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Plastic
Man By Bob Fisher • Photos By Merie Wallace and Claudette Barius
Zielinski actually ended up on this comedic project through the referral of a working colleague. "Barry Robison [production designer] told me he was working on a visually interesting comedy, and he arranged for me to read the script. I liked the story, but realized it could be made in many different ways depending on the director." Helming Bubble Boy was TV commercial director Blair Hayes, whose reputation for unorthodox and daring approaches to 30-second storytelling hit a high note with his Austin Powers trailer spoofing Star Wars - The Phantom Menace. During an introductory meeting, Zielinski and Hayes formed instant simpatico. "I really liked Blair's concepts," the cinematographer says. "He had untraditional ideas about comedy. Jimmy is always separated from the girl he loves and everyone else by a plastic bubble. The director wanted to create a world around the bubble that's not totally realistic. We agreed on a subtly abstract look with main characters who are believable but also cartoonish." "One of my first suggestions was shooting Bubble Boy in Super 35 format," Zielinski continues. "I felt that would give the film an edge that you don't expect to see in comedies. I felt we could use the wider frame to create a claustrophobic feeling in the house and more interesting composition showing Jimmy in the world." He, director Hayes, designer Robison and other members of the creative team discussed the possibilities for composing Bubble Boy in widescreen format, while drawing upon such visual references as Dr. Strangelove (shot by Gilbert Taylor) another comedy with an improbable theme. Though Hayes storyboarded scenes, Zielinski utilized the sketches primarily as a communications tool. While shooting, the director remained open to veering from the storyboards to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. About 40 percent of Bubble Boy occurs in the family's home, where the audience gets to know Jimmy. Zielinski established the setting with exterior shots on a cul-de-sac street in a Palmdale housing development. Built on a Hollywood soundstage, the sets feature the bedroom, a piece of hallway, the top of a staircase and a bathroom. These rooms all measured a little larger than those built within a real house. To accentuate a feeling of claustrophobia, the ceiling sat a little lower than normal. But since the cinematographer wanted the sets to be as close as possible to shooting on location in a real house, the ceiling has no removable panels. Describing the setting as comfortable and mundane with earthtones, including warm beige, Zielinski's lighting was motivated by sources with small painterly touches of fill. Inside the house, he structured fixtures around windows and motivated sources on-set, with a little fill added for dramatic effect. Close to Jimmy's bedroom window, they placed an orange-hued lamp to mimic a sodium-vapor streetlight. Though Jimmy's bedroom is supposedly on the second floor, the set only sat three feet off the ground. Zielinski kept the audience from noticing that inconsistency by blowing out the windows in day scenes. That hot-hazed technique meshes with the narrative since Palmdale is a desert-based town. Besides adding a bit of visual punctuation, the ambiance gives the room a smaller feel, amplifying the sense of claustrophobia. Zielinski orchestrated the angle and quality of light coming through the windows to match the time of day. He capitalized on a lighting box he built previously for Washington Square. The apparatus has two MaxiBrutes in a big box on wheels that makes for quick and easy repositioning. He applied diffusion before lights to fine-tune the light's quality and intensity. He also used a 5K projector to create a strong, direct beam of sunlight. "The space on the stage was physically limited both outside and inside the bubble," he explains. "Sometimes, a Steadicam was the only way to make a shot with the energy a scene required. We had a brilliant Steadicam operator, Bill Brummond, so I was able to design complex shots. For example, there's a night scene where the girl comes to visit with Jimmy after a party. She's a little drunk and unsteady. There's a Steadicam shot of her from inside the bubble over Jimmy's shoulder - both of them are moving. It's a visual clue that allows the audience to experience how Jimmy sees her. Exteriors for Jimmy's cross-country trek were photographed in and around Los Angeles. Camera movement on his roadtrip tends to be more energetic than within his home and even includes some handheld shots. After Jimmy leaves his household constraints, the shots' motion becomes increasingly more energetic. Every scene, however, also suggests its own flow - whether done handheld, Steadicam, as a tracking shot or static off a dolly. Usually, the camera sat just below eye level, which allowed Zielinski to capture the ceiling in house shots, and use backgrounds to present Jimmy as being in new and different environments. "Background is equally important in the composition process as is where the actor stands in front of the lens." On Bubble Boy, Zielinski opted for Vision 200T (5274) for everything but night exteriors, explaining that the smooth grain of this non-intrusive emulsion records deep blacks, true colors and a wide tonal range. He did resort to the Vision 500T (5279) for darker night exteriors. Since shooting through plastic distorts images, the cinematographer did extensive tests with different materials to search for the right thickness and translucency. "It's the same as using a cheap filter on the lens and we realized that any distortion or loss of focus would be magnified when the lab optically 'squeezed' the images into the 2.40 aspect ratio. In addition to selecting the right plastic, it was important for us to record a strong negative with properly focused images. We were shooting through plastic at least 90 percent of the time. There's a big half-dome made of plastic in Jimmy's bedroom, and some tubes which allow him to get into other parts of the house. When he is traveling across the country, his head and the top of his body are covered by his homemade plastic bubble." The cinematographer also had to avoid telltale reflections of camera gear and personnel on the bubble surface. Along with a disciplined crew, that required careful light placement and camera angle selection. He discovered that putting the plastic at the right distance from the lens for tighter shots from Jimmy's point-of-view rendered slightly distorted images with a hint of grain, which amplified the look that he and director Hayes desired. Zielinski also occasionally added reflections of characters and objects on the bubble's surface to draw attention to the barrier separating the boy from other people. Sometimes the camera takes a subjective, spectator-like stance while other times the audience seems to share Jimmy's life-in-the-bubble experience. "There was no simple formula for deciding when to put the audience inside the bubble with Jimmy. It was a question I asked the director for each shot in every scene. Are we with Jimmy inside the bubble, or are we outside looking in?" Zielinski wielded a single Panaflex Platinum camera, Primo primes and one short zoom. The few exceptions included the times he used a second camera to cover scenes from different angles and on late afternoon daylight exteriors when sunsets moved very quickly through the November/December skies. He selected a wide variety of lenses - from 10mm to 400mm - to match the dynamics of each scene. From time to time, he used extreme lenses, ranging from ultra-wide framing that emphasizes Jimmy in an environment to tight long lens shots that draw viewers into intimate, facial close-ups. "You can make a shot in many different ways, but you always have to remember how they are going to cut together. There has to be some logic. Blair and I were always talking about how we could sell a joke differently. Sometimes we'd start a scene very tight and then pull away and go wider and reveal something unexpected. I love this format [Super 35] because it gives you a bigger canvas with so many options for framing which are not always obvious to the audience." Comedic hi-jinx in Bubble Boy is of both a physical and verbal nature. For instance, after Jimmy leaves his safe nest and begins his journey, backgrounds are nondescript - signs on a gas station, diner and bus depot read Gas, Food and Bus, respectively. Once in the middle of the desert, Jimmy meets bulked-up Latino biker Slim (Danny Trejo) covered in tattoos. The biker is trying to fix a flat tire and is in an extremely sour mood. A little menacing at first, the biker puts his knife to the bubble's surface and grills Jimmy about his identity and why he's covered in a plastic sheath. After explaining his dilemma, Jimmy wins the biker over by volunteering to help him repair the flat, using patches for potential bubble bursting. Jimmy ends up riding on the back of the motorcycle in the direction of a beautiful sunset on the desert horizon. Zielinski composed a static shot with the motorcycle riding away from the camera, getting smaller and smaller in frame. It's a beautiful cliché shot synchronized with optimistic music, but after about five seconds, the audience sees the bubble falling off the motorcycle - there is no cut-away to a close-up of the surprised expression on Jimmy's face. "You have to give a lot of the credit to Jake [Gyllenhaal], who is in almost every scene," remarks Zielinski. "He had to make the audience empathize with Jimmy with a sheet of plastic between him and the other actors. On exterior shots, condensation sometimes formed inside the bubble. Jake operated a device that blew cold air on the plastic and also wiped condensation off the inside of the bubble with pieces of fabric." When Jimmy arrives in Niagara Falls before the wedding, production established the famously romantic setting by filming the actors in front of bluescreen and greenscreen. Those elements were digitally composited with stock background plates culled from an IMAX film about Niagara Falls. Tim Landry from The Secret Lab, Disney's in-house facility, supervised the visual effect shots. "I don't think these scenes could be any more believable if we had traveled to Niagara Falls to film them live," marvels Zielinski. "How can you miss when you begin with 70 millimeter background plates? We matched everything to those plates." Front-end lab work was done
by CFI, which provided film dailies. "After his experiences in
the commercial world where you work on a monitor all the time, Blair
loved watching film dailies on a big screen - it opened up a new world
for him," says Zielinski. "For example, there is a shot of
a little girl delivering a line at the end of a long handheld shot.
When Blair saw it played back on the [video tap] monitor, he didn't
feel good about it. She seemed too small in the shot. He remarked that
maybe her line would have to disappear in editing. The next day, Blair
saw it projected on a big screen and loved the shot." When asked
if such glad tidings extend to the on-screen drama as well, Zielinski
smiles, and says, "Would you be surprised if I said there is a
happy ending?" |
A
common myth of cinema holds that comedy is less artful than drama. But
if the truth be told, cracking jokes can be a very demanding form of
drama. Consider the Touchstone /Buena Vista Pictures release Bubble
Boy, which deals with a young man born without an immune system.
Jimmy (Jake Gyllenhaal) spends his early years at home inside a plastic
bubble until falling in love propels him out of his artificial comfort
zone. The picture opens in a Palmdale, California neighborhood where
Jimmy watches the world - specifically, fetching girl-next-door Chloe
(Marley Shelton) - through his bedroom window. Initially, it's a one
way, voyeuristic relationship, but she eventually becomes a regular
visitor and friend. One day, the girl introduces Jimmy to her fiancé
and tells the bubble-bound lad of their impending marriage at Niagara
Falls. Realizing he is losing the love-of-his-life, Jimmy decides to
go to Niagara Falls to convince her to marry him instead. After crafting
a homemade portable bubble, he leaves home, hell-bent on reaching Niagara
Falls. Totally naïve about the world-at-large, everything becomes
a new experience. Jimmy eats in a diner, rides a bus and a motorcycle,
flies in an airplane and meets a variety of oddball characters who assist
him in various ways.
Originally
from Poland, cinematographer Jerzy Zielinski studied cinema at the state
film school in Lodz. "I thought it was fascinating that film speaks
a common language that everyone in the world can understand," he
recalls. "That's especially true for cinematographers, because
we are communicating with the audience non-verbally." Five years
after graduation, Zielinski made his first feature film Aria for
an Athlete. He earned a scholarship to continue his education in
England and shot his first Western film in Ireland. He is compiling
an eclectic body-of-work, which includes Cal, Powder, Washington
Square, Swing Kids, Third Miracle, Home Fries, Galaxy Quest and
an ABC pilot called The Job.