American Cinematographer - March 1995 - 27

Opposite:
Computerized
construction

workers
their
to

a

bring
expertise

passenger

seat. Notice the

steel
and

gantries

crane.

This page: The
exterior of the
CGI "construc¬
tion site."

and cranes,

nation

"After we received the story¬
boards from Wells Rich Greene,
we decided to show this skeletal

camera.

crawling with
Lilliputians. Gradually, the scale
of the gigantic car is revealed.

gantry framework at first because
didn't want you to know
what was behind it," Beck says.
we

"We wanted the

sense

of

some¬

thing massive going on. Then we
started working in elements like
the car's tire and the engine being
lowered in. We slowly built up to
reveal that it

was a

car."

By withholding the
subject's true identity, Beck built
up a sense of majesty and scale
that gave the automobile an im¬
mensity and made this bizarre
scenario believable. But the

spot

posed other problems for Beck
that were less easily resolved.
"We wanted the car to look big
without dwarfing the people too
much. The agency wanted to
make

sure

that the workers had

certain amount of

a

pride and in¬

a bit of ownership in
they were constructing."

tegrity and
the

car

Beck's recent 3-M

Imagi¬

spot was a jigsaw puzzle
assembled in post. He was deter¬
mined to capture as much of
Launch's action as possible in¬

Typically, ILM might

film all the various elements

on¬

- the car, the gantries and
the people - and then composite
them all into the location plate.

stage

Instead, Beck devised

a plan
whereby he'd shoot the actual car

location with mechanized, il¬
luminated miniature gantries. "I
had to ask myself, 'What goes
best with car photography?'"
Beck offers. "In my opinion, get
as much as
you can through the
on

lens, then balance the rest to¬

gether. Even when you think
you've got your bases covered,
you often end up wishing you'd
shot it live. There's a lot less

welding going on digitally speak¬
ing, and it all seems to be more
integrated and natural shot to¬
gether. I used the people in the
spot sparingly. I wanted to keep
them in the
cus

background and fo¬

attention

on

the car."

Beck studied old
of

and miniature workforce. Several
weeks before the shoot

began,

Beck and members of his ILM ef¬
fects team conducted a survey
using a full-sized Ford and vari¬
ous scale
toy figures.
"We put those little men
real car and asked our¬
selves which ones looked believ¬
on our

able and which
Beck

ones

didn't,"

laughs. "We knew

we
couldn't make the workers too

big, but if they were too small,
then you wouldn't see them
against the car. The winner was a
little green army man! We felt
that was the proper scale, so we
just built our miniatures from
there. We figured if a guy was as
big as the little green army man,
then the crane would be so big,
and the

car

would be full-sized

given the scale we'd delineated."
The

gantry design was a

joint effort between Beck and
ILM's Ed Natividad. "Once

photos

shipbuilding and newsreel

March 1995

footage of the Titanic launch, hop¬
ing to create that same sense of
scale with his miniature gantries

we

devised the proper scale, which
was 1/16 scale, Ed Natividad and

American

Cinematographer

25
American Cinematographer - March 1995

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