American Cinematographer - August 1993 - 64

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62

From the beginning,
Yamashita was after a look that
mixed elements of reality with
doses of fantasy. He had found

pictures of reef waters in a
Geographic magazine, in

which the photographer had set up
a bank of strobe
lights about ten or
twelve feet underwater, and the

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sens¬

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he was constantly able to adjust the
density with little or no movement

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frame, with the bulk of it

the look was easily maintained.
Besides the UV lights, there were
others mounted on the snorkel.
"Allen wanted headlights
on his submarines," said Yuricich.
"We put some high-powered halo¬
gens on the lens for some of the
early scenes. When I saw how hot
they were, I jokingly mentioned to
Bob Spurlock of SVS that it would
be nice if he could build a radiator
around these lights to cool them
without damaging the lens. And he
did! He wrapped brass tubing
around the brass casings holding
the light, ran coolant through it, and

kept the temperature down."
Later the same system was

used
cause

the miniature subs. Be¬
the bright hot lights could be

on

used,

one pass of the motion con¬
trol camera was eliminated. The
radiators also kept the models from

melting.
Most of the film concen¬
trated on the undersea miniatures,
but the opening and closing shots
were more

traditional effects shots

using much larger miniatures. The
opening included a four-second
free fall as the submarine simulator

pictures were rich in a surreal color

drops into the ocean. Yuricich and
the Video Image crew rigged a se¬

that fascinated Yamashita. How¬

ries of tunnels with

he knew that color drops off
quickly in deep water and that ev¬
erything is in monochrome at his

that the

ever,

submarine's depths. He wanted the
vibrant colors, yet he also wanted
a believable
atmosphere.
In pursuit of a solution,
Yuricich did tests with a UV excit¬
able paint from Wildfire, a com¬
pany which specializes
of paint. He attached a

in this type
ring of 350

nanometer UV bulbs around the

lens, and whenever the

camera

within range of the paint, the
colors would come up and fall off

came

naturally

as the lens passed them,
as if the submarine had
headlights.
The lights would excite the paint for

up to roughly a foot-and-a-half, cre-

ating just the surreal effect

so

Yuricich recalls, "I knew
had a camera that went 120
frames a second, so it was a matter
of figuring out how high we had to
we

go to get four seconds on the screen.
The tunnels in the miniature dry
dock had to be scaled up. We jump
cut from the !4s scale miniature to a
series of !4 scale tunnels built on the
roof of Video Image, 17 feet in the
air (so the rig was about 37 feet high

altogether). We put the camera in
an underwater
housing and had
the water rippling as we fell into it
so it wasn't like
falling onto a piece
of glass. As we came out of the tun¬
nel, we free-fell 20 feet at 120 frames
second, giving us four seconds of

a

The rest of the lighting was
limited. Using a bank of Kinoflos
overhead and making each one

screen

August 1993

set of rails

into the tank of water.

Yamashita wanted.

adjustable, Yuricich had complete
control over the 'water7 density and

a

actually flew
through the tunnels and dropped
camera

time. That shot was one of
the two traditional opticals in the

film done

by Mike Ferriter."

Still, Yuricich claims the
most difficult shot to execute

was
American Cinematographer - August 1993

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