American Cinematographer - November 1990 - 89

he'd be in the right place at the right
time."
Thanks to the ground control¬

ler, Murray was able to capture the par¬
ticularly eyepopping image of a jet flying
full speed over a hot rod. "That's one of
the shots I'm proudest of," Murray says.
"If you think about the physics of that
shot, you'll understand how difficult it
was to get. That airplane was going
through frame 100 feet above the desert,
so we had to find a way to get some size
on the airplane. This meant using a tele¬
photo lens to squeeze the plane and the
car together. We also had to find a way
to keep the plane in frame long enough
to register as it flew over the car - if we
had shot this conventionally, that airplane
would've only been in camera for 10-12

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really interesting shot - the
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the movement of the plane. Tom Prophet,
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this was a great place for the Power Pod
it would've been very difficult for an
operator to do this shot with a conven¬
tional camera setup because he had to
pan almost 180 degrees. It was a really

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"That's where the creme de la creme of
Air Force pilots are trained," Murray

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cool shot to coordinate, and I've never
seen a shot like that in a commercial
before."
Some 11 months after shooting
"Hot Rod," Murray went to Luke Air Force

mantic tone and

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flight, but the 'Hot Rod' had

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was a

camera was

points out. "The desert where we shot
both of these spots is covered with the
blood of a lot of pilots."
Perhaps it was this darker per¬
ception that colored the "Doc" commer¬
cial, whose visceral, disturbing but ulti¬
mately freeing sensibility was the an¬
tithesis to the mythical, more grounded
orientation of "Hot Rod." Murray's two
spots are highly complementary - "Hot
Rod" is all bright and dreamy, while "Doc"
is very dark. "'Doc' was shot from the POV
of the sky looking down at the ground,
while 'Hot Rod' was about the ground
looking up at the bowl of the sky," Mur¬
ray comments. "The idea of both spots
was to communicate the intensity of

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"We ended up

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