American Cinematographer - July 1992 - 48

Lower left: Boss

proved

a quick laserdisc precomp
when Bruno guaranteed he would

Film supervisor

John Bruno

get the exact same move with

(with beard),

Michelle Pfeiffer in the shot.
"Michelle Pfeiffer came in on a Sat¬

cameraman

Gary Waller and
coordinator Lisa
Baird rehearse
the impending

urday,

shot of the Ice

but that's
about."

Princess'
demise.

we

did five takes, and that

it," Bruno announces. "We left
early. It all went together quite well,

was

Top: To

simulate the
Princess'

one we were

worried

Another of the most

com¬

plicated shots involved Catwoman's forced flight across the
J city as she's carried off by one of the
| Penguin's anthropomorphic um-

horrifying fall,
actress Cristi

o

Conaway is
"dropped" into
the Gotham
Plaza miniature.

|f brellas, which becomes a little heli-

Lower

£

right: The
completed in¬

copter. "That was the widest shot

| in the movie," Bruno explains. "It

£

camera

designed

was

VistaVision shot.

as a

multiplane

painting. First, I
did

a

on a

pan move
foam-core

mockup

of

Gotham City
and printed that
on our video

printer. Brent
Boates scaled

a

drawing based
that and
Michelle Moen
did a detailed
on

quite a long distance. The buildings
were
actually horizontal and were
about 30 feet long, while the street
below was really the back wall of
the set and measured 15 feet high.
We shot the move using a Beau¬
mont Vistavision

Knowing there had to be
easier way to achieve the shot
Burton wanted, Bruno began doing
video tests using a foam-core
an

mockup of Gotham Plaza. Bruno
felt certain that he could create

a

convincing "fall plate" through a
miniature of Gotham City, then
shoot

matching move on a closeup of Michelle Pfeiffer against
bluescreen and composite the two.

46

a

camera

with

a

snorkel lens

going at two frames a
second; it was a slow push in using

multiple passes for lighting. I didn't
want the viewer's eye to look at one
specific spot in the plate, so I took a
miniature truck we use for our
DHL commercials, gooped it up
with

snow

around the

and had it driving
of the Shreck

corner

painting which
approved by Tim. Garry
Waller then set up his camera 18
was

feet in the air over our miniature set
the first layer of our multiplane
shot
and panned across the
Shreck building as the smiling cat's
face follows Catwoman to her de¬
struction. I designed those shots so
that the cat was always observing
the action. The camera tracks in to¬
wards this black hole which will

-

-

eventually have a multiplane matte
painting of Gotham City as
Catwoman floats across the skyline
and then drops into this chasm. The
finished shot has three planes: first,
18-foot miniature

building, which means it was really

our

mounted on the rear wall of the set

setpiece that's moving; then the
middleground, consisting of one or
two layers of cutout buildings with

"Tim wanted her to fall at least 30

on a

storeys, so we built a 1 / 24-scale

arm!"

mockup model of the alley between
the
building next door," Bruno says.

Bruno then sat Michelle
Pfeiffer's double in front of a
bluescreen and, using the real-time

this

Shreck's Department Store and

"We laid the set on its side because
of the length of the move; we

motion-control dolly, basically did
a freehand move that would match

very

couldn't go vertical because 1/24
scale on a 30-storey building is

to the

changing

American

July 1992

Cinematographer

repeatable motion control

background "fall plate" and

encoded that

move.

Burton ap-

foreground

big, ugly smoke-billowing

smokestack; and the background

layer, with flashing lights. It all feels
dimensional; the camera's
pushing in so the perspective's
ments

the foreground ele¬
go."

on

as we
American Cinematographer - July 1992

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