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The
Last Dinosaurs
Two weeks after finishing work on this season of The Others, Johnson received a call from producer Larry Franco, asking whether he had any interest in meeting director Joe Johnston (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer, Jumanji, October Sky). "I read the script for the first time while I was sitting outside Joe's office," recalls Johnson. "As I finished reading, I just stared off into space. This would be working at a scale that I had never attempted. I'd done a lot of television and eight or nine features, including a fairly large second-unit on True Lies, but. . . then the film's UPM passed by and recognized my thousand yard stare and laughed 'Shelly, you look like you just read the script.' That kind of reassured me. I wasn't the only one who reacted in this way! There would be a lot of human moments within complex action sequences containing animatronic dinosaurs as well as complicated CG elements that seemed very overwhelming. We had the forced landing of their tourist plane, the old InGen compound and the water truck where the kid was living, the jungle, the Pteranadon aviary and a confrontation with a Spinosaurus on water during a night rain storm.
The next piece of advice Johnson sought was from Jurassic Park director of photography Dean Cundey, ASC. However, since Cundey was out of the country at the time, he turned to Lost World cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, ASC. "When we finally connected on the phone, he was very enthusiastic," imparts Johnson. "He told me that 'The creatures will give you everything you want. You need to concentrate on giving them a world that they can live in. Find an interesting way to look at their world and it will work.' I realized that since a lot of the movie is character-based, we would lose the audience if the camera was focusing on the Hollywood shot and not on what the characters were seeing." Taking their counsel to heart, Johnson struck off on his own. Jurassic III was to be shot in the 1:85 format, which was easier for effects as well as keeping the feeling of dinosaurs and vegetation existing together. He utilized Panavision cameras - two Platinums and a Panavised Arri III - with two VistaVision cameras for effects shots. His lenses were all Primos, with a lot of time spent on the 4-to-1 zoom. "When Joe starts rolling, you have to keep rolling, and just make a few little adjustments without cutting. That's why there's the zoom. We would hide the fact that we were on the zoom in the moves." The cinematographer capitalized on three Kodak stocks: EXR 5248 (100 ASA) for the Hawaii sequences; a mix of Vision 200T (5274) and Vision 500T (5279) in the massive jungle sets; and Vision 200T for the remaining footage. "I didn't want to shoot wide open with the big creatures, so I went for the faster stock here where I felt the need." At Stan Winston's creature studio, he conducted several tests with digital stills and Kodak's preview system. "I had already figured out what I wanted to do on stage with my coloring, I needed to see how that would react to the creatures." Johnson's first coloring choice effected what would represent the jungle. "I would create a sky ambiance with half CTB on some 200 Spacelights. This would provide a contrast to the direct sunlit areas which would vary in degrees of warmth." "For Joe and I, this was an opportunity to show another extreme to Jurassic Park," Johnson continues. "Although an audience will have expectations based on the previous films, we worked to show them something unexpected. The film feels as though it is set in a rotting environment. There is no new growth - that is to say there are no young green colors. The plants on the island are mature and in a state of decay. Although 'Jurassic Park' can be beautiful and highly textured, it is at the same time foreboding. So colors were important. Ed Verreaux and I worked with greens supervisor Danny Ondrieko on keeping 'young green' out of the vegetation and out of the lighting. This is a decaying island." On the jungle set, Winston and crew managed to fine-tune the dinosaurs' paint job accordingly. "With the Raptors, for example, the female creature is lighter than the male. We discovered that they looked too similar under the color combination I proposed, so creature effects supervisor John Rosengrant offered to lighten up some of her features. The female is dominant. We had to differentiate between the two on screen right away." Photographically, Johnson's prime aim was focusing on the small human story within the much larger context of the island. Most of the time, the camera was placed within and around a character's moving space. Had the camera been outside of space occupied by the characters, the audience would not feel their experience and thus be reminded that a movie was being watched. "The film is not so much a visual spectacle as it is a visual journey," Johnson explains. "We photographed the island with movement and visual layers. I would stack foreground and background elements as often as possible in order to feel its three dimensions. The audience should always feel that something could be lurking in the foreground. We always had shadows for creatures to dwell in." Light on Isla Sorna was cooler in nature, and contrasted with warmer or more normal tones for scenes set off isle. Jurassic III occurs in a section of the island hidden beneath a canopy of tall, mature trees. Johnson imbued the jungle light with a great deal of contrast. "I wanted to suggest that the Sun was up there, but that the thick canopy allows only shafts of light to penetrate." Areas of the jungle fall off into silhouette, taking on an almost night feel - very little hot sky is visible - and light is treated as a subtractive element. "That is to say that sometimes we accomplished more by switching lights off and playing areas in patterns of shadow. Atmosphere and density are heavy. Although some sources were motivated from unexpected directions, it had a simple character that takes the film away from a stage look. We wanted everything in frame to have an element of reflectance. The actors were usually sweating, and the greens were wetted down. With this, we projected hot edges and created images with how a subject reflected light rather than how one absorbed light." The overall idea was to present a terrifying environment where - with movement, color, contrast and composition - the audience would feel as though the characters are constantly doomed. "The look of the film was based on one pencil drawing that Joe found in a book by Don Henderson, who is a scientific illustrator specializing in scenes depicted in the petrified forest," Johnson says, backtracking a bit. "There was this one incredible drawing that had just the right atmosphere where the air was thick with moisture, foreground logs fell off into this very layered gray value that was sharp and detailed. Highlights were lighting the air and when they hit the ground they were so bright that the land almost disappeared. It was the only image that we found that came close to what we were going for and we all carried around copies of it." To produce such a look on the soundstage, Johnson first had to account for what he could accomplish in Hawaii. In tree-covered areas, he mainly shot with an 85C filter, which only gave him half correction. Essentially, it produced what he would get if using half-blue on the lights in studio. "The Hawaii portion of shooting was mostly allotted to scenes in wider spaces where we felt the need to open the movie up," he remarks. "For the more open scenes, I went with a normal correcting 85 filter. While in Hawaii, I also made notes on how the contrast effected our locations so that I could use these ratios as a starting off point for the sets. "Ed's design for the jungle centered around a large track laid on the stage floor for our Spinosaurus and T-Rex. They could only operate on the tracks and the sets had to be redressed around them in order to accommodate the action in the script. The Spinosaurus weighed 27,000 pounds and was enormous even in what is usually thought of as a big stage. It turned out that we could have used a space four times larger and it still would not have been enough. The set had different areas of rock formation and water features where we could create different looks for our numerous jungle scenes. In fact, the lack of good dense jungle locations in Hawaii brought us back to the Universal lot where we relied on Stage 12 much more. "Joe and I were much happier having the ability to control the environment and create the necessary mood since most of the film takes place during the day. In considering the lighting for Stage 12, I started off with the sky source. I elected to go with a large array of Spacelights gelled with one-half CTB for sky ambience. My first instinct was to use several enormous soft boxes that we could run on overhead track and bring in over our acting areas. But that proved impractical, since so many of the large greens had to be supported by the permanents overhead, there just wasn't enough airspace to use them well. "With the Spacelights, the greens department could cable off between the lights. I laid out the Spacelights to the same angle as the Spinosaurus track, knowing that the majority of the action would center on them. I clustered the Spacelights into bays skirted with Duvateen so that I could switch them on or off depending how I wanted the skylight to pool around the set. I was able to fly a 30- foot by 70-foot Light Grid frame under the center bay of lights so that the dinosaur's heads would reflect one broad source - not 200 little sources." This done, Johnson turned his attention to the background. Wanting the jungle to recede into darkness, he opted not to illuminate his painted backing and simply lit it with the available ambiance. He set banks of Maxi-Brutes shot through large Lite Grid frames around the set's perimeter that provided a soft glow to the smaller scale background trees. He also set a few 20Ks at full spot for background sun effects. "To handle the foreground sun areas I turned to Larry Parker at Mole Richardson," he says. "Whenever a cinematographer creates sunlight on stage, it seems we all think about one shadow, one source. I had seen the Mole Beams around and asked if he could make a few huge ones for us. A Mole Beam is a reworking of one of the oldest lights used for motion picture lighting. It is simply a globe reflected into a concave mirror that focuses all of the light off of the backside of the globe outward in an extremely focused intense beam. Larry showed me that he had been experimenting with using larger globes [as much as 20K] in his large 36-inch units, but I didn't see anything that would work as a single source. "I knew that I wanted to favor a backlight sun position on stage and thought about the idea that light in a jungle creates many shafts as it penetrates through foliage. So I thought that if I could place an array of smaller very focusable lights around the stage, I could create the illusion of one source - as long as all the beams were parallel and looked as though they were coming from one distant origin." Upon studying the plans and potential placements of the lamps around stage, Johnson realized that the total light count would number in the hundreds. Aside from the expense, focusing that many fixtures would be extremely time-consuming. "Key grip Bob Babin suggested we put the lights on chain motors so that we could move them around," Johnson discloses."We went down to ShowRigs, a company that specializes in truss and scaffold rigging systems, and came up with yet another plan. They devised a way to create a traveling lighting platform that could travel on overhead track the entire length of the stage. I laid out two sets of tracks on the North and South sides of the set. Each track could hold as many as three 20-foot lighting platforms with eight Mole Beams each. "I could move the platforms along the tracks, raise or lower them, and focus the lights into a series of parallel beams anywhere on the stage in a matter of a few minutes, and with only 44 lights! Because we were working with backlit focused beams falling on an uneven jungle floor, there were no noticeable multiple shadows, and because of the design of the MoleBeams, there was almost no spill. Larry could only make four 20K units in time for us, so we rounded the rest of the order out with the 24-inch 10K units. I wanted to go tungsten with the Sun on stage since we would be doing some warming to the lights and, compared to HMIs, they are more reliable over a period of months." The misters offered the final and probably most important addition to Johnson's lighting schematic. "They respond differently than smoke because you can go fairly thick with them in background areas and they don't build and muddy-up the foreground after a period of time. The mist lays in very quickly as well. You just turn them on, make a slight pressure adjustment and go." On one occasion in Stage 12, Johnson was preparing a scene with actress Tea Leoni as her character is in one part of the jungle calling out to her son and Dr. Grant. Actors Trevor Morgan and Sam Neill had been photographed days before for the reverse shot. "Watching their scene on the monitor, which was a long tracking shot through the trees, Tea asked, 'What part of Hawaii did you shoot this in?' Joe said, 'You're standing on the spot right now!' Tea looked around and said, 'Whoa, good job!' It was very funny and one of the best compliments that I could have gotten!" The most extensive scenes shot on Stage 12 include the crash landing of the Kirbys' airplane into the trees and the final part of a Raptor chase that starts in a kennel area of the Ingen compound, proceeds across a field of stampeding Hadrosaurs and leads into the jungle. "A great majority of both of these sequences took place looking up into the trees," declares Johnson. "In these cases, gaffer John Sprague would move our lighting platforms near the trees to backlight the mist which would conceal the permanents. We spent a lot of time on the Super Technocrane mounted with the Libra III head. With the crane we could work easily in the trees and create fast moves to carry our actors either up or down the trees. For a sequence where the fuselage of the airplane is balancing precariously on the branches, we could use the Technocrane to reach into the open end of the plane body while it moved freely on a gimbal, mimicking the unstable movements by the actors inside. For shots where we needed to move from the ground to the full height of the stage we used a Lenny Arm III." Complexities of logistics came to bear during the climactic confrontation with the Spinosaurus in the river as our intrepid protagonists are trapped inside a small cage on a tiny boat that has just lost power. Lurking underwater, the monstrous mammal attacks them from below the surface. Adding to the tension, the boat is leaking gas and the remaining survivors have to free themselves before the ensuing explosion. "Since it was impractical to take the Winston Spinosaurus onto any location, we decided to shoot the scene at Falls Lake on the Universal backlot. We would be dealing with lighting a huge area for rain while having the ability to raise the light levels to a 5.6 to 8.0 for the large amount of fire required for the scene. It was a challenge to shoot the scene with four cameras over eight nights and find placements for the numerous effects rigs, creature rigs and still focus on the characters. "I knew that I had to come up with a lighting rig that would be flexible and adjustable in order to accommodate all these elements. I decided to use a single source that I could move around the set, as the shots required. We put together a large softbox that was 20 feet by 20 feet by 8 feet, which we lit with nine 20K Skypans gelled with one-quarter CTB.We mounted the box onto a 240-foot crane that could work over the four other effects cranes that supported rainbars. There was so much stuff up there that if you looked up it made you dizzy!" he adds. "As on Stage 12, we would be shooting around the fact that the Spinosaurus was mounted on a small track that only gave him 15 feet of travel. The action in the scene would need to be staged and cheated around him, which meant that my lights were constantly on the move. Gaffer John Sprague's electrical crew gave us D.C. power in the water so we could safely augment with 20Ks on platforms. With all the obstacles we never had a power failure on the lake. In order to deal with the rain, we went to Hydroflex where they made up a bunch of their Hydrobags with air-knives on the front flat - they were our saving grace. They even made one for our little Beaumont VistaVision camera. "When the fire began, we would lower the softbox and run all nine Skypans at full power in order to achieve a light level that would keep the flames an orange color. With all that light, I still wish I had yet another stop to knock the flames down even more. The scenes where the actors are trapped underwater were shot on Stage 27 in the large tank. We had an underwater camera operated by Mike Ferris, as well as the Hydrohead underwater remote head. Our camera crew worked tirelessly and I am so grateful to them for being fearless in the face of so many unfriendly camera elements. Our A-camera crew - operator Don Devine, first assistant Mike Martino and second assistant Dave Taylor - were mostly on the Super Technocrane. Our B-, C- and D-cameras were scattered about in the water and operated by Scott Browner, Scott Ressler, and Phil Lee. "All of this sounds
like a lot, and I guess it is," Johnson concludes. "Since
this was my first real large scale movie, I learned how important it
is to have the support of knowledgeable producers like Larry Franco
and Kathleen Kennedy. When I asked our UPM, David Womark, what was different
for him about making these kinds of movies, he said that one of the
most expensive things he could do was say 'no' to the wrong thing. Although
a lot of the rigging solutions on Jurassic Park III were expensive
for them, it was my job to see to it that expense equaled efficiency
and, for Joe, the rigs also needed equal flexibility. Our crew worked
hard to create a lighting and rigging design that provided for these
components. Even though the film was full of technical challenges, we
felt it was most important to create an environment where our thoughts
would be on the details of shooting the story." |
"This
time it's a small human story within the framework of a large effects
film," says cinematographer Shelly Johnson, ASC of the third installment
of Jurassic Park, the box office busting "dinosaur"
franchise from the minds of writer Michael Crichton and director Steven
Spielberg. "In this story, they have done away with the 'corporate
villain.' We would be dealing with people and nature and human beings
finding their own strengths and weaknesses. We wanted to be true to
the human story and see the action from their point of view." Jurassic
III envisions the efforts of Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) in helping
a wealthy divorced couple Paul and Amanda Kirby (played by William H.
Macy and Tea Leoni) find their son Eric (Trevor Morgan), who mistakenly
lands on the island after his para-sail drifts off course. Even with
such an intimate tale at its core, Johnson nevertheless found himself
perplexed about how to depict the awesome scope of this project's prehistoric
predators.
First
off, Johnson got several great pieces of advice. First he called upon
Allen Daviau, ASC, who did extraordinary amounts of day exteriors in
an on-stage jungle for Congo. In watching the High-Def version
of that picture, Daviau showed Johnson what he felt worked and what
didn't. "I've known Allen for a long time and he is always so generous.
We went over everything in detail and I saw how he handled the exteriors
by his use of color, misters and other tools. On Congo, Allen
created a large sky on a stage with very low ceilings by positioning
lights in the ozone area above the permanents which contained diffusion
material." Johnson's jungle was being built at Universal's Stage
12, which at about 49 feet in height gave him 19 feet more than Daviau
had. "That was a lot but still not enough. There were plenty of
shots in this script that would go right up into the permanents and
beyond." Johnson learned from Daviau that a careful use of misters
is key in creating depth, as is "taking full advantage of the receding
scale of the jungles so cleverly created by production designer Ed Verreaux
[Contact, Mission to Mar, The Scorpion King]," Johnson adds.
"By adding misters - highly filtered water through emitters to
create a curtain of vapor - I could get a curtain that would effect
only the background. This way, people could walk out of the 'depth'
and create the illusion of a deeper jungle."