American Cinematographer - July 1992 - 50

Top: Grip Todd

over

Smith and

Gotham Plaza and out into

effects

camera,

an

al¬

ley."

supervisor

He also flies between

Michael

flocks of

computer-generated bats
provided by Video Image. "That7s

Pangrazio dress
the Wayne
Manor set.

one

Middle: Matte
artist Chris
Evans matches
live-action

above the crowd in

of the

rare

instances of

over¬

lap," observes visual effects super¬
visor Mike Fink. "There's
usual aspect to all of this,

a

rear-

projection street

one un¬

and it's

matte

probably the wave of the future: the
elements Video Image sent over to

with

Boss for

scene

to his

painting
foreground

Bottom: Effects
cameraman

Wade Childress

and matte artist
Brian Flora take
a

meter reading

in the

compositing

were on an

exabyte tape containing digital data
of bats as opposed to film ele¬
ments. Boss took that tape and
composited the shot digitally."
Boss Film was quite familiar with
this technique; it was the same
method they used to create hordes

miniatures.

multiplane

setup that

of CGI penguins overrunning
Gotham Plaza.
Video Image's computeranimated bats are very different
from the traditional cel animation
bats of say, Abbott and Costello Meet

incorporates a
moving cloud
background.

Frankenstein; these high-tech de¬
scendants look more three-dimen¬
sional and blend more smoothly
into scenes than traditional anima¬
tion. "The bats were the responsi¬

bility of Andy Kopra," says Video
Image president Richard Hol¬
lander, whose company created the
Termovision effect for Terminator 2
and handled nearly 40 shots in
Batman Returns. "The bats were
based on a rough 3-D sculpture that
was

digitized here and further

modelled in the computer to add
texture and detailing. We also mod¬
elled the bats behaviorally by giv¬

ing each bat a set of rules. We never
knew exactly where they were go¬
ing to go, but effectively we got a
flocking kind of behavior, with all
these bats squirreling around each
other.
"Once

we

had

a

sequence

thought worked," Hollander
adds, "we digitally composited the
bats onto the background that was
digitally scanned in. Then we went
out to film in one step on the Soli¬
we

taire film

very

printer. The

process

has

little to do with opticals and

everything to do with what we call
'Digi-cals.? Most of the bats in these
shots are blurred. It's very difficult
to add a blurry thing to a scene

48

American

Cinematographer

July 1992



American Cinematographer - July 1992

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