American Cinematographer - July 1990 - 58

stuff going on for that reason. All
the backgrounds we shot had lots
of motion: trains, machines, cars

driving along the roads and
cranes
scooping up soil. Some of
the motion in the distance is al¬
most

subliminal, but those small

details kept these shots

from look¬
ing static, and instead gave the
feeling of looking at a real land¬
scape."
The trickiest aspect of the
dozens of large Martian land¬
scape shots was deciding how to
portray an alien environment
trapped in a vacuum. Brevig and
his team of effects artists found

they couldn't

use the conven¬
tional methods of shooting land¬

scapes in a smoky atmosphere to
diffuse the background with an

atmospheric haze, or aerial per¬
spective. "We had to keep our
landscapes sharp to the horizon,"

atures built for us

screenshot.

triple duty aided by the miniby Stetson

in turn affected how much black

preparesblue

Visual Services and

a

Effects

crew

our

matte

around until

painted skies."
To create the illusion that

Quaid and his companion are
walking alongside a vast Martian
canyon, the actors were filmed on
the all-purpose Mars set, which
was later
amplified considerably
in optical. "There's a little bit of
matte painting to hide the fact
that the set wasn't quite big
enough, then there's the strip
they're actually walking on, and
everything else is a forced per¬
spective miniature," Funke re¬
calls. "The blending of miniature,
live action and matte painting
required a lot of balancing to
determine what the contrast
would be and what color the

finally worked
out a system to determine exactly
we

what the scale had to be in order
to

get a certain color and contrast

to the

landscape.
"As much

we

wanted to

as

possible,

re-use

the mini¬

parts that we'd already had
built, like canyon walls and
mountains, so we ended up re¬
ature

"The dressing of the
model affects the contrast, be¬
cause the size of the shadows on

ing back towards Cohaagen's

the model

directly related to
whether we used sand grains or
pebbles in our miniatures, which

grounds in the

American

July 1990

on the miniatures, like
the size of the sand grains we

detailing

used, which made the landscape

are

Cinematographer

reach to infinity, so it was very
hard to hold them in focus and
have the resolution work prop¬

erly; the images ended up too
sharp. We therefore adopted a
technique where, if the scene was
taking place in sunlight, we shot
our

initial motion control passes

in clean air.

After, when

we

did

Mexico, where the camera's fol¬

a
plan afoot for picking up
all the miniature parts, moving
them around and reconstructing

views from the Hilton Hotel look¬

the fine

forced perspec¬

represent landscapes that

have

aspect.

was

tive to

wise," Funke adds. "Once we
finished with one set, we had to

convincing, and which was inte¬
grally related to the photographic

discovered that it

sets were built in

fill light pass, we shot the
models in a very faint smoky
atmosphere. In many cases, these
scenes involved
tracking motion
control moves done on-set in

dressing everything with existing
pieces, because it would've been
impossibly expensive other¬

something else. Plus, we were
workng Stages 4 and 5 here si¬
multaneously, shooting essen¬
tially opposing views. In other
words, if Stage 5 was shooting the
view from Cohaagen's office
looking over towards the Mars
Hilton, Stage 4 was shooting the

landscape would be. We quickly

56

mixed into the scene. We did
tremendous amount of fooling

was

Funke fumes. "At the same time,
we had to have some
gradation
from foreground to background
to sell the scale. Our miniature

office."
To avoid static back¬

many

miniature

landscapes, Funke relates: "We
made

sure we

always had a lot of

our

lowing Cohaagen around his of¬
fice. This meant we had to match
move the
background into the
shot using motion control, so we
not

only tracking the land¬
tracking the sky
matte paintings by Bob Scifo. "
Adding a synthetic sky to

were

scapes, we were

a

miniature shot is

one

of the

toughest assignments you can
give a special effects man. It's so
daunting a task that only one film
comes to mind where
synthetic
skies were used extensively:
Damnation Alley, one of the most
disastrous effects films of all time,
and an acknowledged classic of
American Cinematographer - July 1990

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