway lined with tele¬

78

phone poles. The lines between the poles
pulse with blue energy as data moves
toward a city on the horizon. The tallest
building in this very modern city opens up
to reveal in a blinding white light the hub

American

Cinematographer

Directed by
Director of

Jim Spencer

photography, David Stump
for J. WalterThompson/Chicago

May 1990

were better photographically,"
Stump continued. "Because we chose
the right time of day, when we wet down
the street we got a nice exposure of the
car headlights bouncing off the road it¬

self."

Stump used this shot as a
background plate and made a registered
contact print of it. Then using Apogee's
microscope tracker, he was able to track
the horizontal and vertical displacement
in each frame. This information

was

given to the motion control computer so
that its camera perfectly recreated all the
bounces, tilts and pans of the original
gyro

shot. Now the city miniature would
American Cinematographer - May 1990

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