Newsletter #241
The Crack of Dawn
I was the 2nd unit director on the first and third (of five) Hercules pilot movies, and I was the main unit director on the fifth. When I finished work on the first film, Doug Lefler, who had storyboarded several films for Sam Raimi, took over. And Doug had convinced Sam and Rob Tapert, the executive producers, to let him do some old-fashioned forced perspective special effects that are so cool it’s ridiculous. If you shoot it right, something that is near to the camera and something that’s far away can look like they’re right next to each other.
In the silent movies they used a version of forced perspective FX called, “Hanging Miniatures.” In the 1925 Ben Hur they built the enormous coliseum set for the chariot race, filled it with a thousand costumed extras, and when they set up for the wide long shots of the whole place they decided that it didn’t look big enough. So they added a hanging wooden model of a second, bigger level of the coliseum, about three feet wide, right up near the camera that would theoretically hold another two thousand people, except that they were little, two-inch wooden dolls all mounted on dowel rods, except that the whole second level is slightly out of focus, like it’s farther away instead of closer up. When the actual human extras on level one stand up, the wooden dolls go up on the dowel rods . . . and you just can’t tell it’s fake. Until it was pointed out to me I had no idea.
So, back to Doug replacing me as 2nd unit director on Hercules, and immediately having cooler ideas than me. He shot several perfectly-achieved forced perspective shots. In one a giant removes a cage from over a human woman’s head, except the giant and the cage are in the foreground and the woman is way the hell in the background and it only looks like he’s a giant and she’s tiny and in a cage. It’s exceptionally clever.
To my endless delight, the bible of forced perspective special effects is the Walt Disney live-action film, Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1958), which is a musical starring Sean Connery in his very first starring role. The Disney effects guys figured out every possible way to make Sean big and the little people small.
When I came back for the third film, I felt out-done. Doug had a vision to do something really interesting that wasn’t done anymore; I had merely done my job. But he fired me up, and I found a vision, or at least a variation on his vision. I reached into the way-back machine and pulled out another live-action effect that went back to the silent era, also a forced perspective effect, called Glass Paintings, which are like hanging miniatures, but cheaper.
I finagled one day of shooting, an artist who I was assured could paint quickly and realistically, a five-foot square pane of glass affixed to a wooden stand, a dozen extras dressed as peasants, a wheelbarrow, some wooden tools, and a variety of baskets and bundles. We set up in a park in Auckland with an area of undulating green grass the size of a football field surrounded by trees. When the sheet of glass was set up in front of the camera, I framed the shot so that the edge of the green hill in front of us cut a wavy horizon line across the middle of the frame.
The artist stepped up with his palette of paints and paintbrushes, and in about an hour painted a realistic-looking village of ten or twelve thatched huts reposing on the hill. Then I placed the peasant extras all over the bottom half of the frame, both going to and coming back from the painted village, hauling bundles, pushing a wheelbarrow, and carrying tools. Exposed properly, it looked like the people were coming and going from the village, which was in slightly soft focus, meaning it was either far away or very close. Since the village being very close doesn’t make any sense, the human brain naturally decides it’s far away and puts it there.
Once we got that, the artist and some helpers cleaned the glass, then the artist snappily painted a castle on the hill and we repeated the process with the extras in a different configuration. We shot five glass paintings that day of various villages and castles, and I’m proud to say that all of them were used in the five Hercules movies.
It’s a really cool trick, and I’d like to thank Doug for inspiring me to think of it and suggest it to Rob Tapert. I’d also like to thank Rob for letting me do it, otherwise I would never have had the chance to shoot an old fashioned effect like a glass painting.
The sun will come out tomorrow, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.