Michael Freeman: How Did You Shoot That? – Industrial Light and Magic

There’s a trick to this example, but I’ll leave that for a little later, below. You might be able to work it out before, though. One of the more enjoyable assignments I had from many for the Smithsonian magazine (more than 40 to date) was a story on Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’ special effects company. A few weeks ago I showed another shot – a straightforward one – from the same assignment, of Darth Vader’s helmet. This one below, however, was anything but straightforward….and that was exactly the idea. To be complicated. The FX procedures invented by ILM set the standards for the entire industry, and it was like a college. People went on from ILM to found their own FX shops.

Anyway, ILM, normally very reserved and security minded, didn’t normally allow magazines open access, but in the case of the Smithsonian, because of its reputation, they threw the doors open. Literally – to a sound stage, cloud chamber, animatronics studio, creature shop, the lot. I had two weeks and could play anywhere. My idea was to showcase the various complex processes, and combine them with an image from the movie – or at least an object or effect. This one was the famous DeLorean car used in Back To The Future 3, just released.

Here are the caption notes I delivered to the Picture Desk:

One of the most essential techniques from the repertoire of movie special effects is to superimpose one image on another so that they appear to be a part of the same picture. The process used is called ‘bluescreen’ after the large backlit screen that forms the backdrop for the object being photographed – in this case the model DeLorean car from the Back To The Future series. The car, being set up in front of a Vistavision camera on ILM’s principal stage by modelmaker Steve Gawley, is first filmed against the blue screen. When the film has been developed, it is copied optically through a special red filter; this turns the blue background black. From this, a black silhouette of the car is made. When the final composite is made, the car is re-photographed with a black background and the new background (here, a sky at sunset combined with yet another image, of funaroles in Iceland) is re-photographed with a black silhouette of the car. The black pieces of film prevent the double exposure that would otherwise occur. This complicated process makes it possible, when done with great accuracy, for this car (or anything else!) to fly anywhere. The same technique was used in this still photograph to enable the car to cross over from the studio to the outside world.

You probably got the trick by now, because of course bluescreen has been replace by greenscreen. And I made the shot in 1990. Right, it’s not a digital image: all the post-production was done in the old-fashioned way, using lith masks, register punches, on many sheets of 4×5-inch film and boxes of Polaroids to preview the results step by step. The result was almost perfect (the typical fault with these procedures was black matte lines – slight black outlining where the register hadn’t been micrometer-perfect. At this scale of reproduction, this was exactly how the final image looked, though for the hi-res version I cleaned up those edges with a clone tool in Photoshop. Oh, did I mention that Photoshop was created by the Knoll brothers? One of them, John, was Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM on many, many movies, including Avatar. So you can see where much of the inspiration from Photoshop came from. And I remember him explaining the new morphing technology he was working on, soon to be applied to T3 (Terminator 3) and countless advertising commercials.

Was that a cheat? Were you expecting to hear about sliders and overlays and fades?  Sorry about that, but post-production was around long before digital. And the difference? Well, if you can see the difference, it’s not a competent special effect!

Written by Michael Freeman
www.michaelfreemanphoto.com