American Cinematographer - March 1993 - 80

Now You
Can Leave
Home
Without It.

paired with a small patch of the
same
high-gain #7610 material).
The model was positioned so that
its body hid the rod from the cam¬
era. The
left-right, up-down flying
movements were obtained by pan¬
ning and tilting the entire cameraprojector rig so that wherever the
background moved, the camera's
field-of-view followed suit. This
made the background appear sta¬

tionary, so that only the puppet
appeared to fly in frame. With a
three-frame flap of its semi-trans¬
parent bat wings -combined with
six channels of mo-co movement of

the pan,

tilt, rod pitch, forwardbackward, and camera and projec¬
tor motors
the puppet carrying
the model of Sheila really looked
like it was flying away with her.
Since the models never actually

grease pencil on the television
monitor's glassy surface. This way,
Sheila could be positioned correctly
for the start of each transformation.
Motion control enabled the camera

duplicate the same movements
during each take, as Sheila's
makeup grew more and more evil.
The takes were later optically com¬
bined, giving the actress a shapeshifting Jeckyll and Hyde appear¬
ance. Combining this with a
pan,
to

tilt and truck camera movement
made the shot look more realistic,
at much less cost than the com¬

puter-generated morphing seen in
most of today's big-budget effects
films.
Another transformation

-

moved (other than a forward-backward roll), this simplified lighting.

Also, the pole through the screen

negated any time-consuming aerial
brace wires.
Shots of this nature always
require that the front projection
screen be free of
any dirt or defects
in material. On static dark scenes,
inconsistencies in the screen are

But when a shot in¬
volves panning or tilting of the
background image, even the slight¬
est dirt shows up as a muddy mov¬
ing smear over the image. Anima¬
rarely

FILM

Arriflex

Tyler mounts

Unilux Strobes
Power Pod head
Enluva II crane
1 50-600 zoom

Telephoto lenses
Innovision lenses
VIDEO

Sony Betacams
Nightscope
Canon LI

HI-8

Gyrozoom
Plus

our

stage

with the

seen.

tion of a different sort involved two

of the transformation

Film/Video

Equipment
Service Co.
Denver, Colorado

Worrell head. This, in turn, was
mounted on wooden tripod sticks
and chained to a mo-co dolly track.
The film was run at 22 fps (which
was the fastest we could run with¬
out the camera motor stalling), pro¬

viding Sam Raimi with the fastpaced, zany look of his two previ¬
ous

Evil Dead films.
A videotap in the camera's

eyepiece helped keep the actress in
the same position at the start of each
shot. Raimi placed her head inside
wooden vise that looked like a
holdover from the Inquisition days,
a

and drew her facial features with a

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in

Army of Darkness. When sweet
Sheila undergoes her change to
wicked, frizzy-haired Evil Sheila,
the 4-perf Mark II Mitchell was
bolted onto a mo-co pan-tilt

biggest eye
in town.

scenes

March 1993

involved body parts
spewing from the ground and
recompositing themselves into Evil
Ash. This effect was achieved by an
even less
costly method. A four- by
five-inch negative of the set was
made, along with a still of Bruce
Campbell standing with his back to
sequence

the camera. These elements pro¬
duced an eight-inch photographic
cutout of Ash, which was posi¬
tioned on glass above a 30- by 40-

inch paper print of the set. A single¬
frame 4-perf 35mm Fox camera
looked down from above; the
whole configuration resembled an

old-style Acme animation crane. To
help achieve the blend, some model
branches were added in front of the
camera lens and a shadow of Evil
Ash was drawn on the glass.
The camera was run frame

by frame in reverse as I chopped off
sections of his body and hand-ma¬
nipulated, Terry Gilliam-style, the
body parts (including fingers) fall¬
ing into a hole in the ground. The
shadow had to be etched away
with a razor blade as the legs dis¬

appeared into the ground. When
seen

in forward motion,

the ap¬

pendages appear to explode from
the ground, forming the solid fig¬
ure

of Evil Ash. The film then cuts

live-action, slightly off-kilter
angle of Campbell seen in full
bloody make-up. Lightning effects
were added
by gradually overex¬
posing certain frames. Each take of
to

a

this short two-second shot took

nearly five hours to animate.
American Cinematographer - March 1993

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