A Different Kind of Battle
Jamie Anderson prepares Small Soldiers for combat
by Pauline Rogers

Originally published in the ICG Magazine in July 1998.

In DreamWorks’ summer movie Small Soldiers, the stars of the film are toys that take on human intelligence.

“It’s a blend of live action, computer animation, and animatronic puppets,” says cinematographer Jamie Anderson (Odd Couple 2, Grosse Pointe Blank, The Juror, Unlawful Entry, What’s Love Got to do With It?). What begins as an attempt by a toy manufacturer of questionable motive and judgment to create the baddest action figure ever, becomes an all-out war between the Gorgonites (a small but intrepid band of odd-looking creatures) and the war-loving Commando Elite soldiers.

Anderson’s first reaction was, “How are we going to do this?” when he saw the script for this picture. “I have known director Joe Dante since the 1970s,” he says. “We went to ‘Roger Corman University’ together, shooting Hollywood Boulevard and Piranha. I knew perfectly well that Joe could pull it off, if anyone could. His effects experience is considerable, between Howling, two Gremlins films, Innerspace, and The Explorers. Few directors have as good a sense of storytelling and editing. Almost none are as fun to work with!”

What Anderson hadn’t counted on was a start date that was etched in stone, with a script that was still being re-written as production began. “That was the first major stumbling block and remained a problem until the last day of shooting,” he admits. “The studio had made a deal with a toy company to release the action figures and other materials at a certain time. The release date for the movie, July 10th, had already been promised.

“So we had to start, no matter what the condition of the script. It’s one thing to have a script undergoing changes, which is epidemic these days in Hollywood; but with a picture like Small Soldiers, which is so effects-dependent, having the script in flux is a real frustration when you are trying to do storyboards, prepare big sets, get locations, and really start to break down what will be live action puppets and what will be computer graphics (CG).

“The number of CG shots had to be limited, because time would run out, even if the money didn’t,” Anderson continues. “Add to all that the fact that we had to start the shooting schedule with effects-heavy scenes, so ILM could get started on their CG work as soon as possible. It was pretty crazy. What’s so remarkable is how well the picture has turned out! I think it’s terrific!”

One of the big challenges for the crew was to make the small characters (soldiers and Gorgonites) as believable as possible. “Stan Winston and his team have created some of the smallest animatronic puppets ever built,” says Anderson. (See sidebar on Stan Winston). “It is difficult enough to make a creature (of any size or kind) out of gears, armatures, and motors. But, when the creature is only 12 inches tall and humanoid, it is a real puzzle to get all those control mechanisms small enough. And they were building a dozen characters!”

The biggest question faced was how much the puppets could do and how much CG would have to take over. It became apparent, after some early tests and early shooting, that any time the characters had to walk, climb, jump, or do any complex kind of action, CG would take over. “At times, we wouldn’t really know how much of it would be done live and how much CG until we were in the middle of a scene,” says Anderson.

“This confusion was partly a function of our own learning curve, and partly a result of the constantly changing script,” he admits. From the beginning, Anderson’s mind set was to define the look in live photography with the real puppets. CG would then match that look. “This was important to me,” he says. “This way, everything would be integrated into the photography of the movie and not look like it was added later. It was also vital that the nature and style of how the CG puppets moved and behaved be defined by what the real puppets were able to do. Otherwise, the illusion would be lost.”

In the pre-production testing process, which helped Anderson determine the final approach to lighting this film, he shot an “industrial commercial” that was to appear in the movie as an in-house sales piece for the toy company. It involved using the Frazier lens and the small characters. “This piece of equipment allowed us to try out the lens and shoot against a blue screen,” he explains.

One of the first problems Anderson encountered with this test was the ability to deal with the puppeteers. “Normally, you are working with larger characters,” he explains, “not with something that is just a little larger than a Barbie doll. Their small size meant the operators were proportionately closer to the creatures in order to be able to control the cable drives—about three feet away. They were either right in the shot or in the lighting path.

“When we wanted the puppet to walk, it had to be attached to an operator’s body and hands by rods. The puppeteer would make the puppet move with these rods,” Anderson explains. “We had to find a way to deal with these guys. So, I had this idea that our lighting for the puppets would have to be ‘inside’ the set—between the puppeteers and the puppets.”

To do this, Anderson began researching equipment he had not used thus far—fiber optics. This led Anderson and gaffer David Morton to Glass Illuminations in Burbank. Here he was given a 90 minute crash course in the equipment. “There were many times when this was a lifesaver for us,” he says. “Now we had accent lights that were actually the same scale as our puppets.

“I learned a lot about table-top photography when I was doing commercials for Bill Werts. All those tricks and gimmicks were invaluable in trying to get some modeling on these little guys. What better eye light than a quarter inch strand of fibers hidden by something on the set?”

The blue screen tests quickly told Anderson and crew that it wasn’t going to be practical  in all the shots. In order to remove the puppeteer from the scene, he tried putting a “miniature” blue screen between the puppet and the puppeteer. “Al LaVerde, my very patient key grip, was pretty sure he had never built such a small blue screen about three foot square,” Anderson says. “We all found that big ones are a lot easier to light. While it worked, the time involved in lighting a blue screen so close to the principal scene was more time than we had.”

Through this testing process, Anderson narrowed down his options. They decided to carryan inclining prism as well as fiber optics, since he couldn’t always light a set to an 11 stop. “The prism would allow us to get very low angles and still work at our normal 2.8 stop.”

Anderson felt one of his most important challenges was to give the audience the perspective of the small action figures, within the human-scale world. He immediately thought of the Frazier lens, a tool he had used on The Odd Couple 2.

“The Frazier lens is a very clever tool that Panavision developed with Jim Frazier, an Australian cinematographer,” he explains. “I have no idea how or why it works, and they ain’t sayin’, but it is great! It is basically a snorkel/periscope that also allows a prime lens to rotate on two axis. This allows the resulting image to be rotated freely as well.

“In addition, the optical characteristics of the tube seem to give the lens about a stop more depth-of-field than you would normally have. It allowed me to put the lens in very small and awkward places, while doing the car interiors on The Odd Couple 2.”

For example, a scene in The Odd Couple 2 involves Walter Matthau attempting to retrieve a hair piece from the road in front of the car, but a bird gets to it first. “The Frazier allowed me to get a shot with the hairpiece and a live bird in the extreme foreground, Matthau full figure about 12 feet back as he tries to shoo the bird away, the Rolls Royce another 15 feet beyond him, and the rolling hills in the distance—all in focus! And all this without having to dig a hole in the road. We made the shot off a dolly.”

The downside, as with any device of this type, is that “you need at least an 8-stop, preferably an 11, and I was using 5274 (Kodak Vistion 200T) with its beautiful grain, but only 200 ASA,” says Anderson. To put the lens over Archer’s shoulder (the main Gorgonite character) looking up at Alan (Gregory Smith), the boy in the story, would be impossible without cutting huge holes in the set floor, something that Anderson felt wasn’t practical.

“I thought it would be helpful, at times, to have all that depth, too. Otherwise, the puppets would be lost as blobs in the foreground. Or, in their close-ups, their own background would be mush,” he explains. “I wanted the photography to take their scale into account. They were central characters in the story, and quasi-human characters interacting with real humans. We were almost going to do tabletop photography, but were attempting to bring these figures into the real world, and keep a real world perspective.”

Early in the schedule, Anderson shot a scene where young Alan has cut his finger and brings Archer into the bathroom upstairs while he bandages it. He sets Archer down on the counter top. “What we wanted to do was get shots where both characters could be seen as really in the same world,” Anderson explains. “We needed the camera close and low and we needed plenty of depth of field to carry both characters.

“Normally, if you shoot over-the-shoulder from one person to another, the foreground person might be two to four feet from the camera. To get the same foreground size on Archer over to Alan, Archer would have to be only inches away from the camera. And, I wanted to keep some degree of focus on him, even though Gregory would still be four or five feet away.”

To do this, Anderson had to light the night interior set (bathroom and hallway) to an 11 stop. “That was a new experience for me,” he says. “I got a little taste of what it must have been like to light the early Technicolor films for night. It takes quite a ‘brain adjustment!’ Your mind’s eye—or is it your eye’s mind?—can’t grasp that the light over there in the corner, which may look like the midday sun, is really two and a half stops under-exposed.

“I snap Polaroids all the time,” he adds. “That is partly because it can be helpful and partly because I just can’t help it. So they were very useful in getting a grasp of what I was really going to see on film, while we were frying on the set!”

To get the effect of the sconces at the sink on the young boy’s face took a 5K coming through the unseen open window. Dedo lights were also helpful, to provide localized punch.

“The Frazier worked great here,” Anderson adds. “We were able to put the lens anywhere we wanted. We could treat the two characters in overs and keep Archer strong and sharp in the foreground. And, I must say, a night interior at an 11 stop looks quite interesting. It started me thinking about shooting with more stop now and then—even when doing very low key scenes.”

At another point, young Alan and Archer are searching for the Gorgonites in a dumpster. “We wanted to shoot up through the open back of the dumpster, past the Gorgonites as they pop up to Alan, and also see the buildings across the street,” Anderson explains. “Of course, it was late afternoon, and light was going. But the Frazier allowed us to get the lens right where we wanted it—in amongst the garbage near the Gorgonite character Occula. It meant Occula was fairly sharp and therefore distinguishable from the bits of junk in the dumpster, and the buildings across the street were sharp, too.”

A third shot was made even more spectacular, because of the Frazier. This time the shot was in a garage at night. Shot at the Warner Ranch, in a practical garage that production designer Bill Sandell built, the shot had a prerequisite 11 stop. “To get ‘dark night’ inside, we had a dozen or so half-blue 1K Nooklites bounced into foam core up in the ceiling for a 5.6—our two stops under ambience,” says Anderson.

Because there was so much heat up there, “we added vents and fans to keep the wood from catching fire. The gentle moonlight coming in the window had to be done with two 18Ks.”

This was a scene where the Commandos discover the treasures to be had in Phil Fimples garage: motors, wheels, skateboards, buzz saws, nail guns, and other tools they could turn into mobile weapons in their relentless search to destroy the Gorgonites. “The lens would be very low, with them on the floor looking up at all this stuff,” says Anderson. “I wanted all the goodies in the garage to remain somewhat sharp when we were down there with the Commandos, so the Frazier was ideal, both for getting low and for keeping the depth.

“We even did a shot where the camera drops down from looking at the armory of tools to ground level over-the-shoulders of the Commandos as Chip (their leader) walks into the foreground.”

The Frazier made this possible. “Chip became a CG character, but we did a version of the take with a real puppet so Stefen Fangmeier and Ellen Poon at ILM would have a record of the lighting on Chip. We shot these ‘reference plates’ all through the movie, whenever CG characters would be added later.” (See sidebar with Ellen Poon).

“One interesting thing about digital manipulation is that it frees the camera to be able to move during what used to be a matte shot,” says Anderson. “It takes more time but any move can really be tracked. Joe loves to move the camera, and the fact that some 250 of our shots would involve digital work wasn’t about to keep him from doing just that.

“This particular shot with the Frazier was done with a jib arm and Weaver-Steadman head, so not only was it moving, but it was moving in that uneven way a fluid head and arm do. When you see the composite work that Stefen and Ellen have done on shots like this, you realize they really can do anything now!”

Finding light sources on sets, whether practical sets on the backlots of Warner and Universal, Warner Ranch, or stage sets, was always important for Anderson and crew. “Bill Sandell and set decorator Rosemary Brandenberg, in addition to creating beautiful sets, were always helpful providing sources of light,” he says.

One of Anderson’s favorite sets was the Blobotech Boardroom. “This is one of the first scenes in the movie, where Gil Mars meets the two remaining toy designers of the company he has just bought.

“Everyone else has been fired,” he continues. “The scene was originally designed to be shot on location in a real boardroom, with a giant 40 foot table, and scheduled to be shot very early. The casting of Gil Mars proved difficult, and the scene kept getting pushed back and back.

“Meanwhile, the location people began making more and more demands and placing greater restrictions, until finally, I felt we just couldn’t shoot there. Production didn’t want to build a set, but Bill and I finally convinced them we had no choice. We probably saved a day shooting by doing it on a stage,” Anderson explains.

“I wanted the lighting in the room to come from one huge fixture over the table, copying the location we lost. So, with Dave Morton and Frank Valdez (rigging gaffer), Bill built a beautiful 6 by 20-foot rig, based around rock and roll truss lighting. He hung this on chain motors.

“From underneath, it looked like any high-end down light table fixture made of fancy wood and metal grating,” Anderson explains. “From above, you could see where we mounted some 50 or 60 lights, including about 30 Tweenies, a dozen Babies, eight 2K Softlites, and mini Moles and Dedo lights.

“In addition to the lighting that came straight down on the table, the pipe rig supported many lamps that worked the walls and targeted characters as they walked around the table. It worked great!” Anderson enthuses.

For the store called The Inner Child, which Alan’s father owns, production used a set built on the backlot at Warner. This way, they could take advantage of the ‘French Street’storefronts situated across the street. Built from scratch, to match the feel of the City of Orange locations, the store was created with the idea that it would remain a permanent structure at Warners.

“So the construction coordinator, Marvin Salsberg, built an ‘upstairs,’ which could open to the store through removable ceiling pieces with catwalks both around the outside and across the middle of the ceiling,” Anderson explains. “This allowed us to light from above.”

Anderson created an “attic of lighting” with an assortment of 1200 HMI PARs and 4K PARs.

“One of the sequences was a night interior, when the Commandos break out of their boxes and prepare to attack the Gorgonites,” he adds. “I needed a lot of stop, partly for the Frazier lens. Even when I wasn’t using it, I still needed depth to carry more than just one character, and depth for CG plates as well.

“We pounded lots of HMIs down through the muslin ceiling pieces and built a night ambience of 4 or 5.6. Changing the nature and the amount of light coming from overhead was made so easy with a whole ‘lighting attic’ up there.”

At one point, when Anderson was doing a scene where Alan comes to the store in the morning and discovers the Commandos have trashed the place, “we had to do a light change when he enters and hits the light switch,” he says. “We had every grip and half the electricians up in our ‘lighting attic’ ready to uncover HMIs when he hit the switch.

“It worked beautifully, but the best part was the noise you heard from above when he hit the switch. It sounded a bit like a sail on a boat coming about in a stiff wind! Greg Smith had his hands full, trying not to be distracted by it. Even for our day interiors at the store, a lot of stop was necessary to carry the outdoors, all the background on the street, and people coming into the store from outside.”

As Anderson calls it, “El Nino the Magnificent” became another factor in his challenges. “In this set, we needed light to come into the storefront windows and have it match from day to day and hour to hour,” he says. “The gloomy weather sometimes cut our day rather short. There were three or four days when, at 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon, we barely had a 2.8 out of the street!

“That would put us down near a 1.4 inside for day interior. So, we had to stop looking out the window. When we did have light, I found we needed a Musco light reaching up over the buildings across the street to keep a constant source coming in the windows. It saved us huge amounts of time and often extended our El Nino shooting days by an hour and a half or more.”

For Anderson, there were many “tabletop” shots. The biggest was a scene where Chip the Commando, after crashing his Mega Vehicle, floats downstream at night, regains “consciousness” in a drainage ditch and looks up to see another Chip Hazard above him. As he crawls up a rock, the  camera moves up with his POV to reveal the new Chip, an inflated, 35-foot tall figure on top of a huge Toy World store.

In the shot past Chip, to the store, Anderson was lighting him with little accent lights, fiber optics, and mini-product gags. In the background, he lit with three 18K Condors and a few dozen PARs splattered about the parking lot and roof of the store.

“Nothing strikes more fear into a cameraman’s heart, at least mine, than reading the line, ‘and the lights go out!’” says Anderson. “This is what happens in Alan’s house during the last 25 minutes of the movie. This is when the Commandos shoot out the windows, launch flaming tennis balls into the house, fire rockets from miniature helicopters, and actually fly a helicopter into the house,” he explains.

“Meanwhile, the various members of these two families, plus the two toy nerds, are running around, ducking, swatting tennis balls, putting out fires, and hiding in closets.

“Now what? I kept asking myself.”

Anderson started re-inventing light sources. “Well,” he thought, “the street lights are still on. The lights are on at Christy’s house next door. There was a bluish, night ambience around. Stuart has a couple of flashlights and lanterns. Irene lights a few candles.

“Then I thought there might be little spot fires as the tennis balls start landing,” he says. “There could be fires on the front lawn from the Commando vehicles that blow up, and other things like that.

“I found the trick was to never really be able to feel the source; and I generally found that if the light level didn’t scare me a bit, I probably had too much light,” he continues. “We had little bits of this and that—maybe one kind taking over in this part of the house, another kind over there, and different things going on at different times.

“Almost anything could be justified,” he continues, “as long as it was only a little. As long as the light was just kind of present, rather than feeling like it came from a source, it seemed to work.

“I got better at that balancing act as I went along,” he admits. “But it is still terrifying. Little bounce lights, soft Chimera lights, KinoFlos, and a great little flicker box that Great American Market makes were our saviors. Not to mention my mini-Xenon flashlight, that I always carry in my pocket for emergencies.”

In Christy’s house, the lights remained on, much to Anderson’s relief.

“This is the set where we first encounter the Commando vehicles,” he explains. “These were those clever assault vehicles the Commandos had been busy building in Phil Fimple’s garage (the late Phil Hartman).

“In reality, they were the creation of Ken Pepiot, Larz Andersen, and their merry band of effects people,” he adds. “All the cars were driven by various battery powered drill motors, outfitted with tool-based weapons, and, thanks to prop men Jerry Moss and Drew Petrotta, they were also outfitted with a great collection of small lighting fixtures.

“These little camp lights, reading lights, and mini things you find in hardware stores were vital to me,” he continues. “Otherwise, not only was there no other way to get accent lights on the Commandos driving them, but the vehicles themselves would just disappear in the dark streets, unless I lit the streets like daytime.”

In the film, the cars burst out of Phil’s garage, following a sequence where Alan rescues Christy (Kirsten Dunst). The two climb out of her bedroom window and down the trellis to the backyard.

“Harry Gavin’s Steadicam shot then starts on a twirling baton, Christy’s weapon of choice here. She grabs it and we pull back, as Alan lands in the shot. We then chase the two of them down the breezeway, to the front yard and into a tight two-shot close-up, as they stop and turn to the noise in the garage.”

This was another of those seemingly simple shots that required Anderson to light the house, the backyard, inside the house, the close two-shot at the end, and about six or seven houses surrounding Christy’s house. “Mike Endler, my 1st assistant, with remote focus in hand, ran after Harry four or five times as they both raced after Greg and Kirsten.

“On the sixth take, Mike’s foot caught the edge of the backdoor step and he went down like a sack of potatoes,” Anderson says. “It just about knocked him cold and sent him to the emergency room. The resulting headache was almost as great as the one he got whenever he had to focus on a full head close-up of Archer and Chip. Not much depth on a puppet head that’s only an inch and a half high!”

When the two young people stop running, the Commandos blast the garage door open and the convoy of six or seven vehicles begins chasing the kids. “One nifty tool I found for photographing these vehicles was Innovision’s RadCam,” says Anderson. “It is a radio-controlled camera car, outfitted with a lightweight Arri IIc. Also, added just in time for this shot, was a miniature remote control gear head that allowed us to pan.

“Expertly driven by Randall Rausch, this little car could put a lens right next to one of these vehicles as it drove down the road. And with a second radio control in his hand, Bob LaBonge, my operator, could keep the car framed up.”

After golfing a Commando or two with the baton, Christy hops on her motor scooter, picks up Alan, and they take off, Commandos in pursuit.

“For these shots, we hopped on a motorcycle sidecar arrangement that let us shoot past the rear wheel of the scooter at the Commandos racing toward us,” Anderson adds.

Anderson admits that his favorite shot of Archer was “one we did quite early in the show,” Anderson continues. After Alan has fallen asleep on his bed, Archer hears voices from down the hall that sound like his Gorgonite brothers. He hops off the bed and goes to the door.

“From outside in the hall a very low camera, our Weaver-Steadman Inclining Prism routine, sees Alan’s door open just a crack. Archer’s small hand touches the door and swings it open. Archer’s head begins to peek around and the camera moves into another close-up (another headache for Mike Endler),” Anderson says.

“The hand that opens the door is a separate hand-on-a-rod, since the puppet can’t rotate his arm that way,” Anderson reveals. “The door swings open on a monofilament, then one of our few walking puppets steps into view as the camera moves in. As the camera got closer in this tiny hallway, we brought in a little eye light. It’s a very simple shot that appears in the film—and very effective. All the effort and the many hands involved are invisible.

After the POV that follows, the next cut is an ILM CG shot of Archer starting down the hall as the sequence continues.

“The CG shots here intercut beautifully with puppet shots, and I think this film really works well in this regard,” Anderson says. “They work together in a way that I haven’t seen thus far.”

For the film Small Soldiers, it took an army of creative people, who all clearly understood the end result and were able to bring together the elements into a seamless film. “This picture certainly couldn’t have been made without the CG animation, and the CG animation would have never seemed so real without the puppet photography, so we definitely succeeded in that joint effort.”