Traveling
with Dean Cundey, ASC, to a Place Called Jurassic Park
The whole world
is watching and waiting. Expectations are running high, and that's
a colossal understatement. It's like saying Cindy Crawford is nice looking,
or Michael Jordan plays basketball. You can't measure expectations
for Jurassic Park in ordinary terms, because the level of anticipation
is way off the charts.
Countless millions
of people have read the book. Three million paperback copies were sold
during the last few months alone. It has caused a lot of sleepless
nights. Once you start turning the pages, it is difficult to put Michael
Crichton's bestseller aside. Most readers have already seen the movie
in the theatres of their minds.
Jurassic Park
the movie. It's like a feeding frenzy. Everyone wants a piece of the
action. At last count, there were more than 140 licenses issued to
companies planning to merchandise everything from baseball caps and
tee shirts, to fast food and cereal. Keep in mind, all of that happened
before the first ticket was sold.
It has a lot to
do with our fascination with dinosaurs, a cacophony of pre-historic
creatures with tongue-twisting names. Many of us first learned about
dinosaurs in pre-school picture books. They are typically portrayed
as benign, loveable and bumbling human-like creatures. One of the most
popular contemporary television characters is a soft and cuddly creature
named Barney, who dresses in a purple dinosaur suit. Most of his fans
are two to four years old, and they love him dearly.
But like humans,
dinosaurs came in all varieties, including some particularly vicious
carnivores called velociptors, which made the worst of Freddie Krueger's
nightmares on Elm Street seem like pleasant daydreams. There are more
than sufficient velociptors in Jurassic Park.
Dean Cundey, ASC,
had just finished shooting Hook for Steven Spielberg when the
director asked if he was interested in translating Crichton's book into
the language of film. Cundey had a pretty good idea of what to expect.
"Steven was
involved with the script for maybe two or three years," he says.
"He'd talk about it sometimes when I was shooting Hook.
The production designer was Rick Carter. He was already working on
the sets. We had worked together on Back to the Future. I got
interested in what he was doing, the concept paintings and the research.
While we were shooting Hook, he'd come around with the latest
drawings for Steven to look at or approve. I got involved as an observer
very early in the project. Steven asked if I wanted to shoot the film
after we finished Hook."
Cundey knew from
the start it wasn't going to be a film that the audience was going to
watch passively. "Steven likes to move the audience through scenes,
so they feel like they are really participating," he says.
Cundey likens the
use of the camera in Jurassic Park to a character. The continuous
movement, the choice of interesting, and sometimes extreme angles generates
enormous emotional energy. It's like a tactile visual overlay, which
sometimes has the audience white knuckled, gripping the arms of their
seats.
"It's like
they are along for the ride," says Cundey, when the characters
tour Jurassic Park on a tram. Look around the theatre, and body
language tells it all, as people sway with the visual twists and turns,
and crane their necks peering left and right, high and low, as if they
are looking for predators lurking in the shadows, or just around the
next bend in the track.
"It's a signature
technique with Steven," Cundey says. "He brings the audience
right into a character's face, so they can see what's in his or her
eyes. It's a way of developing empathy. The camera is always moving,
gradually getting closer to the point of danger. It heightens the sense
of drama and suspense."
Crichton wrote
a vivid action-adventure story about greed, and science gone awry.
That theme is hardly surprising for the man who wrote the Andromedia
Strain and similar tales. In this story, a rich investor builds
a theme park set in the Jurassic age on an island off the coast of Costa
Rica. Only instead of make-believe dinosaurs he commissions a scientist
to clone the real things from DNA samples. A few guests visit the island
before it opens to test the validity of this experiment with genetic
engineering. Guess what happens.
In a large way,
the real stars of Jurassic Park are mechanical puppets and computer-generated-images
(CGI). The digital dinosaurs have to blend seamlessly with the live-action
footage, otherwise you might as well bill it as a comedy. Remember
Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra? The difference between a snicker and a
gasp is slight. Either way, the influence is contagious when strangers
are sharing space in a darkened theatre watching light and shadows flicker
on a movie screen.
Cundey's phone
tends to ring when directors are making big-time visual effects films
like this. He has already collaborated with Bob Zemeckis on five such
films, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the Back to the
Future trilogy, and Death Becomes Her. Cundey earned an
Oscar nomination for Roger Rabbit, which smoothly integrated
a cast of animated characters with live-action film. In Hook,
Peter Pan flew with reckless abandon, thanks to the magic of digital
compositing and wire removal.
How do you light
a mechanical puppet so it looks and feels real? How do you make the
light falling on the digital creatures looks like it was motivated by
believable sources? How does the compositing of digital characters
affect the overall mood and texture of lighting, the way the camera
moves, and the way images are composed? What about the shadows cast
by digital characters? There are endless questions like these.
"You have
to visualize what it would look like if they were there, and plan to
shoot it as though they were actors," Cundey says. "ILM has
done a fabulous job. It's not just wire animation with some texture
mapping. They have stretched and squashed the skin. There are moving
wrinkles. There are details that you take for granted when you look
at something in the real world. All of these things add to the illusion."
Cundey handled
the casting of shadows in a variety of ways. Sometimes it was as simple
as having a grip holding a flag or a cut-out of the right shape in front
of a light. It took some practice, and it had to be choreographed like
a stage production. The timing and angles had to be perfect. Other
times, shadows were computer-generated and composited digitally.
"We usually
made that decision on the spot," he says. "There is a quality
to a real shadow that is difficult to replicate in a computer. But sometimes
it wasn't possible because of the position and angle of light. So we
asked the animators for help."
One of the Hollywood
trade dailies recently called Cundey "Hollywood's master effects
lensman." He doesn't mind being stereotyped. It has happened
before. For a while, he was categorized as a specialist in horror films.
Another time it was comedies. But the truth is that there is a world
of difference between his other visual effects films and Jurassic
Park. All of his previous films in the visual effects genre were
wrapped in an aura of fantasy. Roger Rabbit was like a comic
book on film. There were no surprises for the audience in Hook.
They knew it was a visualization of a storybook, and everyone knows
that Peter Pan can fly. It was kind of an inside joke between Zemeckis
and the audience when Meryl Streep's head was on backwards in Death
Becomes Her.
But the key to
Jurassic Park is hyper-reality. "The audience has to believe
the unbelievable," says Cundey. "You have to give them as
much reality and recognizable truth as you can. They have to walk in
the shoes of the characters portrayed by Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff
Goldblum, Richard Attenborough and others. They have to feel the terror
when the experiment goes wrong, and a handful of people isolated on
an island become prey for the dinosaurs.
Some of the predators
are literally bigger than life, like the mechanical tyrannosaurus rex
which towered 18 feet. It called for a lot of problem-solving. One
important sequence was shot on a stage. The visual perspective from
the point of view of the actors was looking up at a fairly extreme angle.
How do you deal with the ceiling? Ideally, Cundey would have simply
blacked it out. But that would have given him some serious problems
with the fire marshall.
"The grip
department at Universal came up with some black louvers which we were
able to funnel lights through," he says. "When we needed
to, we could angle them to create a black background. At night, we
opened them up, and that satisfied the requirements of the fire department."
One of the reasons
Spielberg opted to shoot Jurassic Park in the Academy standard
1.85:1 aspect ratio instead of wide screen anamorphic format, was to
give visual emphasis to the huge size and bulk of the biggest dinosaurs.
"In Hook
we had scenes with rows of people," he says. "An anamorphic
frame gave us the scope we needed to capture that side-to-side dimension.
In Jurassic Park, you get a better sense of the sheer size of
tyrannosaurus rex compared to the people in the 1.85:1 format."
Also, because of all of the digital compositing, it made sense to stick
with the smaller image area.
"They (the audience) have to believe the dinosaurs are real,"
says Cundey, and everything is riding on that fragile premise. "You
have to give them as much reality and recognizable truth as possible,
so they say to themselves, 'Oh yeah, that's possible.' They have to
suspend a tremendous amount of disbelief, and accept a serious fantasy
as real. I've always felt that the way to get an audience to accept
the unbelievable is to create reality that they do believe."
If you think about
the sub-text of that statement there are better frames of reference
in Cundey's career for Jurassic Park than his big-budget visual
effects films. Halloween, his breakthrough film with John Carpenter,
and Escape form New York are among a series of features he shot
during the late '70s and early '80s, which helped define a genre of
reality-based horror movies made on shoestring budgets. Forget the
content, if you can. Look at the power of the images and the emotions
they evoked.
It's not a new
idea. "I heard it first from James Wong Howe when he was about
70 years old," Cundey recalls. Howe was teaching a class at UCLA
while he was preparing to shoot The Molly McGuires. Cundey was
a student with a split major in film and architecture. After class,
Howe would move to a nearby coffee shop, where he talked with some of
the students. "He said as he got older, he learned to simplify
by working with less light. I always remembered that when I was being
challenged to do more with less. It (low-budget films) taught me to
think about how to solve lighting problems without making things more
complicated. I learned how to improve a scene by subtracting light,
and how I could get two or three shots out of one set up."
You can see that
influence in Jurassic Park, where shadows are used to conceal
just as light reveals. That's one key to the feeling of anticipation
which builds throughout the film. "I think he (Spielberg) used
the dinosaurs very wisely," Cundey says. "He shows you just
little quick pieces of them in the beginning. There is a sense of mystery,
and gradually we reveal more and more."
The visual effects
gurus used to say less is more. The idea was that if you showed the
audience too much, too long, they would figure out the trick. "The
idea is to show enough for them to understand the moment," Cundey
says. "But not so much so that they are sitting there trying to
figure out how we did it." You can compare it to a fisherman baiting
a hook.
How long is too
long? "It's getting longer, because the effects are getting more
sophisticated," he says. "But so is the audience, at least
on a subconscious level." In other words, there are no rules for
doing this right that you could put in a textbook with impunity. It's
something you feel. One thing he is sure about. You have to make the
audience empathize with the characters. If they don't care about someone,
it doesn't matter if they become lunch for a hungry velociptor.
Cundey also credits
his low budget film days with teaching him that there is more to cinematography
than artistry and craftsmanship. He learned how to get along with the
cast, and how to organize and motivate his crew to give him a little
more than they thought they had.
"I don't care
what the budget is, if you don't have good chemistry, you can't make
a good film." His camera operator Ray Stella, SOC, has been with
him for 18 years. There are others who have been on his crew for 15
years, and even the newest people have been working together for seven
or eight years.
As much as anything
else, Jurassic Park was a logistical triumph, stretching over
some six months of original photography, mainly on four big sound stages
at Universal Studios, packed with elegantly detailed sets, from the
control room at the park to elaborate jungle exteriors.
"We shot many
of the jungle night exteriors, visual effects and action sequences on
stages, because it was easier to control lighting," Cundey says.
The interiors were mainly captured on the 500-speed Eastman EXR 5296
film. The big daylight exteriors were filmed on Kauai, which doubled
for the island which was the setting for Jurassic Park in the
book. Mainly, these were big day exteriors, designed to give the audience
a sense of the scope of the park.
It's an interesting
example of how the art and craft of filmmaking converge. In Back
to the Future III Cundey opted to shoot daylight exteriors with
the Eastman EXR 50-speed daylight film, because he knew he would be
shooting in bright sunlight, and he wanted the richest possible imagery,
with deeply saturated colors, devoid of the slightest hint of grain.
However, in Jurassic Park, there are daylight scenes where the
audience gets glimpses of one or more dinosaurs in the background.
The latter has to be in sharp focus, because the image of the dinosaur
is going to draw the audience's eye to that area of the frame.
Cundey never knew
when clouds would float by and block the sun, creating dark shadows.
He anticipated shifts in sunlight by using the 100-speed EXR 5248 film
to photograph exteriors, because it gave him the edge he needed to pull
a deeper stop, usually within the range of T-2.8 to 4. It's a subtle
difference, like a surgeon choosing a particular scalpel because it
just feels right.
"Steven likes
to storyboard," says Cundey. "It helps organize his thinking."
But he's also an intuitive director, who will often modify or throw
away the blueprint at the moment of photography. Not this time. "He
stuck pretty close to the boards, because of the schedule, and we were
going to be doing so much digital compositing."
Cundey shot most
of the plates for scenes destined for digital compositing in the VistaVision
format, using VistaFlex camera ILM developed for Roger Rabbit.
"You usually
work with a larger format camera for plate work, because you inevitably
lose some image quality as you go through each generation of optical
compositing," he says. "However, since compositing was done
digitally at ILM, it gave us the opportunity to try something new.
I shot the outside exterior plates in 35 mm film format using the 5245
film. That saved us some precious time. The image quality was pristine,
and the composites made with the 35 mm film plates, are transparent."
From the beginning,
Cundey says, everyone on the project was in touch with the fact that
the audience is going to have their eyes on the dinosaurs.
"I don't think
you can fool them with people in rubber suits, or conventional stop-motion,"
Cundey says. "Audiences have become too sophisticated to be fooled
by our old tricks. But I think they are going to be startled. It's
not just the digital dinosaurs. The mechanical puppets are the best
I've seen. The 18 foot tyrannosaurus rex is based on the same flight
simulator used for training F-14 pilots. It's all computer-controlled
with very sophisticated hydraulics. Its movements are so realistic
that it is easy to start feeling like you are out there with a real
dinosaur."
But it all comes
down to getting it on film. Except for some action sequences, where
he used a second camera for coverage, it was a one camera shoot. He
used a Panaflex Platinum camera with Primo lenses for interiors, and
usually a Primo zoom for variable focus on exteriors. There is no use
of diffusion or filters to alter the quality of the image. It's a straight
forward, clean look which he describes as "heightened reality."
"Steven believes
in visual story-telling," Cundey says. "He understands the
importance of setting the mood with light and creating arresting images
for the audience. That made it easy for me to say, 'It would look really
interesting if all the light came through that window, and the guy is
in silhouette, and then he steps into a pool of light.' You can say
something like that, and he understands exactly why. Other times, he'll
come up to you and describe a look he wants to see."
There's a sequence
where the characters portrayed by Attenborough, Neill, Dern and Goldblum,
have retreated to a bunker, which was built in case something went wrong.
Spielberg wanted a dramatic look, dark but still daylight.
"We decided
that all of the light sources should come from some very small windows,"
Cundey says. "We looked for angles where we could backlight. We
put a little smoke in the room. That allows the audience to see shafts
of warm light slicing through the darkness. Once we did that, we were
able to block the scene, and move the actors around. It's instinctual
with them. We framed a window between two people, and used some rim
light. It's a very dramatic setting which helps establish the mood.
They realize that everything has gone wrong, and they have to come to
terms with that reality."
Cundey used just
about every device there is for holding and moving cameras, from tripods,
to camera cars, PeeWee and Fisher dollies, a Chapman crane, a Steadicam
and a Mathews crane with a Camremote head. "I used the Camremote
a lot to put the camera in places we couldn't get to with a regular
dolly," he says.
It was the same
with lighting. Just a few years ago, Musco lights were revolutionary.
On Jurassic Park, at one time or other, Cundey used just about
all of the mobile light tools available, including Night Sun and Night
Light, for both daylight and night exteriors on the jungle set and in
Hawaii.
"We had a
big 20 K incandescent light," he says. "It gave us a single
source, and a single shadow. It gave us a believable source of sunlight,
which means we didn't have to open up the camera lens too much. So
we were pulling a deeper stop. Those are all of the things which tell
the audience at some subconscious level whether you are really outside."
He also made some
occasional use of the new slant focus Panavision lens, which can be
adjusted to move the field of focus from side-to-side to front-to-back.
"We used to have to struggle with a split-diopter in front of the
lens, to hold focus from the foreground to the background," he
says. "This lens makes it a lot easier. There's a brief scene
with one of the two youngsters in the foreground, and a dinosaur in
the background, where Cundey wanted to hold them both in crisp focus.
It makes the threat more immediate and menacing. If one of them goes
soft, somehow it distances the feeling of imminent danger.
In another scene,
Cundey used the slant focus lens to show someone working at a computer
console. He wanted the actor in sharp focus, and all of the labels
on the console readable. "It helps the audience understand a key
story point," he explains. These aren't the types of shots that
movie critics write about. They tend to be taken with landscapes, sunrises
and sunsets. But it is this attention to detail that draws the audience
into a film, and keeps them involved in the story.
"One of the
things which intrigues me about filmmaking is the ability it gives you
to create an illusion by getting the audience to believe something you
have invented," says Cundey. "It must be the same for actors,
writers and directors. I don't mind being stereotyped, because right
now, I'm enjoying the films I'm shooting. But I'll admit, there are
times when I dream about shooting a film with two actors in one room.
"
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