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INTERVIEW - RAY STELLA, soc FROM ROGER RABBIT TO JURASSIC PARK
UNDER\NATER CINEMAl 6THANNUAL LIFETIME ACHIEVEi 'ENT AWARDS
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Forever Blowing Bubbles The challenges of underwater cinematography by Robert teadman, AS
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The Widescreen Revolution 27 Continuing series describing each of the major wide screen processes of the era by Rick Mitchell
Interview From Roger Rabbit to Jurassic Park Talking with Ray Stella, oc by Randall Robinson,
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The Orthicon Tube The early development of the Television Camera by Joe Epperson, oc
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Just For Kids Why the Childrens Hospital? by Dr. Ellen Matsumoto
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The Camera Department Threading Vista Vision by teve Gainer
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State of the Union Take the offensive-recapture work!
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The Big Blue Machine Continuing series on the development of motion picture camera by Grant Louck Heritage Film Series Restoration efforts by the UCLA Film and Television Archives by Ed Carter & Elisbeth Greenbaum
Contributors Howard Block Mitchell Block Ed Carter Bill Clark Bruce Doering Joe Epper on teve Gainer Elisbeth Greenbaum Bill Hines Grant Loucks Dr.Ellen Matsumoto Rick Mitchell Randall Robinson Robert Steadman Gene Stei n
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OPERATING C AMERAMAN c
Editor Randall Robinson
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Sixth Annual Lifetime Achievement Awards Homage to excellence behind the camera by Bill Hines 1993 Technical Achievement Awards Tools of the Trade, The Sony Betacam by Jeffrey Cree Tyler Helicopter Camera Mount by Nelson Tyler A Family of Titans, Chapman Studio Equipment by Leonard Chapman
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by Bruce Doering
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Advertisers Index
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SOC News & Letters
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SOC Roster
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POSTMASTER: end address changes to Society of Operating ameramen, P.O. Box 2006, Toluca Lake, CA 91610 The Operating Cameraman Magazine, I S 1069-0646, i published emi-annually by the ociety of Operating Cameramen. For advertising information and article submis ions contact the 0 at P.O. Box 2006, Toluca Lake, CA. 916 10 Telephone (8 18) 382-7070; Fax (3 10) 306-9245
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by Robert Steadman, Ase RAlsE THE TITANIC
W
hen I look bock over the last
twenty-five years of my career I would have to say that I am a generalist. That is, I have tried to sample every aspect that cinematography has to offer. Lighting, from table top to massive sets, special effects, overseas work, aerials, high speed cars, marine, and underwater are just some of the areas that I have worked in. However, it is the underwater area that has provided me with some of the most interesting challenges of all. Let me tell you about three film experiences that are all very, very different. Film11g RAM
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Malta.
The noted cinematographer, Matt Leonetti , was hooting RA.1 E THE TITA 1 and looking for a econd unit cameraman who could handle a lot of model work, much of it underwater. He knew that diving was an avocation of mine, and al o knew that I had a pretty solid lighting background. The picture had been in and out of production for about three year at thi point. tanley Kramer had done over a year of pre-production, including some econd unit photography, when he and Lew Grade, the producer, parted way over ome arti tic difference . The picture went into hiatu for over a year, and eventually director Jerry Jame on was hired t take over the project. By thi time, a ma ive, multi -miUion dollar "deep-tank" had been constructed on the i land of Malta, and they were on their third pecial effect crew. The fir t crew had con tructed the model of the Titanic and some other ve el , including a replica of a 600 ' avy alvage hip, a tugboat, and some cut-out of other hips that could be used in long hot . The econd crew had gone to Malta, gotten all of the hardware out of torage and proceeded to get thing up and running. However, they could not do much more than shoot ome te t , a the deep - tank wa not yet operational. Eventually, for rea on unknown to myself, they were let go, and the earch wa on for another team to make it all work. The tank was still giving them
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model was 55' long, and weighted over 8 tons."
problem . It was a huge ba in cooped out of the ide of a hill next to the Mediterranean, lined with a phaJt, and fitted with a fal e bottom to simulate the bottom of the sea. Holding over ten million gallons of seawater, it wa a hundred feet in diameter at the bottom, and about three hundred feet in diameter at the urface. At it deepest, it wa forty feet, a depth where we ould work indefinitely without having to worry about decompre ion. When they first filled it up, a process that took two day , there wa concern that it might bur t and send all of that water back into the Med, along with whoever might be in it. A daunting pro pect, to ay the least. It wa quickly drained, and plan were made to trengthen the dam that formed half of it tructure. ix month later, the work wa completed and we were on a plane bound for Malta. There i another tank at this facility that ha exi ted for many years, made for the surface photography of models. About four feet deep, and measuring perhaps two hundred by three hundred feet, it wa the cene of many a miniature sea battle. At the back of the tank wa a spillway that our apartment which were built as provided a clean horizon line again t ummer rentals and had little, if any, the ky. We had about a month of heat. After a while the cold tarted to work to do here before we were to go take it toll. Perhap half of the divers into the deep tank. came down with influenza at one time, John Richardson headed up and work almost came to a complete the new effect crew, and he had a big halt. The production company, thoujob ahead of him. The model of the and of mile away in Lo Angele , Titanic wa con tructed on a 1/ 16 finally realized that omething had to cale, but even at that reduced scale be done, and they got us the dry suit the model wa 55' long, and weighed that we had been reque ting. Thi over 8 ton ! Heavily con tructed of made an enormous difference. fibergla s, with a deck made of teel, it The model wa an unwieldy would not float on it own bottom. bea t. It had been built to accomplish In tead, there were mas ive flotation three ta ks, and was not really great at tanks inside the hull that could be any one of them. Fir t, it had to be filled with air to adju t the model ' towed aero the hallow tank on the buoyancy. urface. econdly, it wa to be a backThe fir t couple of week were drop for all of the underwater alvage rather di appointing. The water wa operation , and, finally, it had to break cold, really cold. We started in January, the urface a it was brought up from and the water temperature was 52 the depths. Towing wa the fir t probdegree . tanding around wai t deep, lem. It was kind of funny, if it wa n't with the wind machines and ocean o tragic, for on it maiden voyage, it breeze on you, wa a real te t of one's lowly rolled over to port and lay on its tamina. At every opportunity, we ide, half ubmerged. The steel deck would run to the hower to pour hot made it top-heavy, o plan were made water down our uits, but the effect to lift it out of the tank for modificadidn ' t la t long, and oon we were tion . However, the crane that we had right back into it, dozens of times a hired proved to be unequal to the ta k. day. After work we would go back to Ju t a the keel cleared the water, the
"The first batch of sharks was a group ranging from 8 to 12 feet. Was I scared? Damn straight!"
ociety of Operating Ca111era111e11
'Wi11ter 1993
crane tipped over and went into the tank, with the model. Eventually the effect department worked out their problem and we started to get ome good footage. We were shooting this picture in an anamorphic format, u ing Technovi ion Jen e . All of the urface photography wa done at 125 frame per econd, fairly standard in thi type of work. The camera were Mitchell Mark H's, hou ed in watertight boxes with window fitted for the len e . The boxe were fitted with flotation pontoon that were adju table, allowing for the lenses to be within a few inche of the urface. This meant that the viewfinder wa also a few inche above the urface, o the waterline came about to your nose. Finally we were headed for the deep-tank. The engineering department wa sati fied that the dam wa not going to burst, and a larger crane wa engaged to tran fer the model. Fir t, the tank wa filled and the model wa floated out into the middle. Then it wa drained, a the model wa guided to her place of re t on the fibergla and tee! ea bottom. Then the tank was filled again. pages
At the time (1980) there were no underwater housing/camera combinations that would fulfill our need . We had to be able to shoot slowmotion, but the Arri III wa a year or more away. I decided that the Mitchell was just too big, o that left the Arri IIC. The high speed movement would give us 80 frames, and we hoped that this would be enough to give us the illusion of size at 1/16 scale. I wanted to put the package into a tubular housing for ease of construction and balance considerations. A backloading displacement type magazine was found in Germany that would provide the low profile that we needed. From Technovi ion we got a compact motor base that put the motor parallel and clo e to the camera body. Since the tandard Arri motor wa rather a crude affair, requiring a huge rheostat, we decided to buy an indu trial motor and build our own electronic control for it. We also built an electronic footage counter and put frame rate and footage on the back of the housing in large LED's. The viewfinder wa the next problem. An optical viewing tube would be unworkable for two rea on . First of all, the viewing tube would have to be o long in order to take the image to the back of the housing, it would be very dim. econdly, it would be impo sible to keep your mask up to the back of the housing and do the delicate moves required for miniature work. A video monitor seemed to the only answer. To my knowledge thi had never been tried before, but I couldn't think of any reaon that it would not work. We put a 5 inch monitor in its own hou ing and attached it to the main housing. The y tern needed no beam splitter because we were dispensing with the optical tube, o the video camera got all of the light. De-anamorphozing was done electronically on the monitor, and we had external controls for contrast and brightness. The widest len that we could get at the time from Technovision was a 40mm, and it looked through a dome port made from a compass housing. The whole package lid into a tube abo ut 12" in diameter, 30" long. Work commenced in the deep-tank. The water still hovered around the 52 degree mark, but now we were fully immersed in it. Since the pagt6
real Titanic lays at a depth of over 5000', it is in perpetual night. Since we did not have the tank tarped in yet (a ma ive job in it elf), that meant that we were working night . The model ubmarines were now operating for the first time in salt water, and they were having their problems. I think that the first night we went down and came back up at lea t twenty times. It was cold, really cold. Expo ures proved to be a big problem. We wanted a dark look, but every take got progressively darker until we had not much more than black leader punctuated by the lights on the hulls of the subs . I had shot ome tests back in the states, and for the e I used a Spectra in its own little underwater housing. This yielded ome pretty good results initially, but in the real world we had a host of divers on the et - lighting, grip, camera, and effects were all repre ented. At the end of each take, every diver would, in the cour e of moving around to do what he had to do, stir up ju t a little bit of ilt. After two or three takes the water would not only be a lot cloudier, but it would act like a filter, reducing the amount of light that would reach the camera. The result was a lot of very dark footage. I agonized over this for some time, and came very close to getting fired until I figured out just what wa happening. The solution was simple. I put a spot meter in a housing, and made all measurement from the camera position. End of problem. A the ilt would tart to build up, the meter would sense it, and I could adju t the expo ure. Actually, that was not quite accurate, for the rather weak lights on the subs meant that I had to shoot wide open f/2.8, and there was nowhere left to go. If the set got too silty, we would quit and go to another part of this vast tank and do something else. The size of the tank caused some other problems. One night, early in the game, I called the urface and asked for a reloaded camera. A diver was ent down with it, but after waiting for five minute he didn't how up. The staging area for the camera department area was probably two hundred feet from where we were working and I hadn' t had any light installed along the way. He had gotten lost in thi ten million gallon lake of
our . A earch party wa sent out from the set and he was found, thoroughly disoriented by the blackne and lack of landmarks. The director of the econd unit, Ricou Browning, wa a practical joker, and so were all of his divers. One of Ricou' favorite tricks wa to me around with your air upply. He would start turning your air off while you were gearing up to dive. Every time you turned away from him , he would give your tank valve a turn. By the time you went in the water it wa about a half a turn from being completely clo ed . Then he would wait until you were engro sed in omething, watch for the bubble coming out of your regulator as you exhaled, and give it the final turn. Tho e that panicked were watched more closely in the future as possible liabilities. Tying your dry suit zipper to someone else' wa another favorite trick. When you moved apart the zipper opened and an inrush of freezing water wa the result. Another one wa tying a bucket to someone' ankle and filling it with air. You went up to the surface upside down, fast. Lots of fun. Communications underwater are ordinarily carried out by hand signals. However, we were working in the dark, o this would not work. We had ome regulators fitted with ultrasonic communication device , and they did olve the problem for the mo t part. Ricou and I could talk to each other and the urface, and the re t of the crew wore hearing-aid o they could hear what was going on. Lighting wa a whole new ballgame. It wa not too difficult to make a gloomy, dark look; all I had to do was to make a bank of light roughly at right angles to the camera, some 20-30 feet back. However, the light that the salvors used, which in full -s ize version towered ten feet high, were only even inche high in our cale. omehow we had to come up with small lamp that would light the ship and look light the real thing. ince all of the R&D money had been spent on this long before I came onto the project, we had to come up with something there in our workshop on Malta. MR-16 bulbs proved to be the answer. Originally de igned as lamps for lide and movie projectors, they continued on page 16 Society of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
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SOC: We've always appreciated seeing the SOC after your name on the credits. Stella: I enjoy that. I try to get it on all my hows. It's nice, and I like to see it there. It' a proud organization to be a ociated with. SOC: Some of the pictures you've done have been rather remarkable. You've worked with Director of Photography Dean Cundey, A c for quite a while.
W e're on the set of the little tiny town of Bed Rock, some time in the late BC's, in the home of Fred and Wilma. The film is that of the Amblin Productions, The Flintstones. Operating the camera is SOC Charter Member, Ray Stella, soc. In an informative interview, Ray talks about his illustrious career and body of work on some of the most visually adventurous pictures ever made. The pictures range from Roger Rabbit to Jurassic Park. So come with us on trip Back to the Future.
Stella: I've worked with Dean Cundey ince 1972. I wa barely an a i tant then. I had done ome 16mm film . When I an wered an ad, I aw in the trade a king for a DP and operator. Dean aw the ad and we met up and got the film together. We've been together ever ince that little short subject film. I knew Dean had something on the ball, o I wa going to tick around, if I pos ibly could.
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SOC: Did you assist primarily? Stella: I a i ted at first for about eight year and Dean operated, becau e they were
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non-un10 low budget . ~ That' how we came up in the bu ine . I alway operated the B camera. From early on I got a lot of experience operating. In '75, we got on a how where Dean wa the Director of Photography and I was the operator. We were able to get on the producers Experience Ro ter from that picture. In 1978, we met up with John arpenter and did Halloween which made a ton of money. We
Society of Operating Cameramen
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followed that with The Fog which al o made a lot of money. When Carpenter did Escape From New York, he wanted to go union. ince we were already on the roster and had a good track record with him, we were able to do the picture. We got in the union on that film; actually, in February, 1981. SOC: You haven't done anything but A-Class films since?
with Zemecki .
Stella: We'd actually shoot the puppet as a lighting refe rence, and we'd SOC: You ended up doing Back to the rehear e with it o I'd know ba ically Future I, II and III? where to put the frame. lf they were Stella: Ye . It wa a lot of fun. It was in goi ng to stretch him, or if hi ear were tho e picture we tarted u ing a lot of going to be up or down in a certain motion control. ituation, then I'd know how high to frame above Bob Ho kin , who played SOC: Extensively with the cars? You opposite did a lot of flying cars. Roger. Stella: A lot of flying car in II.
Stella: Pretty much. We moved up pretty good. You know, Dean's very knowledgeable and one of the top five cameramen in the bu ine s. We have j ust been going along . Knock on wood. Clyde Bryan has been a i tant ameraman with us for fifteen year . SOC: One of your big features was Romancing the Stone wasn' t it?
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SOC: Is that where you learned how to frame empty space? ~
SOC: You're the ~ king of empty space.
Stella: Yea, the king of empty pace. E pecially in Roger Rabbit, that wa kind f rough. Your instincts tell you to compose one way but all the ubject i not there, o you have to vi ualize SOC: That was really the start of what the animator are your special effects career. going to put in. The old adage, you can't frame for air, Stella: It basically was. Yea. That' / : : : _ is kind of a sarca m. But I when we started u ing the found out, you actually can, Camera-Remote head. We put it . which was, at first, fairly on a Tulip crane. Bob rough. Then you get u ed to Zemecki directed. He is~ it, like anything. one for concept hots. Bob wa etting up ~ SOC: It must be rough giving ome pretty good- ~ a Rabbit a haircut when you looking tuff. can't find him in the picture?
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teeth on a
remote head on that picture , which i intere ting, becau e you're at a monitor. It' a little different, becau e you're not attached to the camera. It take a little getting u ed to. But once you do, it' fantastic. You can get the camera into place where yo u couldn't get a normal crane, camera operator and a i tant. We did some really nice stuff Society of Operating Cameramu1
'Winter 1993
SOC: Bob Ho kin must have been wonderful to work with.
Stella: Yea, basically.
Stella: Well, you know I didn 't do Romancing the tone. We just needed a break from each other. Dean went down to Mexico on Romancing and I went to Hawaii for ten months and did Magnum PI. We came back together on Back to the Future I. I went back on the A camera, and then l hot about five to six week of econd unit.
o, I cut ~ my ~
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Stella: Bob's a great guy. Bob wa really a trooper and he was alway there. Technica lly he's very good, he work with you. SOC: He must have helped you vi ualize the character. Stella: It' not easy to do what Bob did. I don't know if he was really given the credit he de erve . That' hard to do, acting with something that's not there. Bob Zemecki did a fanta tic job, too. Hi directing wa ju t incredible. SOC: Were there any anecdotes that came your way because of not having
Stella: The animator help a lot on something like that. Becau e what we u ed in Rogerwa a rubber puppet. We wou ld rehear e -'-""~-.. ~ and omeone would carry him through the frame. We'd get a reference for lighting with that al o. We'd run them through the frame and hoot film o the animator could see where the light fell on Roger. SOC: So you'd actually shoot the puppet?
anything there? You can't really bump the head of the actor. Stella: Well, that' a good ituation. If you tend to be a little hort at one point, the animator will draw the ear a little horter or if you're a little high, they 'll tretch the cartoon character for you. ILM naturally did all the effect and they u e Vi taVi ion. They had made two Vi taVi ion, Vi taflex camera , e pecially for ILM, and a blimp. The camera are fairly Large and, you know, the mag run ideway . The blimp wa huge. The eyepiece tuck up above the blimp. I wa o far from the eyepiece with my hand to the wheel that I couldn't do anything more than a ninety-degree pan. ever the le s, Bob Zemecki would et up hot that required 180 to 270 degree pans. When thi happened, Ian Kelly, the video technician, would et me up a little four-inch ideo a i t monitor right next to the eyepiec . uddenly, I cou ld do anything. I ju t got u ed to watching thi little four-inch monitor. I could go anywhere I wanted to, l cou ld climb over the dolly. l did a lot of it right on the monitor, I hardly u ed the eyepiece at all. I'd have to look through the eyepiece to make sure we didn't have unwanted tu ff in the frame. Once you have your perimeter , ju t go for it. We had ome really nice move with it. SOC: Taylor, my little two year old son's favorite film is Roger Rabbit. He's just watches the cartoon section over and over again. Eventually he tarted watching the live action. He got to the point where he followed the whole movie. I loved the first scene where you came off the refrigerator with the Technicolor blimp camera. Stella: You know, I'm on that camera, that ' me in the background. They dre ed me up in a blue uit and cut my hair and licked it down and put me in the film. SOC: Then you went on to do II and III of Back to the Future? Stella: After Roger, we actually did Big Business, which wa 'with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin and u ed a lot of
page 10
motion co ntrol. We graduated from tepper motor on a gear head where you could pan and tilt to putting stepper motor on a dolly, so we could dolly, pan and tilt at the arne time. In the old day , they'd lock off a camera, like in Parent Trap, the Hayley Mill movie, with two of her appearing in the ame frame. They'd lock off the camera, keeping it completely teady. They wouldn't touch it. They'd walk Hayley through one ide of the frame and then cut, redress her and walk her through the other ide of the frame. o, when they'd compo ite the e two hot together they 'd be completely registered. We got to where we'd u e the motion control, run it through a computer, computerizing all the moves. I would do the fir t pa and then the computer would take over and run the camera. o, we could do dolly, pan and tilt all in motion control.
Stella: Right, and as you know, it's doing quite a bit of bu iness. Four hundred million dollar in the states alone in two month o far. SOC: Here, you were working more with real puppets, and things that were actually in the frame.
SOC: You used that extensively in Back to the Future IJR
Stella: In Jurassic Park, tan Win ton and his group did the mechanical tuff. They were fantastic. The show i mixed with mechanical and computer graphic <lino aurs, and it' hard to tell the difference. Those dinosaur in Jurassic are o real. Our fir t test we aw wa when they first get onto the i land and the doctor takes the two dentists out to how them the bronto aurus eating omeleave off the top of a tall Eucalyptus tree. It was ju t unbelievab le. We all ju t clapped and cheered at the dailie it all looked so real. It's really omething what they can do now-a-days with these computers.
Stella: Yea, we u ed that exten ively in tho e movie.
SOC: You were doing the framing, weren't you?
SOC: Didn't Michael J. Fox play his whole family, his brother and sister?
Stella: Right. Thi wa al o with Vista Vi ion, and a whole group of ILM people were there marking. They set up markers for all their mathematical computation .
Stella: Yes. Thi made for some intere ting effects. SOC: Did you have stand-ins for him to play off? Stella: On the B- ide of the hot, we always had omeone in there he could relate to, and I could frame to them. They are there when yo u photograph, becau e that' not the ide you're u ing. Then you redre the character from the A- ide, put them in the Bide and then put the tand-in back in the A-side. You ju t have to be careful they don ' t cro the line. Even in in tance when they did cro the line it looked good . lt doesn ' t look so much like a heat, but it co t a little more money, becau e they had to roto cope the part of the actor that cro ed over into the other side.
SOC: You just came off Jurassic Park didn't you?
SOC: The top of the trees were real? Stella: Oh, the tree are all real. It's just the dino aur and the articulated tree branche that aren't. Then they even drew in ome leave falling in thi particular scene. After he pick a couple off, a couple of leave fall, which really help the believability. Ju t tho e little added thing . SOC: Going from Roger Rabbit to the Dinosaurs, did you learn something different? Stella: Roger Rabbit wa n't computerized. Roger wa all animated. o it wa hand - drawn frame-by-frame, old Disney cartoon work. Which is very tediou and time con urning. owadays they do it by computer, which is quicker.
ociety of Operating Carnerame11
Spring 1993
SOC: But for you it's the same. You s till have to keep the space, or the faith? Stella: Same thing, same thing. Frame it for the air and maintain the space. SOC: In the sequences around the car, when the dinosaurs are so dose to the kids they breath on them. Are they there or not there? Stella: Most of that stuff i aU mechanical. We had a bea utiful T Rex, we had actually three parts of a T Rex. We had from the belly up all the way to the head with the hands. Then we had a tail part and we had the feet. They have to get in to the back of it and make it move. In one situation, we shot from behind the T Rex, and yo u ee hi back feet stepping into a p uddle. Well, that's one part of the creature, and then the other part would be a separate entity. You'd ju t have to put the camera in a pot to where you don't see the gap. SOC: What about the big chase in the jeep?
Stella: The big cha e in the jeep is CG, and it' hard to teU . I wa in the back of a golf cart, i on a stage, and I'm fo llowing Jeff Goldblum as he' run ning from the T Rex, leaving air and space for them to draw in the T Rex with the computer. SOC: Was there a lot of advice given to you about just how large this creature, finally animated, would be? Stella: Oh, sure. Because all the ILM people are there making sure with all the mathematical comp utation , measuring everythin g, o you'd how high it's going to be and how m uch head room you need . T h at wa a great eq uence. T hat was fa n tast ic. Jurassic Park wa a pecial film. SOC: Did you shoot mostly in Kauai? Stella: No, we on ly shot three weeks in Kauai. We lost one day because of the hurricane. We were very lucky it was only one day. We were there and got caught in it an d we couldn't get out for two days.
SOC: Was it frightening? Stella: It wasn't too frightening for u , because we were in a big hotel and the banq uet rooms were down below. We were fine on the we tern side of Kauai, b u t t he Isla n d wa deva tated. We went out once the eye hit u . It' relatively calm in the eye. We surveyed the area wh ere our eq u ipment truck were. It eem like practically every tree was snapped abo ut five feet off the ground and taken twenty, thirty yards away, stopped in a wind hield of a car or a truck. With 180 mile an hour winds, it wa unreal.. SOC: How do you like working with Steven Spielberg? We've heard how difficult he can be, but he seems to have taken to you. He took you over to Poland. Stella; He asked me per onally to go over to Poland with him. l like teven . He's kind of hard to get used to. Hook was our fir t fu ll length feature with hin1, which was a little hectic becau e they ran over by a couple of months, continued on page 41
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What is 30 inches high, 40 inches long, weighs over 1000 pounds and is blue all over? That's right, the Technicolor Three-Strip 35MM motion picture camera . Technicolor Motion Picture orporation de e lop ed the famous Three- trip Technicolor Camera in 1932, 17 year after the founding of the company in 1915. Technicolor Process o. 4, a 3-component imbibition proce , wa fir t used in 1932 to develop an animated film titled FL WER AND TREE b y Walt Di ney. The Techni olor camera wa u ed for the fir t ever live-action, three-color hort ubject in 1934, LA Probably the mo t fam u length feature film wa G Wt D, 1939. It i in thi page 12
Technicolor introduced negative tock three time the peed of preceding negative. Most of the Technicolor Threetrip amera that are till in exi tence are claimed to have been used in the filming of E WITH TH E Wt D. A claim difficult to refute, ince mo t of the available camera in Hollywood were u ed at one time or another during the filming. The Camera: 1932-1955 Developed y tematically over a number of year by Dr. Herbert Thomas Kalmu , Daniel Fro t om tock and W. Burton We cott-founding member of the Technicolor Corporation; the Technicolor ThreeStrip amera expo ed three eparate black and white negative imultaneously through a single len . Behind the len was a beam- plitter, made from two pri ms of optical gla which were gold coated (later ilver flecked ) to produce a light mirrored effect. The purpo e of the beam- plitter wa to reflect part of the light to an aperture to the left. The remaining light pa ed directly through to a normally po itioned aperture. The light that pa ed through the pri m reached a green filter that allowed only green light to rea h the negative. Behind it, the reflected beam of light wa directed to a tandard bi -pack containing two negatives. The front film carried a red-
orange dye which ab orbed the blue light and filtered out the red ray . The e rays pas ed through the regi ter on the rear film of the pair. ee attached drawing. Prepping The Three-Strip: Like Panavision equipment, the Technicolor Three- trip Cameras were only rented. Technicolor main tained a camera rental department and a number of well-trained cine mechan ics that erviced and prepped the camera . Becau e of the unique de ign , there were many pecial procedure to be performed before a camera could be considered ready for filming. A tan dard mechanic' check li t con i ted of 79 operations and this did not include film testing. The mechanical ervicing included tandard cleaning and lubricating plus more complex operation , such as polishing the aperture plate with polishing paper wrapped on a pecial wooden block. Another unique aspect of the Three- trip is , ince it pa ed three pieces of film imultaneou ly thr ugh the double movement, there wa an unu uaJ amount of emulsion build -up and film chip that could collect in the movement area. Cleaning then wa of the utmo t importance. The following i an ab tract from a technical memo regarding the re ponsibilities of the p ople u ing the Technicolor equipment. Society of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
Technicolor Memo Owing to the large number of cameramen and assistant cameramen who have been sent out into the field with comparatively little instruction regarding the methods and policies governing Technicolor's care of equipment, it is necessary that they carefully consider and adhere to the following:
rollers. 4. Top loop too short. 5. Bottom loop too short. 6. Belt too loose. 7. Clutch not properly adjusted. 8. Faulty thread of film in magazine, allowing roller to wind out of true causing bind against lid and back. 9. Lack of lubricatio n in magazine pulleys causing excess drag. Buckles 1. The first cameraman is in charge of must be brought to the attention of the the Technicolor troupe and assumes full second in charge. responsibility for his unit. 10. Heads should be inspected to see that they are free and even tension and 2. The second cameraman in charge of the locks are in good condition. equipment is responsible for the care of all camera equipment and responsible ... and the li t goe on. Prepping and to his first cameraman for it. maintaining the 3. All other second men and assistants shall do everything in their power to assist the second in charge. 4. Lenses should be covered at all times while 1wt in use. 5. Light should never be allowed to strike prism filters when not in use, as the strong light has a tendency to fade them.
airplane , put in underwater hou ing and in general, were made to re pond to the whim of the directors and cinematographer . Amazingly, the big blue camera got the shot whether from James A. Fitzpatrick' camera car po ition or flown up ide down by Paul Mantz for the 1938 film,MENWm-1 W1 l n the mid - 1950' , Ea tman Kodak introduced Ea tman Color Negative, a simpler, less expen ive process, in which the three primary colors were contained on one roll of film and coupled during the developing proces . This marked the end of the Technicolor three color camera proces . By the '70s,
Technicolor Three-Strip, like Panavision cameras and Arriflex camera of today, required diligent careful and meticulou attention to detail. Two other prepping procedures that were equally as detailed as
6. Lenses should be cleaned and inspected for looseness and care exercised so as not to scratch the optical s11rface. 7. Prism brackets should be handled
with extreme care. Make certain the fingers do not touch the surface of the lens. Filters and optical surfaces are the scratched very easily. A small quantity camera check were of ether is advisable in cleaning, as an focu te ting and etting of len e and excess dissolves the balsam cement used checking and etting the prism finder in the prisms. Excess dust should never lines. Another intere ting and unique be cleaned from the surface with any- aspect of the Technicolor Three-Strip thing but a small camel's hair brush. A was it magazine. The magazine held stiff-bristled mascara brush is used for three 1000' rolls of film. The green cleaning corrosion from aperture pins record and the blue record were thread and plate. ed, emulsion-in and the red record wa
Technicolor orporation had converted it processing plant to handle Eastman color negative. Today, the only three -color processing plant in the world i the one in the People 's Republic of China, where it is till in operation, producing high volume, high quality print .
threaded in the emulsion -out po ition.
8. Buckles are generally caused by poor Equally important wa the path of the thread-ups. They are usually traceable film through the magazine light trap, a and may be avoided if the proper pre- well as the loop ize. cautions are exercised. Buckles are usuThe Technicolor Three- trip, ally due to the following faults: with all of it technical idiosyncrasies, J. Failure to fasten clip on shuttle. performed admirably for over 20 years. 2. Failure to seat intermittent sprocket The camera were put into telephonereleasing spring. booth- ize ound blimp , hung on con 3. Failure to lock down drive sprocket truction- ize crane , upported under ociety of perating Camerame11
'J!l)inter 1993
Contributor to this article: Dr. Rod Ryan Julian D. Hopkinson GLORI TE HNI OLOR, Fred E. Baston
Grant Loucks is President of Alan Gordon Enterprises, Inc.
page 13
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have a mall quartz bulb fu ed in the center of a mall reflector. Today they have found wide u e in hi-tech track lighting, di play lighting, and a host of other u e . A mold was made in order to ca t the lamp tructures out of re in, and three of the bulb were in tailed in each unit. The wire to power them were hidden in the and, and eventually led to the urface. The big problem wa
Plrotograplri11g tlie worlds oldest slripwreck i11 Turkey.
The fir t of Kodak' hjgh peed emu! ions, 5294, wa not yet on the market, so we were till at an A A of 100 pu hed one top to A A 200. Thi meant that given the brightne of the light on the ubmarine , I had to hoot at a 2.8. At that top, a 40mm Jen with a + 1 diopter would pull focu at 19", plu or minus one inch. That' right, two inches of depth of field! Actually, this worked out pretty well, ince di tant object , such as the hip, were rendered soft by the cloudy water anyway. For some hots I u ed split diopters and got 28" focu on the other ide of the screen. May finally rolled around, and after five month , the water wa a balmy 60 degree . We were fini hed with thi project and ready to go home.
growth. Nearby was a drop-off to over five thousand feet, known a the To GUE OF THE 0 EAN, a favorite haunt of U.. submarine on maneuver . The wreck, provided by the Bahamian government, wa the booty of a drug bu t. One hundred twenty feet in length, her engine were removed, bulkhead replaced to facilitate our tory, concrete ballast poured, and valve in tailed, o that she could be unk at our cho en ite. The day of the sinking arrived and our wreck, covered with gunnite to imulate decade of marine growth, and pump roaring to keep her afloat, wa positioned over the ite. We went down to take a look. How often do you get to witne a hip inking from underwater? he hit the bottom with a tremendous thud and a cloud of and and debris, right on target. We were in bu ines . We had our et and the tunt double were ready. All we lacked were harks. The Miami eaquarium collection boat had been ent out to collect Tiger harks. NEVER SAY NEVER AGAJN Tiger were cho en becau e of their A couple of year later availability; they looked leek and feroRicou called me again, cious, and they did better than mo t this time to go to the sharks in captivity. It seem that they Bahama to do second have the ability to pump water through unit on the Jame Bond their gills with their jaw better than film, EVER SAY E ER mo t sharks, an important factor when AGAI . This wa es ential- they are kept motionle for long peri ly a remake of ods of time. THU DERBALL. We had a The co.llection boat would et big sequence to hoot hook baited with frozen mackerel in where Bond i being the evening, and return in the morning cha ed around and inside to see what had taken the bait. The fi h a wreck by a number of would then be dragged into the " live shark . The other well" where the hook would be equence involved the bad removed carefully without putting any guy tran porting an vi ible cars on the hark. This wa a atomic bomb through a formidable ta k, a the e harks were sy tern of underwater highly agitated! cave , culminating in a batThe fir t batch of harks was a tle royal. Did I say in ide a group ranging from 8 to 12 feet. Was I wreck? With hark ? Ye , cared? Damn straight! They were aweome! We brought them out of the well and a far as I know nobody ha attempted thi before or one at a time, with rope around their tails, and tied them off to ome conveince. After scouting a num- nient coral head . The hark handlers ber of locations around assau we set- would sort of gang up on them, each tled on a patch of ocean that had been man grabbing onto a fin, and everyone u ed for a number of other film . About staying well back from tho e murder40' deep, again we could work all day ous-looking jaws. A they were not free- wimwithout having to worry about decompre sion. Remnant of previous Bond ming, except when being filmed , they epics littered the bottom, silently rust- were lowed down by the lack of oxygen ing, overgrown with lush marine
" When Christ was born the wreck was already 1,400 years old." that we had no way to encap ulate the bulb , which meant that they had to operate directly in the seawater. Their life expectancy was something around two minutes, o we had lot of backup . At one time we lit all 55' of the wreck, and must have u ed omething like 50 of them for one hot. page 16
Continued on page 47
ociety of Operati11g Cameramen
'Winter 1993
Hf RilRGf HLM Sf Rlf 5
PRt~tRVI~G l~t MOVI~G IMRGt Rl ~ClR a~ [a [arter ana [li5 a aet~ Dreenaau~. Assistant [ditorn
T he UCLA Film and Television Archive, econd only in the ize of its holding to the Library of Congres in the United tate , i dedicated to the cau e of preservation. "Pre ervation" mean a great deaJ more than storing films in a vauJt; it i a compJex proce s that i being con tantly reinvented. Ae thetic judgment are critical to the recreation of the image and the sound of the original work. Hi torical re earch is nece ary to recon truct a film that has been capriciou ly reedited . Both technicaJ kill and ingenuity are vital to the re cue of damaged and fragile moving image material . During the pa t sixteen years, U LA' pre ervation program ha re cued million of feet of our film and televiion heritage, but much remain to be done. Approximately 50% of ftlm produced in the United State before 1950 and untold thou and of clas ic television programs have already been lo t, and many more are in danger. The preservationi t' axiom," itrate won't wait," i tragically borne out by each reel of pre-1950 nitrate film that decay inexorably to du t. Time i quite literally running out for a Imo t 25 million feet of unique nitrate footage in the Archive' collection-including 11 million feet of nitrate new reel footage from the Hearst Metrotone ew ollection, documenting every area of American life from the teens to the early 1950s; rare silent film from the teen and the 1920 ; the Archive's collection of 1930 and 1940 feature film , do ument of an era of Depres ion and war. All will fa e the ame fate if the Archive i not able to transfer them to a table medium. ln general, "pre ervation" means extending the life of an object, in this ca e, a film. Nitrate film stock, u ed until about 1950, i highly un table and inevitably degrade into powder or goo. The mo t recent troubling challenge to preservationi t i the di covery that afety tock, too, is ubject to a different type of deterioration. The triacetate - based film which wa used from the 1950 through the 1970 breaks down, relea ing an acetic-ba ed acid; the phenomenon i known as the "vinegar yndrome." In either ca e, preservation involves the tran fer of a film to new acetate or polye ter safety stock. Thi i a relatively imple proce of taking a complete print, negative or duplicating positive and making a traight copy onto new tock. "Re toration" a sumes that a current copy i in some way inferior or incomplete compared to an earlier or "original" ver ion. Re toration can mean many things- the re reation of an original relea e version, a "director' cut" or simply an effort to produce a print with the be t po ible picture and ound quality, when commonly een copie are in poor condition. The " imple t" process of preservation i taking a ocwty of Operating ameramen
'Winter 1993
complete, high - quality positive or negative and copying it-though even thi require minute attention to detail, to en ure the clo e t po ible reproduction of the films original image and oundtrack quality. The more complex proces of restoration often require piecing together parts from many different element (or iginal or duplicate positive or negative ), or u ing material of different gauges ( 16mm and 35mm). A recent project is THE FA T WORK ER ( William eiter, 1924). UCLA's 35mm print has Dutch intertitles, but the 16mm print has the original English language one . The title from the 16mm print will be blown up and inserted into a new 35mm negative. From a technical tandpoint, the mo t challenging re toration projects are those that require the mo t detective work in locating mi ing footage, or that involve tran forming inferior urviving material into an acceptable fini hed re toration. The Archive met both of the e cha ll enge in the landmark re toration of BECKY HARP (1935 ), the first complete three-color Technicolor feature film. ot onJy did wa a worldwide earch conducted for the be t remaining material on the film, but for a number of equences archivi ts faced the additional task of attempting to recreate three-color Technicolor using incomplete material for each of the three co lor elements (yellow, cyan, magenta). UCLA archivi t have developed special experti e in the preservation of early two and three co lor film a well a early ound. Another highly acclaimed film re toration by LA wa THE TOLL OF THE SEA (1922), the first two-color Technicolor feature by Chester Franklin, which starred Anna May Wong. The preservation proce i time-con urning and costly, with the bulk of expen e being taken up by laboratory co t . Nitrate pre ervation co t approximately 1 to 2 per foot for black and white film and approximately $5 per foot for color film. n average, one minute of film equal 90 feet, so a 90 minute black and white film co t around 15,000 to preserve; a color film co t 35,000 to 40,000. A central part of the film pre ervation program focuses on fiction film , including features, hort and cartoon . The first critical task i determining which titles in the Ar hive' collection hould receive preservation priority. The e might be film of out tanding artistic or cuJturaJ ignificance, but could also include le er-known film which have deteriorated enough o that any delay could re ult in lo . Title pre erved or restored by UCLA range from Howard Hughe ' daredevil flying picture H ELL' A EL ( 1930 ), to the how-biz drama of William Wellman' A TAR I BoR (J 937), to crewbaJI comedie like George ukor' HOLIDAY ( 1938 ) and Howard Hawks' HI GIRL FRIDAY (1940). ecil B. DeMille' exotic LEOPATRA (1934) and Josef von tern berg' BLO DE VE u ( 1932) are among UCLA' mo t notable project , along with Billy Wilder's noir cla ic DOUBLE I DEM ITY ( 1947) and John Ford's TH E l 'FORMER ( 1935) and TH Q u1ETMAN (1952) . Co11ti1111ed 011 page 40
u
page 17
It was another evening to remember. The 1993 SOC LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS BANQUET came off with
the warmth and style for which we are noted. The Calabasas Inn was aglow with the well dressed men and women from all parts of the entertainment industry. That same warm feeling prevailed as the music played on, and the awards began. The night became another high-point in the achievements of our Society. page 18
Society of Opera ting Cameramen.
'Winter 1993
C hairman Howie Block greeted the audience and made introductions. Howie ha been involved in every aspect of the Awards Banquet , now in their sixth year. Almo t singlehandedly, he is responsible for the great ucces of the e Banquets. OC President, Randall Robinson gave a warm welcome and introduced the officer of the Board of Governor . A pecial tribute surprised out-going Treasurer, now Vice Pre ident, oug Knapp, for his long dedication and hi impact in helping to bring the Society to the proud tanding we now enjoy. Robin on presented Doug with the 1993 PRE IDE T' !\WARD. co11t11111erl on pnge 35
Society of Operating Cameramen
'Win ter 1993
page 19
WILLIAM N.
CLAR~
soc
PARKER ROE, soc
He wa born in Hollywood, Parker grew-up in a mall California, a few block outh ea t of town in we t Texa . One day, after a Columbia tudio . Attended Le onte particularly windy windstorm, he grew Junior High and Hollywood High weary of watching tumble weeds flying chool. He operated his fir t camera aero the road. "I think I'll join the avy and ee the world," Parker said. on a Buck Jone western when he wa nine year old. Hi father was an actor He did, but aw the sea instead. When on a picture with Buck and took him the Navy turned him loo e, he hitchon location for the day out at ra h hiked home to Texas. tanding in a puddle on ome country road ju t a orrigan' Ranch. He made friend with the camera crew headed by Ray little outh of Peco , his thumb shameRennahan. The operator let him do a le sly expo ed to the element , he imple pan. When the hot wa over decided to head we t. "When you've een one tumble-weed cro the road, the whole crew applauded. Later that day the director let him work extra. you've een them all," he mumbled. When the director cut, the whole crew Getting started in Hollywood wa n't applauded again. Two things hap- easy. He worked on commercial and pened that day. He wa bitten by the political spots, played gin in the
camera bug and wa the leepie t nine-year-old in Hollywood. Later came World War II and he enli ted in the Marine . He was on Midway Island when the war tarted and on Okinawa when it ended. In between there wa Guadalcanal, The Marshalls and lwo Jima. By the time he wa di charged from the orp , he had put in eleven year and had a ilver Star, a Purple Heart and two ilver crews with a ilver plate in hi left leg, caused by an continued on page 35 page 20
BRUCE CATLIN In 1964, Bruce mentioned to Leonard outh that he would like to get into camera work. Lenny introduced him to Herb Aller, the business agent of the camera union, and his career in this bu iness began. His first job was on an Elvi Pre ley picture called, HAWAIIAN PARADI E, and the Ii t goe on: TAKE THE MONEY A D Ru , HI ATOWN, Ml TER RI O, TIO , BABY BL E MARI E, E, THE LA T RIDE OF TH DALTO GA G. Hu TL! G, PHY x, A TU nine year a a camera assi tant repree n tat i ve on the union executive
board. He worked for ten year with Director of Photography Robert Moreno. The television how they did together during that period numbered in the hundred . Bruce is a dedicated A istant Cameraman and a beloved member of our community. He ha cared enough to train many assistant cameramen who have moved on to excel in Camera Operator and Director of Photography po ition . For them and for all of us we ay, "Thank You, Bruce! - you cared continued on page 35 enough to alway give your be t!"
unemployment line. Worked on sporting events and mu ic hows. Then played more gin in the unemployment line, losing more at gin than he was getting in unemployment compen ation. Finally, he got a steady job. He has done them all, a virtual hmagegg i e of televi ion how . Variety, HALLMARK HALL F FAME, Broadway hows such a AP LLO RE OVERY and ballet and three we tern at Univer al called, TUMBLEWEED, T MBLEWEED Two, and THE R.rruRN F TUMBLEWEED.
ociety of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
BUD GRAY
indu try. Hi photograph will Live on forever.
including film width and procket roll . Each motion picture had to be rephotographed frame by frame. To accomplish thi , Niver eventually developed three different piece of equipment to cope with the variance of the paper rolls. The prints were often distorted, tained or faded. iver ha said there were twenty- even separate and di tinctly different problems which might occur in any roll of paper print . A wide range of complex photographic, mechanical and optical techniques were utilized in the re toration proces . iver ha also said that he and hi re toration team had worked o continued on page 35
Bud ray's photograph peak for them elve . To appreciate and comprehend a photograph, it is necesary not only to look at it with attention, but to have some familiarity with it place in hi tory. A photograph, after all, i not merely the product of it creator's imagination and skill. Photographers throughout history have been influenced by earlier photographers, as well a by economic and ocial event of their time. When you look at a Bud Gray photograph, really look, you have a en e of time uspended. It i de igned to act a a timulan t for tho e to whom the enjoyment and tudy of that picture is a brand new experience - to enhance the pleasure and sati fy the curiou .Your eye are never o full that another look is not desired. Indeed, it i like being ravenously thir ty and returning to the welJ one more time. Bud apprenticed in portraiture and commercial photography in 1938 to 1941. He worked at the hicago Time in 1942 and 1943. He wa a avy photographer during
The 0 honors Kemp iver in conjunction with our Heritage Film erie and for his efforts in conveying the need for film restoration. Kemp i being awarded the overnor Award for his extra ordinary contribution to film hi tory a well as to the technical aspect of his work for the paper print collection of the Library of ongress. Until 1912, there was no motion picture copyright law. Therefore, no legal way a producer could protect himself. Bromide paper copie , the same width and a long as the original negative of whatever motion picture film product the cameraman made with his equipment, were their only protection. Bromide paper print were ent to the copyright office a a means of copyrighting a picture. In the late 1930's barrel of the e battered paper print were di covered in the ba ement of the Library of ongress. After deciding to try to
The ociety owe a great debt of gratitude to Doug Knapp for his dedication and talented effort over the past six years in bringing the OC to a high professional standard in all aspects, culminating with the Operating Cameraman Magazine. Hi work has been impeccable and the
World War II from 1943 to 1946 . When he wa di charged at the end of the war, he married, Nina Salazar. He worked for the Phoenix Gazette and the L.A. Mirror. In 1965, he did BEAU E TE for Univer al. By 1967, he was in the union. He ha worked on more than forty features and three hundred Mo ies of the week. Bud' career spans 50 years. He is the father of nine children, eighteen grandchildren and great grandchildren on the way. By the quality and dedication of hi work, Bud Gray has assured his place in our
turn the paper back into film, two decades were pent on this without success. Then, in connection with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and cience, Kemp Niver was given the project. This wa a logical choice, a he had originated the bromide print . In 1950, iver began and by 1960 he and hi taff has succeeded in converting over half a million feet of paper and ome three thou and titles. To further exp lain the work, consider that when the original films were made nothing wa standard,
demands never ending. till, Doug ha met the challenge even with hi heavy work load on films ranging from BATTLE TAR GALLA TICA, BEETLEJUICE, COM! G TO AMERJCA, and CHRISTMA VA ATIO , to TV series FALL GUY, HEART OF THE CITY, D OR DOCTOR, and the Emmy Award winning MURPHY BR WN. T he Pre ident's Award is not given every year. With the amount of growth in this ociety, due in large part to the extraordinary effort on his part, we proudly honor Dougla Knapp, so .
ociety of Operating amerame1i
'Winter 1993
GOVERNORS AWARD KEMP NIVER
PRESIDENT'S AWARD DOUGLAS KNAPP, soc
page21
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l·or '""'' "11h \uum. the hJprnan ltwn II. Super CJl'll fir S1t/H'r A111i//11 '' lor uu' Ille~ unih pro\ldc \CNitilit~ .tllll\\tng 'a\lng" 111 production -.clUp lime"' \\ell"' cup1Unng 'Orne oflhc mo,1 d1fficull ,ho1> with ea-.c ;1nd pcrk<lll>n. Dn,en to 1he pnxluc11on 'nc b) one of our-pcc1all) tr:uncd dmer\ 1he-.c u1111' \\Crc dc,1gncd ""h ruggcdnc" 111111111d. The Super m·11 "11h 1t' 6 "heel drive nrnJ S11r1er A111i//o "11h -I "heel drove h"' Cl>nqucred mo\I 1crr.11n' TI1c cleclnc dn\C all""' "lcn ·c during producuon '""''· Crah unJ cc"' cn11onal 'leering cu pa bi li1ic' a"' ell '" ,I\ anc1y of acce,,ory o.utuchmcnh enable numcrou' c:amcrn angle' to enhance a production' Jr..11nL1t11: and tcchn1cal a... pcct'
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Tools of the Trade
the Beta cam Camcorder by Jeffrey Cree I n just over a decade Betacam and Betacam SP camcorders have done more to change the life of the camera operator than any other development in the broadcast industry. These products have evolved from heavy tube cameras of the late 1970s to the lightweight CCD camcorders of today. As the quality of these camera products have improved so has the programming that they record. Video is no longer just for news gathering. Video production is being used for commercials, situation comedies, and even made for television movies. While the history of Betacam camcorders is far from finished here is a brief review of the development of the tools of the trade, the Betacam camcorder. ocil!ty of peraring ameramen
'l-1 1inter 199
In the latter part f the 1970', the fir t compa t portable camera appeared on the market. At about the aine time ony developed the fir t Matic portable re order for the broada t market. The e two de elopment triggered the tran ition from film to video new gath ring, what we now call ENG (Electronic New athering). To ome ext nt thi al o applied to what became known a " Electronic Field Production" ( FP). ideo overcame the fundamental drawback of 16mm film camera , which were originally u ed for news overage. Film wa mor onvenient, particularly with r p ct to ize, weight and ruggedne . How ver, film wa till limited by the over-riding di advantage of being a time delayed y tern . Film mu t be proce ed before viewing or transmi ion i po ible. Video
achi ved the immediacy required for hard new coverage, but at a c n iderabl acrifice to the new camera perator. The camera operator went fr m a mall ompact, rugged y tern t a relatively bulky, complicated and mu h more delicate y tern, involving a pa rate camera and recorder with an interconne t able. The introduction f the BVW- l, ony' fir t Betacam camcorder in 1982, and then the BVW-3 in 1983 , pr vided the fir t hint of the return to a more ompa t y tern for new gathering and fi Id production. The latter y tern weighing only 23 lb 2 oz wa a large tep fr m the 45 lb U-Matic y tern of the late 1970 . The e y tern were till deli cate due to their tube type imager and required ub tantial maintenan e to maintain their high quality images. continued 011 pnge 8
page.2
The Standard of th Worldwide e Industry
1YTJER HELICOPTER CAMERA MOUNTS by Nelson Tyler
I was always into flying. At age ten I started building an endless stream of model airplanes until I was in high school. Then I bought a full sized Ryan PT-22 open cockpit airplane with which I terrorized the Southern California skies and myself. Having survived that phase of my life, I continued on to Cal-Aero to become an Aeronautical Engineer, thinking I would eventually continued on page 36 become a test pilot. Society of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
page25
Ct1<1p111a11 Studio Equipmc11t was fo1111dcd by Ralph Clwp11um i11 19..Jl. Leonard Chapman, lfolpli :, so11, joi11ed the co111pa11y in 1956 after hal'ing co111plctcd hi: CI.A cd11catio11. Altho11glz just out of college, I co11nrd had been working with hi. father d11ri11g s11111111cr l'llcatio11s and was 1â&#x20AC;˘cry familiar ll'ith the co11ccpt c~(thc Clwp11u111 Crones. The original hapman crane designed specifically for outdoor u e was called the Hercules. The HercuJe wa built in 1953 and a the name implies it wa dependable, rugged, and had many new capabilities for it time. The u ce of The Hercule crane wa immediate. The Her ule wa able to follow a tion and get the type of hot that were unavailable at that time for location hoot . ne of the fir t projects that The Hercule wa u ed on wa the motion picture epic, TH E T E MMA DM T , directed by cil B. DeMille. The pecific new feature that made The Hercule so popular wa the auto leveling feature, the 6wheel drive, the electric dollying y tern, the 6-wheel steering feature, and the great len height and reach. Following The Hercule wa The Atla crane. The Atla rane wa a malJer version of The Hercules. The Hercule and The Atla were the predominant mobile location crane u ed throughout the 1950' . The Atla was a highly maneuv rable lo ation crane a well a an efficient tage crane that could do the job economically, effectively and rapidly. The Atlas was u ed on uch film a TAUR B LBA and televi ion hows such as Bo A ZA, MBAT, THE G ALLA T ME , and many, many others. page26
Toward the end of the 1950' it wa decided that even more could be done to enhance the hapman Mobile Crane . Two area that we were primarily concerned with con i ted of adding the Mercury Balancing feature and the Power A si t feature to the rear wheels. The e fea ture would make maneuvering and arm balancing much ea ier and have it done a a one man operation. The teering improvement feature was the Hydraulic Rear teering Mechanism. The Hercule wa originally set up with a eat in the back of the cen ter po t where the operator could control the wheel as well a it at an advantageous point of view of the action and steer accordingly. This steering was done with a teering wheel that was quite good for its time, but with the improvement feature of the Hydraulic teering, the operator could accompli h the same ta k , and more, while reducing hi work load. It was al o decided to move the operator to another po ition along side of the driver, o that they would have better communication with each other. The operator could then e completely around the crane at a higher point of view which increased the safety factor. Another great afety feature of the hapman location cranes is through it removable cab de ign. Thi de ign further increa e all around vi ibility. By 1961, the fir t Titan Crane came into exi tence. The Titan Crane was a leek, modernized version of the Chapman crane already de cribed with the added improvement of mercury balance in the arm, the improved functi n of the hydraulic leveling system, the improved hydraulic rear steering mechani m and even greater height and reach. All of the aforementioned made the Titan continued on page 34 ociety of Operating Camaam~n
'Willter 1993
THE
WIDESCREEN REV-• •LUTI• •N
Cinema Scope by Rick Mitchell Part two of a continuing series on the developing standards of motion picture photography and theater presentation.
Two gentlemen who took Cinerama seriously were Ea rl I. Sponable and Herbert E. Bragg of 20th Century Fox's New York based Research Department Sponable, as well as Fox president Spyros Skouras, had seen and dismissed Cinerama in 1949. Now, noti ng the success of th is fo rmat, many in the industry were wondering if there were a way of adapting the process to existing theaters . Bragg remembered the Hypergonar len s invented by Profes or Henri hretien of France, who'd tried to intere t variou companie in it off and on ince the Thirties. The Hypergonar wa an anamorphotic len that saw a wider than normal view, queezed the image before recording it on film, and un queezed it in projection. ponable wa about to embark on a trip to Europe to meet Skouras and set up a meeting with hretien, after learning that th e Rank Organization had an option on the right to hi ystem which was about to expire. With koura ' permis ion , Sponable shot te t with one of Chretien' 20 year old tense u ing a Movietone ewsreel camera. The e ufficiently impre ed koura and he okayed the buying up of hretien's rights and cabled Darryl ociety of Operating .amera111e11
'Winter 1993
Zanuck in Hollywood to hold up production on their big budget religiou epic THE ROBE until he could ee and con ider filming it in this proce s. Professor Henri hr tien did not invent the anamorphotic Jen . ("Ana morphotic" i the correct technical term; legend ha it that it wa implified to the more commonly u ed "anamorphic" because pyro Skoura couldn't pronounce "anamorphotic"; the commonly accepted term will be used hereafter. ) ir David Brew ter filed patent on the ba ic principle in 1862 and Profes or Ern t Abbe was i ued the fir t patent for the actual manufacture of uch len e in 1898. According to everal ources Chretien had u ed the principle to develop a peri cope which gave an 180° field-of-view for French tanks during World War I. Abel Gance i supposed to have u ed anamorphic lenses to achieve urreal effect in LE F LIE DU DR. TUBE (1915). The principle of anamorphic Jen e involve the u e of cylindrical len e or pri m in an arrangement that bend the light rays pa ing through them in one plane only. The proper arrangement of elements , placed in front of a normal lens, take in a wider fie ld-of-view in the horizontal plane than the lens normally would and record it on the negative in a queezed form . ln projection, a corre ponding len rever e this procedure, achieving a wider image with no change to camera or projectors beyond the anamorphic Jen e . The amount of queeze can be varied depending on the arrang ment of the anamorphosing element . Recent discovery of anamorphic footage shot in
Pari s in the Twentie , apparently by hretien, uggests he'd alway worked with a 2x queeze, while an American, Profe sor H. idney ewcomer, the only other per on definitely known to have been experimenting with anamorphic len e at that time , wa u ing a l.Sx queeze. In a paper delivered to the MPTE, ponable tated that Fox cho e the 2x queeze, which initially re ulted in a projected a pect ratio of 2.66:1, becau e it was lo e t to the look of Cinerama. They had the option of choosing any final a pect ratio between that and 1.37: 1. While it i not known if hretien wa in pired to develop an anamorphic len y tern for motion picture after se ing Abel Gance's NAPOLEO ( 1926 ) with its triptych equence whichincluded panorama remini cent of Cinerama (and problem in trying to keep three projectors running in sync), it has been e tabli hed that he began hi work about 1927 . (Wi d e creen inema by John Belton [Harvard Pre ], published after this article wa written, ha some previou ly unpubli hed background information on hretien and his development of the anamorphic le n s . ) In 1928, laude Autant-Lara u ed the Hypergonar Jen on hi film POUR LA 0 STRUIRE U FEU. ome sour e have aid the entire film was anamorphic, other that it wa u ed for certain equence only; the film it elf ha been lo ta have ome other French film of the period with which the u e of the Hypergonar len ha been a ociated . hretien and ance' work eem to repre ent the only European intere t in Widescreen continued 011 page 43 page27
At Clairmont: another three custom tools you may not know about
We've made lots of these things. If you need an unusual accessory, ask - we may already have it. If not, we'll be happy to build it, free, rent it to you and add it to our inventory of helpful tools.
D
irector /Cameraman Don Guy showed us a photo of Jon Fauer's SledCam and asked whether we could make something like it. Director of Photography Jon Fauer had the SledCam made to shoot CBS promos on ice for the 1992 Winter Olympics. It had one central handle and ice skates that tilted. Don Guy wanted one with wheels, to shoot extreme low angles of an outdoor basketball game for a Kellogs commercial; intense, fast-moving action. He was going to dolly on asphalt, so we used model airplane wheels with pneumatic rubber tires. (We can also let you have narrower, solid wheels for use on carpet.) You can have all four wheels on swivel mounts; or two swiveling and two fixed straight ahead; or all four fixed . If you want to go in a straight line fast, four fixed works best. Changing a wheel takes less than a minute and no tools.
The SkateCam
The handle arms can be set to any fixed angle from vertical to horizontal. Alternatively, you can set them so changing arm angle during the shot tilts the camera while all four wheels stay on the ground. You can also pan the camera as the SkateCam moves in a straight line.
G
The Steadicam Saddle
arrett Brown originally had this made for him on location, by a grip. After that shoot, he stored it with us and then gave it to us. For repeated use, we made the saddle's Steadicam mount stronger and uglier. It's not just for rider POV shots. It gives you Steadicam footage as steady as walking shots, but higher up and faster moving. One semi-serious complaint we've had was that the footage looked too smooth to be horseback POV; almost like a helicopter shot. One way to fix that is to include the mane of the camera horse. With this rig you can go where wheels can't, faster than on foot. Sync sound if you want it- that's a Moviecam in the picture. You need an experienced Steadicam Operator who is a good rider. You also need a strong horse who doesn't get spooked.
CLAIRMONT
CAMERA
North Hollywood and Vancouver (818) 761-4440 and (604) 984-4563
W
e had this made for us, to simulate explosions and earthquakes. It has two motors in its base, one at the front, one at the back. Above them, the camera baseplate is mounted on a thick rubber pad. There's a remote control box, not shown here. The remote box has an on/off switch and two potentiometer controls. With those, you can set and vary the speeds of the two motors - each motor independently. On the Shaker's base, you can see two large pale-grey knobs. Turning those knobs controls the distance of each motor's shake movement. The front motor moves the front end left and right. The back motor moves the back end left and right, independently. The rubber pad makes the camera wobble every whichway. You can mount a video tap on the ARRI 3 and use a remote monitor to see what's going on.
The Camera Shaker
by Joe
The e1'0/11tio11 process of the television system is very interesting. From the beginning of the commercial era, roughly the late 1940s, video production was always equipment i11te11sil'e. That is, production needs /Jad to ndopt to the system. In the early, postwar days, 11011- tudio production took a lot of dedication to tlze job. Prol'iding copious amounts of electricity for the equipment and lighting, running heavy camera cables, and keeping touchy equipment cool wa a daunting task to anyone not in love with a live broadcast.
3 tn" /111age-Orthico11 Tube a11d Charge-Coupled Device
page JO
Epperson, soc
Until the mid-1960 , the 3-inch image-orthicon (1-0) tube was the central element that permitted the conversion of a real-life image into an electronic signal that could be sent down a wire. The I-0 tube, (like its 1920s predeces or, the icono cope) work by focusing an image on a light ensitive plate which is scanned by a beam of electrons. The I-0 camera produced a very good monochrome picture, but the equipment wa bulky and often maintenance inten ive. That is not to say that the camera weren't reliable, because they were. They ju t needed a lot of attention. Fortunately, the I-0 tube wa fairly ensitive, needing light level of onJy 75 to 100 foot-candle . The tube's ervice duration wa u ually between 750 to 1000 hour and when it neared the end of it life, bright image would burn into the photosen itive urface and appear a a gho t when the camera was panned. While these cameras performed well in brightly-lit ituation , they generally worked be t when the contra t range was ontained. Whenever pos ible white wa replaced with light blue or gray. It is intere ting that the 3 1/2" 1-0 camera u ed 35mm format, "C" mount fixed Jen es that were usually of very good quality. In the mid 1950 , RCA developed the TK-40, a color camera that u ed three image-orthicon tubes, one for each primary color. The e cameras were enormou and everely limited the operator's ability to do anything quickly. They al o required a lot of
light. Two hundred fifty to five hun dred foot-candle was common in a tudio, placing a tremendou load on the air conditioning system, not to mention the talent. The next big improvement in televi ion cameras came in mid- I 960 when the Dutch electronics company Philips introduced the Plumbicon pickup tube in it PC-60 color camera. Phy ically, the Philip camera took u back 15 year a their camera wa about the ame size and weight a the early monochrome camera and had imilar lighting requirement , around 75-125 foot-candles. It produced an excellent color picture for its day. Plumbicon camera were de igned
~Chip) coupled hnrge-
from the beginning to u e zoom lenses, which unfortu nately, were often of less than tellar quality. From the mid-60 through the late 70s, televi ion camera were pretty much unchanged. Advance in circuit de ign produced better quality and reliability, but the camera, no matter where it was u ed, was still a tudio device. It needed lots of power, interconnect cables and a separate recorder
Society of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
that also needed lots of power, a maze of cables and an air compressor. But things were changing fast. Micro-circuitry and small, low current pickup tubes allowed the de ign of very mall, quality cameras. Probably the fir t to gai n general acceptance was the RCA TK-76. Thi 3-tube camera required regular attention to its color registration system, but when properly maintained it produced a very acceptab le picture with no more upport equipment than a charger for its 12-volt batteries. The TK-76, designed for the non -technical operator, featured auto white balance, manual or auto iri , and an internal co lor balancing filter wheel. What a concept. The operator had control of hi picture. Alas, the TK-76 till had to be connected to a eparate recorder, but by the later 70 this was a portable l " helical can machine for optimum quality or a 3/4" ca ette recorder. Both machine operated on 12-volt batterie oat la t video wa truly free of th e st udio , power and cable ha le . TV tation news department embraced this new eq uipment because it cut down the time between shooting and airi ng a stor y. Add one mall coaxial cable and the camera could be conn ected to a microwave van for Live tran mi ion, opening a whole new way to pre ent news. Other equipment manufacturer like Ikegami a nd ony quickl y jumped into the portable camera market, eclip ing the R A TK-76. But it wa ony that changed video production forever with it Betacam. The Betacam, which put location video production on the map, originally u ed three 2/3" saticon tube . A aticon delivers very high re olution , perform adequately in low light, produces excellent color and it i fairly cheap to manufacture. The tube' bigge t drawback is its image retention , similar to the old image orthicon tube. Very quickly, ony
Society of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
upd a ted the Betacam with a Plumbicon tube and it became the standa rd of the industry. The beauty of the Betacam was that there was now a high-quality, go-anywhere, self-co ntained record ing sy tern. From the operator's tand-
T oday's chip ca1neras give the video operator tlze closest nzediunz yet to Jilin in 1nany ivays.
Mid 19SO'sf?c A TK-40C. l
oorCnmem
point, the Betacam gave u our freedom to record what we wanted to record. But along with thi indepen dence ca me the added responsibility of total quality control of our work, omething that few video camera operators had experienced. The Betacam also came along about the same time as the need for cheap television programming ballooned . Many production companies bought or leased a camera and an off-line editing system and were in the program business. Of course the system was not perfect. Plumbicon camera , like all
tube cameras, have trouble handlin g bright areas, like white sky or pecular reflections, that are 2 to 3 stops over the correct expo ure for Caucasian flesh tones. With electronic field production becoming big busine s the contrast problem was something we had to learn to live with or work around. About seven year ago yet anoth er innovation hit the scene, the charge-co upl ed device or chip. Although everal manufacturers were working on chip cameras in the early 1980s, RCA wa probably in the lead when they ceased production of broadcast equipment. Sony jumped into the market in the mid -80s with a chip Betacam, the BVP-5. Other manufacturers followed with chip cameras and we are now at the point where it would be difficult to find a new tube camera. The larger camera manufacturer have their own proprietary chip de ign which are not really important here because they all work exception ally we ll. What is important is that in ju t five years th e chip ha rendered every tube camera m ade for video production obsolete. Today ' chip cameras give the video operator the clo est medium yet to film in many ways. The ony 400 one-piece Betacam i roughly the ame ize as an Arri 16 R and I think it handle ea ier. Latest chip designs have almost no vices that intrude upon the needs of the production and within the last couple of years lens manufacturers are finally producing high quality optics for video use. What's in the future? If you are not up on the latest in video technology, don' t worry. Just go into any big consumer electronics store and look at the picture quality on some of the $1000 palm-corders. The distinction between professional and amateur equipment will blend , just like it did with 35mm still cameras. The only difference will be the skill of the person looking through the lens.
page31
Fuji Professional Motion Picture Film For more information, call
1-800-326-0800, Ext. 4303
1.9!:a FUJI. A newwayof seeing things. Q l993 Fuji Photo Film US.A., Inc.
It' not our birthday, but there i cau e to celebrate. The new Arriflex 16 R 3 earner are now available at Victor Duncan, Inc., your leading rental hou e for film and video production equipment. The unjque de ign feature of the Arriflex 16SR 3 have already captured the attention of epi odic televi ion producer a well a tho e anticipating the emergen e of high definition t le i ion. It deli er an image that i both ea y on the eyes and on your budget. Mo t unjque to the camera i its ability to h ot normal 16 and uper 16 fonnat . Thi
feature, in concert with an internal time code generator, an illuminated ground gla (a.k.a. ArriGlow), and impr ed optic in the eyepiec , make the Arritlex l 6SR 3 the camera for al I your modem production n ed . To further enhance the filmmaking pro e , Viet r Duncan, Inc. has d igned a new vid o i t y tern - the HyperTap. lt i a cu t m pa kage that minirruze flicker to deliver a harp image without an outboard flicker proce 路 or. Come revel in the future fl 6MM production today by contacting your l cal Victor Duncan film rental oordinator for more detail .
VICTOR DUNCAN, INC.
member of
Atlanta
Chicago
Dallas
Detroit
(404) 457-4550
(312) 267-1500
(214) 869-0200
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~
Titan continued from page 26 a forerunner in it cla s. We are very proud that the Titan Crane came together in a way that validated our concept. There are many other feature of the Titan ranes that make them unique to the indu try. One of our intention back in 1961, wa to make the cranes look "futuristic". We think that even today the crane till have that look. With emphasi on crane design and great added effort, the job not only got done, but enhanced the elegant and beautiful look o recognizable in our indu try. Other features include more arm length thu giving the crane more height and reach, more power, and increased axle ize for more durability for off road u e. oupled with the 6wheel drive, the tire u ed on the Titan rane are carefully cho en to provide a wide range of tire pres ure . The e pre ure allow the u e of our crane in very oft and to the harde t condition that tough location provide. The Titan rane are fully capable of traveling the highway at highway peed and have afety brake y tern incorporated into their design. There i al o an automatic leveling function incorporated into the Titan that, today, ha been patented and i able to correct the leveling of the uper tructure o moothly that even the operator can't feel the correction being made. Another advantage of the automati leveling sy tern is that it eliminate the problem of leaning due to the u e of exten ions or other accesorie on our equipment that move the enter of gravity. The e leveling capabilities make it ea ier to film in area uch a an Franci co where there are evere street angle or on hillside . This new valve often ave time by eliminating costly track leveling effort . An additional feature of the Titan Crane is it ability to put heavy load on the equipment. The uper ova is the newest member of the Titan family of cranes and i capable of loading equipment uch a exten ions, the use of more than two men or up to 1,750 pound . The balancing i done up to 1,226 pound , with the uper ova, in le than two minute via the mercury balancing y tern. U ing the mercury balance feature n t only ave time, it greatly redu e manual labor. The mercury balancing y tern maintain the proper center of gravity which prevent page 34
the cha i from leaning when panning the arm. The ability to set up as quickly as po sible i an important factor to consider for most shoots. With the Titan Crane , you are able to drive to a location and be ready to operate within a few minute . Chapman has been fortunate enough to have the same driver operate our cranes for many years. Our drivers have become quite skilled in operating the equipment both effectively and efficiently. Thi experien e coupled with our new crane capabilitie are al o proven time saver .
The Super .\'01路11 is the 11e11路cst 111e111 her of the Fit 1111 ji1111 i ly of cr1111cs 1111d is mpalile if lo11di11g c11uip111e11t such 11s exte11sio11s. the use if 111orc tht111 tll'o 111e11 or up to 1.150 pounds. The development and introduction of the original Titan in 1961 wa a very well received item in the indu try. In fact, in 1962 the Academy of Motion Picture Art and cience recognized Chapman tudio Equipment with an Academy Award for this type of equipment that we provided to the industry. Chapman tudio Equipment ha continued the development of our crane throughout the en uing 31 years. Our newe t equipment ha ome of the added equipm nt mentioned earlier a well a newer feature . Some of the newer feature include greater battery pack to enable longer dolly shot , with out the need for recharging batteries, as well a giving the ability to upply power for variou light . There have al o been tructural advantages to improve the reliability of our product including fa ter battery recharging to enhance the capabilitie of our larger battery upply. The uper ova ha more than double the battery capacity of our previou crane . ubsequent to the Titan crane was the Apollo. The Apollo, like the Atlas wa to the Hercule , i a maller 4w heel drive ver ion of the Titan. Although smaller in ize the Apollo i ju t as big in it abilitie while providing mailer ize when so required. Like the Titan, the Apollo is excellent for pulling
wagon or cars by securing the vehicle to our cranes. The Chapman list of available acce orie is very large. Over 48 year of accumulated acces orie exi t. A wi e pre-production vi it to our plant could ave on redundant construction of already exi ting device . This doe reduce production costs and ha done o many times. ome features that Chapman tudio Equipment will be introducing soon or have recently introduced are the Hydraulic Extender, the Arm on Arm concept, and a Power A i t feature for arms. The Hydraulic Extender will allow for arc compen ation and also allow for horizontal exten ion into and out of cene . Thi extender i a rugged extenion capable of carrying a load of 1,200 pounds. This mechanism attaches in the ame way a our tandard 12 foot exten ion . The Hydraulic Extender will provide a range of 5.5 feet to 13.5 feet of added reach. The action is mooth and quiet. The control for thi device will be by either manual joy tick or by computer y terns available. Thi purely horizontal exten ion provide ea y to u e capabilitie when coupled to either our Titan or Apollo cranes. The pre ent de ign give 8 feet of extendibility with the ability to reach an additional 16 feet for remote camera u e. Becau e of the heavy lift capacity, mentioned before, that our equipment po se se we have developed the arm on arm concept. The concept i basically putting our Lenny Arm, for example, on a remote platform, mount it on a Titan crane and make it po ible to articulate in all varying degree of action that will allow reaching around corners, reaching up through window and into buildings. In short, wherever your imagination will carry you i what the arm on arm concept will allow to happen. Power A i t feature will allow easier and safer arm control and eliminate the need for extra arm operator . The Power Assist will work very similar to how the power a sist work on an automobile. The Chapman organization feels proud of our mobile crane and we are very thankful for the reception they have received over the year . We are very grateful for the recognition that the ociety of Operating Cameramen ha accorded u . ~ Society of Operating Camerameu
'JI! inter 1993
award winners cont. from pages 20 &21
WILLIAM N. CLARK exploding hand grenade and resulting in a year of bad dreams. He went to work at Technkolor on the night hift. During the day he would go out to Univer al and apprentice either as a loader in the camera department or a econd assi tant on one of the shooting companies. There was no pay but high hope . For two years he appren ticed and finally there was an opening in the optical department. He hated it, but it wa s a way into camera. He lea rned how to run the Acme, how to make fade and dis olves and a million other things. It wa the best training a production camera per on could have and he has drawn on it repeatedly throughout the years. His first picture on production were I HERIT THE WI D and Tou H OF EVIL with Orson Well . PARTA u came next and then To KILL A MOCK! GB IR D, p YCHO and THE BIRD . By now, he wa an experienced first a istant and decided to go freelance. NEVADA SMITH, SOMET IM E A GREAT OTIO , EAST OF EDE , POI T BLA K, THE CAREY TREATMENT,
Moo LIGHTY G, GREA E If, u DER THE RAINBOW, TEN, PI K PA THER RETURN ' PETER Gu , M YRA BR E KE RIDGE, BREEZY, DARLI G LILI, THU D RBOLT A D LI HTFOOT, MAG UM FOR E, TH E EIGER SANCTION, HEROE ' THE BIG Frx, CATHER! E, THE RAI PEOPLE, WH LLY Mo E , O KLAHOMA CRUDE, THE ARRA GEME T, J.W. COOP, TOM AWYER, HI DE BERG, CAR WASH to name a few. He has taught camera operating in summer sessions in Carmel for the Maine Photographic Institute. He helped found the SOC and erved a it Pre ident for two terms. He ha erved on the executive board of Local 659, International Photographers Guild, for twenty years, as well as being a member of the Board of Governors of the SOC ince it inception. According to Bill, " It is till a kick to see through the camera." The years may have taken some of th e pring out of his tep, but the eye are still the eye of that nine-year-old, who wa invited to make a guest shot on a Buck Jones western. PARKER ROE These hows locationed in We t Texas, a case where virtual reality met virtual
fanta y. Needless to say, he couldn't wait to get back to Hollywood . On OPERATIO ENTERTAI M NT he had a long lens holding Vicki arr as she walked among th e Marine ju t returned from battle. Vicki ang, "It Must Be Him." he was pale and bea utiful in a pink dress. "To see the faces of tho e war torn Marine , as he sa ng directly to them, makes this long journey worthwhile," Parker says. "I started in this bu iness because it was fun. It turned into a wonderful career full of joy, enlightenment and wonder. Amazingly, it's till fun." KEMP NIVER often with a specific cinematograph er's photographs, that they could recognize the man's ca mera technique and tyle. Once the conversion was over, Niver and an assistant viewed each one and indexed them in detail. His resultant book was print ed by th e University of alifornia Pres and later revised by the Library of Congress. Kemp iver has written everaJ books on film history, pecific early film s, early directors and actors.
Banquet continued from page 19
For the econd consecutive year, our LI FETIME A HIEVEMENT AWARD BANQUET included the pre entation of our Technical Achievement Awards. In recognition of the significant technical innovations by the corporate community, which have helped advance the art and craft of the camera operator, three outstanding and well-deserved awards were given. The awards were pre ented by Bill Hines, Corporate Liaison of the SOC. The first TE H I AL ACHIEVEME T AWARD wa given to Chapman tudio Equipment Inc, for the invention and introduction by Ralph and Leonard Chapman in 1961 of the TITAN FAMILY OF CAMERA CRA E . Leonard Chapman, EO of Chapman Studio Equipment Inc, accepted the award, giving due credit to his father, the late Ralph Chapman, for th e development of the sophisticated tudio camera cranes. elson Tyler, inventor and CEO of Tyler Camera ystems Inc accepted the next award for the 1962 introduction of the vibration-dampening, fully tabilized TYLER HELi OPTER CAMERA Mou T. The final TECH I AL ACH IEVEMENT AWARD of the evening went to ony Electronics Inc for the 1982 invention and introduction of the Betacam y tern. Jeff Cree, ational Marketing Manager for Sony Electronic Inc accepted the award. Master of Ceremonies for the evening was Jame Wat on , een on HALLS OF ANGER, TH E 0RGA IZATIO , AIRPLA E II , BA K TAIR AT THE WHITEHOU E, HILL STREET BLUES, MATLO Kand QUIN Y. This year' Governors Award was pre ented to Kemp Niver for hi work in restoring to motion picture film, the paper prints used by producer to patent for their silent film . Mr. iver seemed really moved by hi award, receiving a standing ovation. Bill Clark was awarded a Cammy for his lifetime's work as a Motion Picture Film Camera Operator. Bill al o received a standing ovation, well dese rved. Parker Roe received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Video Camera Operator. Bruce Catlin was awarded a Cammy for his career as an Bil/Hi11esprese11tsTec/111ica/Award10Leo1rardCl1apma11 Assistant Cameraman and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Still Photographer went to Bud Gray. The warmth of the evening is something you take away with you. Waiting for the valet to bring her car around, the grand daughter of Ralph Chapman wa really moved, clutching his award, explaining that her grandfather was looking down from heaven. The evening has real meaning. Hope to ee more of you next year. ~ Society of Opera.ting Camera.men
'Winter 1993
page35
continued from page 25 But as fate would have it, upon leaving Cal-Aero I feU into a job at a mall film production company that made commercials. Thi was an easy transition since I had an entree into the film indu try because my dad wa a cameraman. He wa head of the camera department at Di ney tudio during the s ow WHITE, Pl 0 HIO and FANTA IA era. With thi background in mind, at age twenty-six, I attended an air show in La JoUa, at which a pilot wa giving ride in hi helicopter for 10.00. I took a ride and with my 8MM camera shot some film from the air. It eemed a little rough at the time, but I wa urpri ed to ee how haky it reaUy wa when I aw the developed film. Ayearlater(l961)1 awa movie called WE T IDE TORY, which for it' opening, had a erie of traight down angle shot traveling over ew York ity. It was a great looking scene, but very shaky, ju t like my first attempt at shooting from the air. At that moment, I decided to attempt to build a camera mount which would hold a camera teady in a helicopter. I thought thi would be a two month project and I would be able to u e "The Camera Mount" a few times a year. l wa wrong on both account . It took one-and-ahalf year to get the fir t Tyler Mount fini hed and after that I averaged two to three day a week in the air for the next eighteen year . typical hot I did during this time with the Major Mount, that mo t people remember, is the cene with Barbra trei and on a tug boat in the movie Fu IRL. As it turned out, the mount itself needed a number of eparate features to mak it work. Fir t, a platform upported by pring and hock device wa u ed to get rid of the air frame vibration caused by the main and tail rotor blade , and the engine. ext, a three-axi gimbal a embly at the center of the mount wa u ed to i olate the camera from the helicopter' pitch, roll and yaw motion . Then a weight (battery box ) wa needed to counter the weight of the camera, which wa placed at the end of a curved arm to allow the amera operator a place behind the campage '6
era. Under the camera, a double dovetail unit was built on top of a fourth axis (pan) which was attached next to the fifth axis (tilt) on the end of the arm. Handles with control witche were then in tailed, as well as adjustable clutche on the pan and tilt axis. The camera upport arm, in addition to the double dovetail, needed ad ju tability verticaUy to achieve a neutrally balanced camera package. After the camera end of the mount was balanced, the other end (battery box) wa balanced with adju table weights until the camera would float weightlessly and could be pointed in any direction effortlessly. Thi de ign allowed a camera operator to ea ily pan and tilt as welJ a level the horizon at will. The weight of the camera and battery box a well as the placement of the mount's five -axi keeps the camera isolated from the helicopter' variou movement .
The completion of the mount allowed, for the fir t time, the u e of a long Jen from a helicopter. Zoom len es were ju t becoming available to the indu try, o I got one and installed it on my fir t mount. ince there was n room for an assistant who could zoom and focus the !en , I built a motor drive y tern for the lens which was con-
trolled by witche in the mount's handles. This was probably the fir t electric zoom u ed in the film indu try. Having fini hed the mount, I shot a demo film of a man using the fir t battery powered unbeam Electric Shaver on the beach in Malibu. tarting on the logo on the haver and pulling away and zooming back to show the who le coastline; this was a hot that had never been seen before. An ad agency friend liked the hot so much he made forty print and ent them to other agencie in the United tates. From that moment on, the mount and I were con tantly bu y, running around the country hooting one commercial or movie cene after another. It became apparent very oon that I could get around quicker than the mount , o I built a second one, which I would shuttle around through air freight ahead of me. It was also obvious I could not do all the jobs my elf, o I built ome more Tyler Mounts for other camera operators to use. At thi point, a avy Commander from the Pacific Photo Group knocked on my garage door in Van uy , where I wa building my mount , and said he wanted ix of them for hi photo group. He had een a oca- ola commercial I had hot circling around surfer and had tracked me down through the ad agency. o I moved out of my garage, got a building and tarted Tyler amera y terns. During the following year , we built camera mounts for aU the branche of the U.. Military a well a ome foreign countrie . oon I wa leaving mounts at camera equipment hou es around the country to rent to their local film producer . I till had only one ize mount, which wa designed around the Mitchell Mark II camera. Mo t of the e equipment house were doing a lot of 16M M rentals and they a ked for a down ized mount. I designed a mall ized mount around the Arri "M" 16MM camera u ing an Angenieux 12:120 zoom. Thi was a much more compa t mount, but still used the ame five-ax:i principal of design. I called it the Mini Mount, at which time I named my fir t mount Society of Operati11g Camerame11
'1-Vinter 199
the Major Mount. The Mini Mount, having twen ty-three ca ting a well as many small part , lends it elf quite well to manufacturing production a compared to the Major Mount which has many large ma hined parts. Pretty oon, the Arri 35MM film camera and Broadcast Video camera were becoming popular, o we built what is now alled the Tyler Middle Mount. Thi mount, I' m sure, i the mo t u ed helicopter camera mount worldwide. We have about one hundred in operation. Over the years, we have al o built many of what are called belly or nose mounts, which attach under the helicopter near the no e. Thi type of mount i u ed primarily for forward hots or shot looking straight down while moving forward. This kind of hot can be done itting in our normal ide mount with the helicopter flying ideway quite well but only up to about 30 mph at which time the tail of the helicopter tart to weather vane.
We built many different types of nose mounts for all ort of cameras from IMAX on down. Finally, we tooled up and built our tandard nose mount which is called the Tyler 206 ose Mount. Thi mount is remote controlled, u ing a monitor console which fit on the camera operator's lap while he it next to the pilot. We have about eighty of these in u e. A typical Tyler No e Mount hot can be seen in the movie THE FUGITIVE where there i a night equence of straight down shots moving over a city. All of our mount have evolved over the year a cameras, lenses and helicopters have changed . All the electronic have al o been improved and updated as better electronic component became available. We now have forty location worldwide that rent Tyler Mounts for u in their area . The e mount are replaced every two year or so with updated mounts to keep the reliability level as high a po sible. All aircraft camera mount nowaday mu t al o be
EA.A.
ertified. Now we are about to put into service a new Tyler Mount called the kyGyro. The SkyGyro is a gyro stabilized ball type camera mount which is mounted outside the helicopter and i controlled from in ide with a lap mon itor console. Using our experience gained building gyro mounts for military application and learning of the problems encountered with the few gyro mount now in u e in the film industry, we pent three years de igning and building what I think i the mo t advanced camera platform ever made for film or video work. I hope it will be as well received as the Tyler Major Mount. I have just received from the ociety of perating Cameramen, a Technical Achievement Award for the introduction and development of the Tyler Helicopter amera Mount. I wi h to per onaJJy thank all the member of the 0 for this award. I am very proud of it.
Betacnm co11tinued from page 23 The addition of the CCD ( harge-Coupled Device) to the Betacam y tem provided the final element to the ucce of Betacam a the field acqui ition format of choice. Pre ented in 1986 the BVW-105, and later the BVW-505 with its three MO imager provided good resolution with mall ize and ubstantial weight reduction from the it's predecessors. Producing 550 TVL, the BVP-5 camera provided a tool for the field that did not require the constant care of an engineer a with the earlier tube cameras. At 28 watts in the BVW-105 camcorder configuration, power consumption wa low enough that heavy high capacity batterie became unnece ary, thu reducing the weight even further. These camera were o durable that an enterpri ing ale man wa known to hook a BVP-5 to a monitor and drop the camera from a height of eighteen inche onto the floor. This kind of puni hment would de troy a tube camera but the CCD camera took it in tride producing high quality image through the whole ordeal. The BVP-7 was a major step in C D technology, for the fir t time the characteri tic red smear, created from high-contrast light source , disappeared. Thi first generation HAD (Hole Ac umulated Diode) Interline Transfer imager provided an unheard of 700 TVL from a CCD camera. Ordinarily, achieving such high re olution from chips would entail acrifice in sen itivity or ignaJ-to-noi e ratio. But with signal-to-noise performance of more than 60 dB and sen itivity of 2,000 lux (186 footcandle ) with f/5 .6 at 3,200 degree Kelvin, ony did not require any uch sacrifice . When mated with the BVV-5 Betacam P docking recorder, the BVP-7 camera provided ubstantial advantage in image quality from it competition . Upgraded to the BVP-7 A with performance of f/8 at 2,000 lux thi camera still provide the lower co t "IT" alternative to ony' line of Portable Broadca t Camera . "FIT," Frame Interline Tran fer technology came to the forefront with the introduction of the BVP-70 camera. Thi frame transfer technology wa u ed earlier in the BVP-50 camera but with only 550 TVL and a dynamic range limited to 90 dB there was room page38
for improvement. The BVP-70, and later the more sen itive the BVP- 70I , provided far uperior performance. The BVP-701 , with the addition of 0 L (On Chip Len technology), provided an increa e in en itivity to f/8 at 2,000 lux and a dynamic range of 124 dB. Low li ght performance and dynamic range were unmatched by any other camera at the time. Upon it's introduction thi camera became the tandard for electronic field production (EFP) . Due to the <lockable design and uperb performance, the rental houses aero s the country placed orders months in advance for the right to own the fir t BVP-70 's in their market. By the end 1992 the ba e performance of the D camera had finally reached a leve l to change the cu tomer demand for more re olution and dynamic range to demand for more feature . More and more of the <lockable type product were finding their way into the tudio environments requiring more control ia multicore or triax camera control unit . Many of the prin1e tin1e program produced on video u ed <lockable cameras in their tudios, requiring tudio camera performance from the <lockable camera. ony's answer to this demand wa the BVP-90. Incorporating the new Hyper HAD 1000 imager, the BVP-90 achieves an out tanding 800 TVL of resolution with aliasing effects, inherent in conventional CCD cameras, reduced to a m1n1mum. en itivity is maintained at f/8 at 2000 lux, only made po sible by advance in the original ony Hyper HAD en or technology which, combined with the Frame Interline Tran fer tructure, virtually eliminate the mear phenomenon. As its sister models, the BVP717 A and BVP-70/701 , the BVP-90 i very versatile allowing u e with all of the conventional portable camera accessorie . The BVP-90 can be u ed standalone, a embled a a Betacam P combo or interfaced with multicore or triax CCU . The Hyper Had 1000 imager provide the BVP-90 a path to the future world of wide creen 16:9 television. A imple change from the 4:3 to a 16:9 configured imager tran forms the BVP-90 into a 525 widescreen ystem. While many ATV specification are yet to be determined, 525 wide creen may provide the most
co t effective path to the wide creen requirement of ATV. Up to now we have only di cu ed the development of the <lockable camcorder. While the e unit provide the flexibility of operating a a camcorder, a two-piece recording y tern or a studio ystem, they do o at the co t of weight and power consumption. It was for these reasons that ony developed the world' fir t one- piece camcorder. To provide a mailer, lighter, and more power efficient camera y tern, a complete rede ign of the recorder wa required. The re ult of thi development wa fir t di played at AB in 1989. The concept behind the BVW200 ne-piece camcorder wa to provide a co t effective, lightweight camcorder for the E G market. Many of the key de ign deci ion were made after do e con ultation with veteran ENG crews from the major international broadca t organization and ony industrial designer a well a electrical and mechanical engineer . Many of the advantage of the previou fi lm camera were included in thi design. With an operating weight of 15 lb 7 oz the BVW-200 was the first video camera y tern achieving the operating weight of the earlier film camera . Upon it' introduction many camera operators exclaimed it' virtue as the, " Fir t video camera that really feel like a camera!" While limited in in1age quality due to the MO imager u ed in the de ign, the BVW-200 wa a major advancement in field acquisition technology. The new recording mechani m adopted a head drum with a diameter approximately 2/3 the tandard size. Thi required a move to a fourhead y tern from the normal two-head de ign. By changing the drum peed the de igner were able to produce the same track length and recorded angle a the standard Betacam P format. The recorded format of the one-piece camcorder conforms to the Betacam P format despite the difference in drum size. In addition, the recorder accept either metal or oxide tape. Thi technology wa advanced with the addition of the BVW-300 to line of one-piece camcorder . Refinement of the base design took place at the reque t of the major networks. Using the same "IT" HAD Society of Operating Cameramen
'Wi11 ter 1993
imager as the BVP-7 on a compact pri m y tern the BVW-300 provide the increa e in quality that the network required. The BVW-300 was quickly accepted by the broadca t indu try as the tandard for all ENG y tern . Incorporating the Hyper HAD imager, the BVW-300 wa later upgraded to the BVW-300A. Improvement included the quick- tart viewfinder and the ability to provide the optional component output for simultaneou recording. Electronic Field Production embraced the one-piece camcorder with the introduction of the "FIT " BVW-400. The BVW-400 wa the fir t implementation of the Hyper HAD OCL (On hip Lens) technology. F8.0 performance with uperb ignal to noi e pecification , and improved pectral ensitivity of the imager provided the excellent color reprodu tion required in a EFP camera y tern. Thi high resolution system provided all the performance feature of the larger two -piece EFP camera y tern in the more compact ergonomic de ign. To meet the
uncompromi ing demand for the highe t quality E G/EFP performance the BVW-400A was developed and introduced in 1992. The latest innovative technology uch Extended Clear can and Enhanced Vertical Definition have been incorporated while retaining all the function of the renowned BVW- 400. Improvement in the status di play and viewfinder performance have been included to improve the interface with the operator. The Betacam y tern, whether it is a one-piece or twopiece camcorder ha done more to change how we operate a video recordists or camera operators than any other development in the last decade. When we look at the image from around the world, providing same day coverage of world event , more likely than not, it was recorded with a ony Betacam am corder. [Jeffrey Cree i Marketing Manager of Broadcast amera for ony Electronics In . and 3-Time Emmy Award Winning Video Recordist] ~
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FILM SERIES continued from pagel 7 The Archive's preservation philo ophy i ba ed on the conviction that "average" film hould be pre erved alongide acknowledged ma terpieces-that it is not the archivist's job to second-guess hi tory. Furthermore, the Archive i committed to making film available in their origin al form (often by adding lost or cut footage), and to presenting prints with the finest picture and ound quality po ible. The completion of the soundtrack i ju t a important a the picture; and both highly killed, pain taking manual work and new computerized techniques have come to play a role in improving sound and image quality alike. Pre ervationi t never con ider a project fini hed, becau e previou ly unknown material, or material in better condition, may turn up, and new technologie for eliminating defect emerge con tantly. ilent film pre ervation is e pecially difficult, becau e resource material are carce or non-exi tent. Many ilent film made u e of color tints to enhance the image ; however, the urviving print are u ually black-and-white. To reproduce an "o riginal " version of a tinted and/or toned film, archivists work with the film lab to reproduce, a clo ely a pos ible, tho e color when the new print is made.
Another part of UCLA's preservation program i dedicated to the Hearst Metrotone ews collection. A do e watch is kept on the state of the continually deteriorating nitrate new reel ; footage that has degraded beyond aving i eliminated in order to save the portion that is in imminent danger of being lo t. early every new ree l project is a re toration, because all the completed newsreel were di a sembled after being pulled from release, and individual tories were u ed as stock footage. One of the main jobs of new reel pre ervation i trying to piece together the piece of thi va t jigsaw puzzle. Television presents pecial challenge to pre ervationi ts. The Archive is committed to aving a ignificant egment of the mo t remarkable and influential media in American culture ince the end of World War II. Thou ands of programs, ome as recent a ten year ago, only exist on ob olete and endangered tape format . A the equipment on which tape from the 1950s and 1960s was recorded becomes outmoded and di appears, it i an enormou Iy complex technological ta k to find a way to play the e tape back. Thou and of other program exi t only on one-of-a-kind kine cope which mu t be protected through the creation of reference copie . The hi tory of videotape tech-
nologies is too young to gauge with any certainty the helf life of a particular tape format. However, videotape does deteriorate over time, and tran fers must be made before that deterioration begins to occur. The UCLA film preservation program ha been headed by Pre ervation Officer Robert Gitt ince 1977. His current team include A sistant Film Preservationi t Eric Aijala, Preservation Assi tant Ro a Ca tro, Newsreel Pre ervationi t Blaine Bartell and A i tant ewsreel Pre ervationi t Yuell ew ome. The televi ion pre ervation program i headed by Televi ion Archivist Daniel Einstein. Over the years, the Archive ha preserved hundred of feature , hort ubjects, cartoon , newsreel and televi ion program . Although UCLA' work ha gained worldwide recognition, it preservationists are working again t the clock. Thousand of films and televi ion pro grams are endangered by deterioration, and more funding i needed to bring the e cultural re ource back to life. For information on how you can help the Archive's preservation program with a contribution, please contact Cornelia Erner on, Development and Public Affair Officer, 302 Ea t Melnitz, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Lo Angeles, CA 90024; or call (3 1O) 206-1477.
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Ray tella, continued from page 11
and working with Robin and Dustin wasn't easy. A lot of rewrites were happening, and he was a fairly impatient person on that film. He works really fast, which I don't mind a bit. I like to work fast, it makes the day go by in a hurry. SOC: He doesn't let go of the camera does he? Stella: He does. He learned to trust me a lot. It was hard to come by at first. I proved myself to him, and after Hook, Jurassic Park came up and I was ready for him. We got along really well on Jurassic. We're pretty good friends and then after Jurassic he asked me to go to Poland on Schindler's List. Which by the way, is going to be an incredible film. We shot it in black and white. It's going to be three hours. SOC: That's a serious movie. Stella: This is a very erious movie. His most serious film yet. I had to get back to normal composition. SOC: It must have been a challenge for you. Stella: The challenge was I hand -held forty percent of the movie. Steven liked that look. We had a Steadicam with us, and I did a shot or two, but it started looking too smooth. We were using an Arri 535 on Schindler's List, and he ended up liking the look better, the little bit of a rough documentary look a opposed to a smooth polished featuretype tyle. SOC: And you shot Black and White? Stella: Black and white is really interesting and not many people get to u e it. I think a lot of cinematographers would like to, but films nowadays don't call for it and it doesn't bring in the money. People like color. SOC: Even Spielberg had a tough time getting the money to do it. Stella: Yea. I think teven's been trying to get the money for this show for about six years. It wa on-budget and onschedule, perfect. SOC: Who was the DP? Stella: The DP was Janusz Kaminski. He came out of Poland in 1980 and went to Chicago Film School. When he was in SociÂŁty of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
Poland he shot some black and white film which teven aw and he liked hi work. SOC: You're about to do another picture with him, aren't you? Stella: Yes, I'm about to do a thing called Tall Tales for Di ney which starts shortly. September tenth or twelfth, in Colorado, Arizo na, the Redwoods and also here in town. SOC: Right now you're working on The Flintstones. You had the opportunity to work with Elizabeth Taylor. Stella: Elizabeth Taylor is really a gas. She's a total professional and fun to work with. She's a legend in her own time. She's a really nice person. I'm proud to be able to say I worked with her. She plays Fred Flintstone's motherin-law. Wilma's mother. She's a real pill, like most mother-in - laws . John Goodman plays Fred, Rick Moranis as Barney, Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma and Rosie O'Donnell as Betty. I think everyone of them was perfectly ca t. They're all doing a great job and they are a lot of fun to work with. SOC: Doing The Flintstones must be really therapeutic after Poland? Stella: Steven and I both were doing probably the most serious film we will have ever done, and then coming on to a cartoon help . Schindler was very emotional. The most emotiona l thing I've ever done, probably ever will do. SOC: Was it hard operating, because of the emotion? Did you get caught up in it? Stella: Yea, you get caught up in it a little bit. Physically, it was a little hard because it wa forty percent hand held. At first it's always a little hard but then you get used to it, like anything, and it gets easier and easier. I actually really enjoyed hand-holding the camera that much. Not many guys get to do it, unless you're doing a documentary, which I u ed to do. I've done a few around the world for a World Hunger Organization in the early part of my career back in the mid-seventies. But to be able to do this on a big cale feature with Steven, was very enjoyable. Hand-held, the operator gets a lot more creative. You become part of the action, once they let you loose in a scene. We had thirty thousand extras on
this film. We had eighteen hundred in one day, and they start letting you loose, and you start blocking scenes wit11 a lot of extras around yo u, and it gets interesting. SOC: Did Steven want to hand-hold? Stella: No, Steven never hand -holds. It's kinda nice in that situation, I didn ' t have to fight him for the camera. SOC: Did he feel kind of tenuous letting you go like that? Stella: I'm sure he did a little bit. He complimented me a couple of times on how nice my work was. It was a confidence booster when he asked me personally to go to Poland with him . T h e story is a Nazi busine man back in occupied Germany who became friend with a lot of the SS officers. He bought a enamel factory to use Jewish slave labor to keep them out of harm's way. He was able to do this, and paid dearly. He spent all the money he made, keeping people busy and out of the death camps. A couple of years after he tarted the enamel factory, he bought another factory in Czechoslovakia which wa an arms factory. He made arms for the German Army and he also got to employ a lot more Jewish labor. As a result, he saved around 1, 200 Jews during the holocaust, and now because of his heroics there are four or five thousand people. At the end of the film, there was a reunion. They brought 100 to 150 survivors and their relatives over to Jerusalem. It was interesting, and I got to talk to a few of them that actually knew Schindler. Schindler is dead now, he died in '68, I believe. There are very few of them that don 't well up with tears when they tart talking about him. It's just like it happened yesterday to them. SOC: They carry these memories with them? It sounds like doing Schindler's List really changed you. Stella: Yes, it was really something. I think it changed us all. ~
page 41
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Widescreen continued from page 27 wide screen in the late Twentie and early Thirtie . Later, Chretien tried to promote hi lens in the United tate and, like ewcomer, found a lack of profes ional intere t, though at least four anamorphic len system were promoted for 16mm amateur u e in the early Thirtie . January 1953 wa different. hretien and one of his lenses wa brought over to hoot te t on the set built for THE ROBE. Like kouras and ponable, Darryl Zanuck was excited by the results and the deci ion wa made to not only hoot the film in the anamorphic proce s, but to de ign a new pre entation y tern adaptable to all exi ting theaters to go with it. They even came up with a new, exploitable name: inema cope, only to di cover Don Fedder on had already regi tered it for a video-to-film re ording sy tern in I 949. Rights to the name were quickJy purchased. The decision to develop inema cope created a plethora of problem which had to be dealt with immediately. Only one 20 yea r old not- too- harp anamorphic len existed in the United tate . Fox quickly made a deal with the Bau ch & Lomb Optical ompany to make new lenses, improving the de ign a much a possible. Ultimately Fox wou ld order
250 camera le n e and 3500 projection len es. Both camera and projection tense were also ordered from a number of foreign manufacturers. At thi point, the anamorphic wa a upplemental len that went in front of the prime lens. It was di covered that thi combination could not be used on the Technicolor three-strip cameras and this ha tened the adoption of multilayer color negative stock even though they were lower in exposure peed than three-strip negatives. With a desire for focus to be as harp as po ible in mo t inema cope hot , this meant u ing more light on et . Following focu became a problem a both tense had to be focu ed eparately; two assistant cameramen were u ed for thi purpose in Hollywood and even subtle rack focu es and dolly move requiring major focu shifts are rare in early inema cope films. The most notable attempts at such hots wa done by George ukor and am Leavitt, A in A TAR I BORN (1954). Fox engineer al o felt the wider image called for tereophonic ound. Lorin D. Grignon of the Research Department rea oned that three channel behind the creen were ufficient for Cinema cope and three properly placed microphone were used for production recording onto 35mm magnetic fullcoat. Fox later <level -
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oped a common boom for the three mike whi h it would continue to u e for production recording until about 1960. Fox was the only tudio to do so, the other preferring to pan and/or pread a monaural track in the dub. For the final relea e, magnetic track on the print were deemed preferable to a eparate picture and magnetic film y tern a u ed in inerama or a would be u ed to accompany the fir t run of many other tudio ' 1953 release . To achieve this without too great a los of picture information, Bragg realized that the perforation in the print tock, {traditionally much larger than the sprocket teeth in projectors to allow for the shrinkage of nitrate film), could be narrowedbecau e afety stock, (legally required ince 1950), wa con idered , at that time, impervious to hrinkage. Four tracks, left, center, right, and one with a tone that turned on urround peakers a desired, could be laminated to the tock, trimming the projected aspect ratio of the picture down to 2.55: I. To reproduce this track, it wa also deter mined that better quality would be achieved by placing the magnetic oundhead before the projector' picture aperture. A pecial reproducer, oon to be known colloquially as a "penthou e," was designed to be ea ily attached between the
upper magazine and the picture head of mo t exi ting projectors. There is ome confusion about the chronology of Fox' initial inema cope production and the availability of the improved Bau ch & Lomb lens. At the time, it wa reported that only THE ROBE u ed a Chretien lens, production on HOW T MARRY A MILLIO AlRE and BENEATH THE 12 MILE REEF being held up until the first Bausch & Lomb len e were ready. However, both John Belton & Rudy Behlmer (i n Memo From Darryl F. Zanuck) state that three of hretien 's lenses old len es were deemed acceptable by the Fox Camera Department and were u ed on those film . While there are some ubstandard shots in THE R BE, no uch problem mar BE EA TH THE 12 MILE REEF, photographed by Edward ronjager, almost entirely on location in Florida. Thi include house interior and night cene , a rarity for black & white fea ture , much le a wide creen color fea ture in a proces with which the tudio wa getting its early experience. Cronjager would win a well de erved 0 car nomination for hi work. Although Fox filmed a concurrent pherical version of THE ROBE (which would later be relea ed in 16mm for churche and the nontheatrical market), it demonstrated it faith in its inve tment in inema cope by announcing all future production would be in that proces and in the future would only conider projects suitable for wide creen treatment (thu rejecting 0 THE WATERFRO T, which had been offered to them first). Jn an attempt toe tabli h their proce a a standard, they al o announced it would be made available to all other companie , for use only on "A" pictures in c lor, for a fee of $25,000 per picture. At thi time, very few people outside of Fox had een the proces . In March, J953, THI I ERAMA had it We t oast opening at the tanley Warner Theater in Hollywood. While filmmaker were quick to point out the major flaws in the proce s: the vi ible join between the panel , often different van i hi ng point for each panel, the di tortion cau ed by the u e of 27 mm len es in clo er angles, etc., they could not deny the enthu ia tic public respon e to thi glorified travel ogue, not ju t in ew York and now Lo Angele , but in other citie where it had opened. But there wa till mutual agreement on the impracticality of the process for the average theater. While other tudio were hoping their upcoming 3-D film would meet with the ame re pon e, they anxiou ly awaited Fox's announced public demon tration of Cinema cope in
page 44
mid-March. This was held on the large t tage of Fox's Western Ave. tudio and con isted of test footage, including the inevitable roller coa ter cene, and footage from THE ROBE and HOW TO MARRY A MIL LIO AIRE, to how how adaptable inemaScope was to an " intimate modern day story" a well a pectacle. Drawing special comment (a nd frequently used in ub equent publicity sti lls) wa a clo eup of Victor Mature from THE ROBE' crucifixion scene, in pite of it reflecting the "anamorphic mump " (fattened faces that would plague lense based on hretien 's de ign for as long a they were used ). Exhibitor with theater who e pro cenium would permit the installation of larger, wider creen were enthu ia ti , other theaters le o. Filmmaker , however, objected to the extreme width of the image. They felt compo ition would be de troyed, e pecially in clo eup which would feature a face with a lot of wa ted pace oneither side. Fritz Lang ' comment that inema cope was suitable only for snakes and funeral wa widely quoted. Ironically, many of the arguments voiced in 1929-31 again t the average 2: I a pect ratio of the variou wide film proce e promoted at that time were revived, pecifically, that more height than width was to be pre ferred, that the best ratio wa the 1.66: 1 "Golden Ratio" preferred by arti t in the pa t. MGM was th only studio to sign up immediately for a inema cope package. They oon put into production K IGHT F THE ROU D TABLE, photographed in England by Freddie Young, B and tephen Dade. RO E MARIE followed, photographed in Hollywood by Paul Vogel, AS . The other tudio preferred to wait and see public reaction to THE ROBE. Before the relea e of THE ROBE, another problem came up which would become the cau e of con iderable contro-
versy in recent years. Technicolor had developed and daily printed the negative on Fox's inema cope pictures. It wa assumed release prints would be made via its famous dye tran fer proce s. Unfortunately, it was discovered that dye transfer prints did not hold up in term of harpne under the magnification and expan ion involved in anamorphic projection. The mordanting chemical u ed on the blank printing stock to minimize dye pread till allowed too much spread to yield a harp an image a obtainable from a color positive print. The narrowed perforation required for the magnetic track was incompatible with the precise registration pins on the belts used in the dye tran fer printing proces . A a re ult, though credit read COLOR BY TE H 1 OLOR, that lab made Ea tman olor Positive prints of all inema cope films it printed until the fall of 1954 when they developed an improved mordant and al o a dye tran fer pin belt with inema cope perforation . THE ROBE premiered in ew York on ept. 16, 1953, and in Hollywood a week later. With it immediate succes , Univer al, Di ney, and Columbia igned up to make Cinema cope pictures. Jn the meantime, other tudio had been eek.ing way to capitalize on what they saw a a potential widescreen bonanza, and, a anamorphic lens patents were in public domain , possibly even beating out Fox with it own di covery. ~
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Bubbles continued from page 16 reaching their gills. This not only made them omewhat ea ier to handle, it would eventually cau e their demi e, becau e thi oxygen starvation would cause them to lowly die . After about four or five day they would be so low that they would be u ele s for further filming, and o were de troyed. Why didn't we just let them go? We were afraid that they had become so used to the company of humans that one of them would wander to a local beach and eat some child, and we did not want to chance it. I wa told that in the month that it took to film thi sequence we u ed some 65 hark. The hark handlers were told that ince we were in open water, if they felt that the fish was getting out of their range to recapture they should disregard the hot and go in and get it. If he got away he wa gone. Ba ically, the correct approach i to come down on top of the hark (hi blind pot) and grab one pectoral and the dor al fin. One man could pretty well control a six- footer, but as they got larger, it took a lot more guys to slow one down. In fact, our large t hark were 14' long, and they proved to be a real handful. I remember one time, eeing the first man mi the doral fin and getting the tail instead. He was whipped around Like a rag doll, mask, fins, and regulator flying off of him like so much debris. The fourteen-footers were tough to work with in ide the wreck becau e they couldn ' t fit in the doorways without some con iderable difficulty. Their pectoral fins were too wide, and it took a lot of coaching to get them through. I always had my e cape routes carefully planned. If the shark went over me I would wait until the hot was over, drop the camera and grab for the neare t door ill. With a strong pull I would be propelled outside of the wreck. One of the hark handler joked, " ever mind the hark, just don ' t get in teadman ' way when he bail out. " One hot was of the shark exiting the wheelhou e window. I wa outside the window, looking in. It wa another of the e big babies, and she had a Lot of trouble getting through the window. When she finally broke the window frames, she came right at me and buried her nose in the len hade. I wa struggling mightily to keep the camera between her and my elf, figuring that he would have to inge t the camera before he got to me. It was a quick trip to the bottom, ome 30' before the safety men could get her turned away with their pole . We tried bang-sticks as safety armament for a while, but none of us had much faith in their ability to slow down a Sodety of Operating Cameramen
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really angry shark. Then, when one of the hark handlers vaporized hi thumb while loading one, we a1d forget it. From then on we used long pointed poles to turn a shark away, when nece ary. The Arri Ill had made its appearance by this time, and we had one as our A camera. Fitted with a Panavision 30mm anamorphic lens behind a dome port, it was otherwise stock. The other camera was a IIC and had 40mm and Macro-Panatar lenses behind a flat port. ft wa used for clo e-ups, and the magnification of the flat port worked here in our favor. Lighting was fairly traightforward. At the time there were no HM! underwater un1ts, so the I OOOW Par incandescent was our only weapon. Extra long tails were soldered directly to the bulb and then sealed with a marine ealant. If I needed a large source I would gang a bunch of them up on a stand set well back from the wreck. In ide, they were about the right ize. All of the cables led down from our dive boat where they were powered by a small generator on deck. Still, an f/2.8 was about all we could get in ide the wreck. With 30mm and 40mm lenses this meant a considerable amount of followfocu ing. Distance were taped, just as if we were working on the surface. The assistants had a tough job, because they were in a very vulnerable spot, without the protection of the camera it elf. Going back to working with 6 and 8 footers eemed anticl1mactic after the big one because they looked like puppy-dogs by compari on. Looks can be deceiving. One day we were doing some imple pa sbys with a 7-foot shark. Usually, when you release a shark in open water, he will do everything possible to get away and regain his freedom. This one, however, would turn back and try to take a piece out of omeone. One of the handlers narrowly mi ed having hi mid ection limmed down, and the di gruntled fi h left with a rubber flipper in hi mouth as a con olation prize. We gave that one a pas . After a month of this madnes , we fini hed with the shark and were off to do the cave sequence with the bad guy and the atomic bomb. It wa a whole different kind of madness. Located in the backwood on the i land of Grand Bahama, Ben's Hole is reached by lowering a ladder down a small hole in the ground. Once down the ladder, it opens to a large room with a small lake in it. A dive to 80' takes you to a large chamber filled with stalactites and talagmites, but to get down to 80', you have to travel some 200' horizontally. If you get in trouble down there, it is a long way to go to the sur-
face. The chamber wa huge, about the size of a medium ound tage. Becau e the floor wa full of broken Lime tone boulder , stalagmites, etc, lights could not be mounted on stands. Besides, there weren ' t any stands tall enough. The ceiling was smooth, and nothing could be attached to it. One of my guys came up with a brilliant olution. We had an extra hose attached to hi regulator that allowed him in inflate an inner tube wherever he wanted it. After the inner tube floated firmly up against the ceiling, a plank wa lashed to it, and 11ghts attached to the plank. The cables were lashed together and buoyed with styrofoam, then led back to the urface. We set perhap three of the e rig with 3-4 light apiece, and we had the place 11t. Visibility was superb when we first entered the cave, but without any current, it became cloudier by the hour as more and more d1vers went about their ta k . We had it rigged in a day and then hoped that it would ettle and clear overnight before we began to shoot. The next day the vi ibility wa indeed improved, but filming became a race against time because every time you touched either the ceiling or bottom, fresh clouds of silt would be stirred up. The cave had an intere ting phenomenon. At the top, it was filled with fre h water that had seeped down through the limestone. At the bottom, there was salt water that came from the sea, about two miles distant. Where the two waters mixed, there was a boundary called a halocline. The salt water wa perhap 6-7 degree warmer than the fre h water, and its index of refraction was quite different. As the waters mixed there was an effect like fun house mirrors. Someone three feet away would be rendered totally unrecognizable. Sink just a few feet deeper, and the effect would disappear totally. VOYAGE FROM ANTIQUITY
After finishing EV ER Ay EV ER AGAI , I wrote an article on it for the American Cinematographer (Oct,1983). Jack Kelly, an Oklahoma oilman, read the article and called me up. "How would you like to go to Turkey tru summer and photograph the exploration of the world's olde t known h1pwreck?" You can gue s my an wer. As a kid I had always been fa cinated by Cou teau' documentarie , e pecially the one about ancient hipwreck . I think that if you stay in this bu ines long enough and put out the right energy, you get to do just about everything that you want. The wreck had been discovered by sponge divers off the southern coast of page 47
Turkey in 150-180' of water. They had been offered a bounty by the archaeologi t of the Institute of Nautical Archeology, Texa A&M, for discovering anything that wa of ufficient interest to be excavated. After the first survey, sufficient intere t was arou ed. The archaeologists, headed by Dr George Ba , were ure that the wreck dated to the late Bronze Age, and was probably some 3,400 years old. To put that into some ort of perpective, Tutankhamen was the boy king of Egypt at the time, and Athen was nothing more than a little settlement. When Chri t was born, the wreck was already 1,400 years old! When we came up from my first dive on the site, I remarked that there was pottery all over the place in the hallower waters of the lope. Dr Ba s aid, "Oh, don 't bother with all of that tuff, it i probably ju t Byzantine junk." I remarked at another time that it would be great if we found a coin on the wreck. The original would of cour e go into the museum, but we could have an impression made, and everybody would leave with a great ouvenir. Dr Ba retorted that he couldn't imagine a worse thing to happen. "If thi wreck is as old as I think it is, coins haven't been invented for another 700 years!" This was a whole different kind of diving for me. For one thing, it was deep. Working every day at 170 feet means decompre ion, and lots of it. We made two dive a day with a surface interval of more than ix hour . This allowed us twenty min ute from the time we left the surface to the time we left the bottom. The de-compre ion time were about 18 minutes on the morning dive and 22 minute on the afternoon dive. Decompre ion i a boring affair. On day when the current was running we would be holding on to a steel bucket uspended from the boat like so many commuter waving in the breeze. On aim day we would try to read one of the paperback we had placed in the bucket. Thi worked o.k., but turning the page wa tricky a the waterlogged paper would tear ea ily and you would lo e the thread of the narrative. We had a recompression chamber on our dive boat, and a doctor trained in hyperbaric medicine, but we were very conervative nonethele . n the pa age down to the djve ite from Bodrum, we put into a mall fi hing village for the night. There wa a young ponge diver there who had been brought to our boat the previous summer for treatment of the bends. It wa too late for him, for there wa permanent nerve damage. We vi ited him to see if there was anything we could do to make hj life ea ier. He was lying on a bed in the shade of an
page 48
olive tree, his leg withered, unable to move or feel anything below hi navel. It was a sobering scene. After that, we decided that a few extra minute decompre sing wa good insurance. With bottom time hort, the work was slow. Archaeologists are a painstaking lot a well, and nothing is removed from the bottom until it has been photographed, mapped, and thoroughly mea ured in relation to all of its adjacent objects. tereoscopic mapping technique are employed, and the re ult are a accurate a if the site were on dry land. After anchoring over the ite, work was begun on the hore facilitie . We were kind of out in the middle of nowhere, about a two hour boat ride from the neare t town. The hore wa a limestone cliff that went up in giant steps to over 100'. All of the water had to be brought in by boat. Using a boatload of junk lumber, mo quito netting for walls and a thatch roof, we con tructed a sort of a building that housed twenty, with a con ervatory on the lower level. This conervatory had large tub built into the rock for fresh water baths to desalt the various obje t as they were brought up. The major job of conservation, however, would be done back at the museum in Bodrum. At first, there was a lot of sand to be removed from the ite, but the airlift that you ee in treasure hunting were u ed only sparingly, a the loss of the tinie t of object could rob us of important clues. After about a month of excavation it became necessary to remove a large jar that was lying on its side in the middle of the ite. A cargo net wa pread out on the and next to it, and the jar wa rolled onto it. To our urpri e, small piece of pottery spilled from the neck of the jar. There wa a small decanter for oil, and a number of small oil lamps that looked like small saucers with a pinched end for a wick. Work wa immediately halted, and we called a conference on the urface. We theorized that over tlie la t three millennia (that
is millennia, not centurie ) countless octopi could have pulled these objects into the jar to feather their ne t . In any case, the diver with the longest arm would be detailed to remove what he could before the jar wa further di turbed. There were more oil lamps, but they were neatly ne ted together, packed by the hand of man , and had lain undisturbed for over three thou and year . I took two Arri SR's with me, both witl1 underwater housings, and a Rebikoff underwater camera. The SR's were to do double duty, both on the site and on the surface. Their housing were marketed by Arri, and designed to use the Angenieux 9.5-57mm zoom behind flat ports. I don 't like flat ports because they magnify and darken the image, and the longer end of the zoom i generally u eless. However, the Kinoptic 5.7mm i about the same ize a the zoom, and we thought that we could fit a dome port that would keep it a true wide angle. The Rebikoffhad a IOmm with a corrective port, and proved to be a great general purpo e camera. These were great depth however, and the Arri housings had problem keeping the water out at anything exceeding 120'. They were not catastrophic floodings, but were more like a low drip of water on the in ide of the dome. Of course, once you had a drop on the inside of the dome it would be right in the middle of the picture, o that would abort the dive . Eventually we worked the e problem out, but it was without any out ide help, as we were a long way from civilization. The water wa very clear. If you were to top at the hundred-foot level, the dive boat would be clearly visible on the urface , and you could make out diver below on the site. There was plenty of light a well. A I remember, we had something like an f/5.6, but the light wa blue, blue, blue. I brought two lOOOw underwater quartz lights, and their warmth brought ome real color to the scene. However, with 200' of cable tretching to the surface, a light current could cause some real problem .
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itrogen narcosis, the "rapture of the deep," wa another problem to be dealt with. If you have ever had nitrou oxide at the denti t's office, you have ome idea of what thi i like. It would u ually kick in at about a hundred feet, and get progres ively wor e. At 175', you were really toned. I remember the fir t day that we took both the Arri and Rebikoff camera down . I et the Rebikoff down and proceeded to hoot with the Arri. I then handed the Arri to Mike Ferris, my as istant, and looked down for the Rebikoff. It wa gone. ow at this point I am not too rational, and paranoia is creeping into my consciousne s. omeone has taken it, I thought. o, that i clearly irrational, we are the only two down here. I decided to make a quick bounce dive down the slope to see if it had slipped from the place where J put it. o luck. I motioned Mike to join me in the phone booth for a parley.The phone booth is a plex:igla hemisphere full of air that is firmly anchored to the bottom. Two divers can stand in it and have a conversation. Well, sort of, because at those depths you are talking with five times the density of air, and you sound like Donald Duck. All of this was tremen dously funny. Meanwhile, the camera in question had slowly floated to the urface,
cau ing ome peculation amongst the crew on the boat as to what our fate might be. Anyway, by the time Mike had recovered the camera, our bottom time was just about hot, o that ended that dive. At the end of two month , we had barely scratched the surface, and the archaeologi t were to return for another eight season . The film is called VOYAGE TO A TIQUITY and has aired numerous times on OVA and ATIO AL GEOGRAPHI EXPLORER. The December 1987 edition of the Geographic has our expedition as it cover story. I still have friends from that expedition and look forward to going back to Turkey some day. Underwater filming is often times dangerous, fru tratingly slow, and totally at the mercy of the element . But the reward are great. l think that hort of being an astronaut, thi is just about the most foreign element that man can place himself in. There are just two cardinal rule that apply to shooting underwater: 0 Don't hold your breath. 째Keep the water out of the camera. The re t, you just have to make up a you go along. -Robert teadman, ASC
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42 37 14 24 33 49
Ellen R. Mat umoto, .D. FAA Director, Contact Lelis en 1ice Childrens Hospital of Los ngeles
C hildren' Ho pita! of Lo Angele (CHLA) i the number one Pediatric institution in the Western United tate according to a recent urvey reported in U. . ews and World Report. The ho pita! i only for children aged O _16 year and i devoted to upplying the very best in medical care to them. CHLA i committed to erving all the community including children from low-income familie . . The Divi ion of phthalmology i the part of Children' Ho pita! which pecialize in the eye care of chil dren. Their new Eye Clinic facilitie have thus been de igned with the care of kid foremo t in mind. For example, fully- reclining chair allow the examination of even the younge t patients who cannot it up. Infant and toddler who can't it till for thorough examination mu t be edated to be checked. The Eye linic ha the unique ability to provide ane the ia to children on the outpatient ba i o they do not have to be admitted to the ho pita! for many ne e ary examinations. pecial instrument uch a a portable lit lamb al o facilitate the care of the e young ter . The human touch ha not been forgotten either-in tead of ju t magazines, the waiting room i tocked with toy . A t~levi ion tuned to children' program and cartoon put kid at ea e when they vi it the doctor. _There ar_e .s~ven major pecialized pediatric program in the D1v1 ion of Ophthalmology at Children Ho pita!: Retino?Ia toma, euro - Ophthalmology, Pro thet1c Device , ROP/Retina, trabi mu Electrophy iology and Contact Lenses. . _Led by Dr. A. Linn Murphree, the program i an mternat1onal referral center for the care of children with a previou ly fatal form of eye cancer. Patients, who in the not too di tant past might have uccumbed to thi tumor, are n_o~ treated with the dual aim of pre erving life and v1 ion. The Jayton Ocular Oncology Group at hildren Ho pita! ha been in the forefront of re earch in retinobla toma treatment. In an exciting development the cancer ha now been linked to a defect in chromosome 13 in the D A of tumor cells. Further re earch into why this defect occur may allow us to under tand the gene i not only of r tinobla toma but many other cancer a well. The second program of the Divi ion is the euroOph thal mology ervice. Under the director hip of Dr. Mark Borchert this service i involved in the diagno i and page 50
management of optic nerve hypopla ia-a poorly undertood di order in which the nerve of the eye do not form properly. A a result children may be blind in one or both eye . Effort are underway at Childrens Ho pita! to undertand why thi occurs so that it may be prevented. . Fr~quently it is di~cult to know the vi ual acuity potential 1n preverbal children. A third ervice of the Divi ion, the Electrophy iology ervice te t infants and young child~en to a e s their vi ual potential objectively thereby gett111g information without requiring accurate re pon e from patient who cannot it still much !es read an eye chart. A forth service of the Divi ion of Ophthalmology i the Pro thetic Device ervice which is concerned with fabricating eye just for kids. . _The ROP (ret_inopathy of Prematurity) /Retina erv1ce 1s concerned with the eye care of premature babies. Excell~nt mo~ern ?ay life support sy terns allow even very lo~ birth weight mfant to urvive. Unfortunately, uch children may become blind due to a retinal di ea eretinopathy of prematurity. The Retina ervice i involved i~ ~reating the e children to prevent them from losing their VI IOn.
trabismu mean eyes that aren't traight. ro ed eye " and "wall eye " are colloquial term for this common disorder which afflict 4% of children. Strabi mus can lead to amblyopia (commonly termed the "lazy eye"). l~ the you?g child amblyopia i the mo t frequent cause of v~ ual I~ 111 one eye. The key to prevention of amblyopia i d1agno 1s and treatment during early childhood. Most of the children seen in the Contact Len ervice don't want Jen e becau e they do not like glasse . Rather young patient are fitted with Jen e becau e thi form of correction i a better vi ual outcome than pecticle . Infants and young children are fitted with contact lense after cataract urgery, corneal tran plant surgery or if they have extremely high refractive errors. In the critical period of thei_r visual development contact len e help prevent amblyop1a and lo of vision. ., The la t but not l_ea t important in the Eye linic i 1t staff members. We pride ourselves in working as a team and every member of our team is there becau e of a desire to work with children. This dedication fosters a commitme~t to provide the be t possible care for the pediatric patient. The entire Eye Clinic i geared "JUST FOR KID ."
Societlj of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
-
C A M E R A
D E P A R T M E N T
VistaVision
c 1993 STEVE GAINER
Officially unveiled in December 1953, Paramount's VistaVision was designed to improve overall picture quality by more than doubling the negative area. This was accomplished by exposing and projecting the film horizontally. After it became apparent that theater owners were not willing to invest in seperate projection system for each format, VistaVision assumed the role it has maintained until today; an extremely stable 8 perf system for optical effects and reduction .
Next issue: The Arrijlex 535! ocief:IJ of Operating Camera1tum
Winter 1993
page.51
IAIHEN lHE GOING GETS TOUGH THE TOUGH GET TOGETHER "" 1
'
Hence the SOC
by Bob Marta, 1ST PRESIDENT OF THE oc What eem like only a few day ago, 15 camera operators (seco nd cameramen) gathered to dis u s the idea of forming an organization that would be non -political, while maintaining the highe t level of profe ionalism for our craft, and the motion picture and televi ion indu try. As a whole, we have been faithful to tho e goals, much to the chagrin of other organization . n that very memorable night, we elected officer and formed committees to set out on our quest to, fir tly, find out how thi organization would be received and secondly, to build a membership. The re t i hi tory!! Who would have ever thought that just a few short years later our member hip would be worldwide, or that the letter OC would be so proudly displayed behind o many great names and work ' of art. The pride, Love and admiration that well within me ju t at the thought of what you, the membership, have made the 0 , i overwhelming. I am gratified to have had the opportunity to play a small role at the inception of the SOC, and am proud of the magnitude of today' organization, and it' potential for future accompli hment . However, a we all know, succe is not without growing pain and ob tade . You are approach~g the single mo t important plateau to date, of your profe 1onal career -U ION EGOTIATION 1993. Take heed, as your future
ar~ at take-~he future. ~fan entire classification of comm1tted profe s10nals are m Jeopardy. Times change over the year , and with tho e change , it i necessary t~ the sur.vival and growth of the SO~, that we change our ph1lo oph1es . ave your brothers, 1 ter and your elves. BECOME INVOLVED POLITICALLY. But to do o in an orderly, organized fa hion. Go to YOUR officer and YOUR Board of Governor ; write letters to YOUR Pre ident with copie to the Union and the International. Never forget that the International negotiate the contract. Make your wishes known to the Union and the International- hould anyone object (AMPTP), go to your brothers and sister in the new media and publicize your plight!! Hi torically it has worked . Remember when the industry wide afety Committee began and the obstacles and threat we faced from the producers and the I.A.? But for the new media and trade papers, our road would have been very long and arduou . Our safety and future was trengthened by our unitygo to Randy and the Board of Go_vernors. . . " . I would caution you agamst breaking off mto punter group ", a they will ultimately tear you apart. Unity of number can be very powerful. The OC was conceived out of love and unity for our fellow professional , alway mindful that divided we are conquered; united they will never take us alive!! . . . The journey ha been long, and at tune pamful, m arriving at where we are today, but the fruit of our labor have been mo t worthwhile. I look forward to a long and prosperou future with you, the member hip of the ociety of Operating Cameramen. ~
Of the many ways to drive an Arri 2C..• CINEMATOGRAPHY ELECTRONICS INC. 1455 19111 StrHt, S.•t• . . . ka, California 90404
THIS IS THE BEST! Pilon: (310) 129·1111 Faxa (310) 453·2601 t•s: 650 315 2405
state of the union
TAKE THE OFFENSIVE, RECAPTURE WORK! by Bruce Doering, Executive Director, Local 659 It is time to take the offensive. West Coast Studio Locals need to unite around a plan of action that will top the erosion of the Ba ic Agreement and, at the same time, increase job opportunities for members. The implementation of a bold strategy cannot come too soon. The studio system, once a bedrock of employment for thousand of lATSE members, is now an empty memory for all but a privileged few. Moreover, because of Article XX, major producers can easily evade the Basic Agreement through the subterfuge of so-called negative pickup and production -di tribution deals. In addition, the IATSE has yet to make major inroads into the fastest growing ectors of our indu try, namely, movie -of-the-week, cable and syndicated productions. Furthermore, a large percentage of producer have attempted to cut costs by running away from Los Angeles altogether. Indeed, the City of Los Angele estimate that 90% of movie -of-the-week and 14% of 28 one-hour dramas are now shot out of town and that 40% of feature production ha left the city in the last three years. To turn thi ituation around we need to expand IATSE program already in place. First, the best way to protect wages, working condition and benefits of the Basic Agreement is to eliminate the producers' non-w1ion alternative. This mean putting together a coordinated, nationwide organization campaign. The goal of such a campaign would be to make it more co tly for producers to shoot non -IA than to shoot under contract. In addition to crew support and picket lines, the tactic employed to achieve this goal would include conducting publicity campaigns designed to embarras the offending, greedy producer and at the ame time extol the virtue of unionism; making alliances with prominent mem bers of AG, WGA, etc.; and demon trating against parent corporation . Such a campaign would be coordinated with other IA Locals throughout the country. The recent organizing uccesse on RETURN TO LONE OME DOVE, HOLY MATRIMONY (botll in Montana ) and BAD GIRLS ( onora, California) demon trate that with additional organizers and a national plan of attack, uch a goal is not beyond our reach. What is necessary is that Hollywood Local put our heads together and make the commitment in time and resources to see that it happen . econd, if organizing i the " tick" to deter producers from evading the Basic Agreement, then competitive contract are the "carrot" to convince them that the IAT E i prepared to tailor agreement to different circum tances and budgets. The purpo e of such agreements is not to "give away" conditions of tile Basic Agreement but ratller to get the work we don't have. For example, last year le than 3-1/2% of the 197 MOW's made for network televi ion and cable were hot under even a modified ver ion of the Ba ic Agreement. Moreover, the percentage of cable and yndicated production under contract i al o abysmally low. Altllough tile BCP MOW Agreement may have eemed a radical departure to ome, it not only brought 14,000 man -hours of work and health benefits to IA members but it also marks tile first time a major producer of MOW' ha made a commitment to shoot IA. IA members would be well- erved if our union u ed uch competitive contracts a a launchpad to round up uch infamous non-IA producers as HBO, TNT, Wilshire ourt, etc. Third, the IA' We t Coast Office and Locals should initiate a gra sroots campaign to convince Lo Angele County governments to cut the co ts and eliminate the bureaucratic hassles of shooting in the Los Angeles area. Assistant to the President, Harry Floyd, Local 659 President George piro Dibie and Busine s Repre entatives Gene Allen and Marja Bernay have taken the fir t step in this direction by serving on city and county commissions and articulating the need to make Lo Angeles "u er friendly". It i time to back up their efforts with a letter writing campaign from the IA' 20,000 plus member . We hould coordinate our letter writing with meeting with members of the Los Angeles City Council, County Board of upervisor , et al. We hould take a our model the efforts of the New York City's lATSE Locals. After three years of hard work they have made ew York ity into a low-cost, friendly place to shoot. Making change is never easy. However, we no longer have the luxury of debating these issues. The time for action is now.
Society of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
page 53
e soc SOC AT SHOWBIZ EXPO For the first time, the Society established a pre ence at howbiz Expo, held at the Lo Angeles Convention Center 5-7 June 93. The booth included the OC banner and two logo card . On the fronting table, a prominent di play of 0 activitie included the Eye Care Clinic, the current eye care pin, and several is ues of the OC Magazine. OC jackets and cap , member hip application , brochures and order form rounded out the di play. Bill Hine wa the booth coordinator this time around. taffing the booth for the three days were: Howie Block, Bill Clark, Bob Feller, teve Gainer, Gil Haim on, u an Hender on, Bill Hine , Jeff Hoffman, Doug Knapp, Allan Lumli, Karin Modlin, Ru el and Lisa Ofria, Randy Robin on, and Harvey Rubin . Our corner booth location provided maximum expo ure. Many friend and member dropped by to ay hello. We pas ed out 2,500 brochure , and 200 member hip application to our visitors. ale of magazines, caps, jacket and pins cleared around 800 from the booth. The optimum exposure received by the OC at this indu try-wide event and the financial succes realized has a ured our participation in howbiz Expo 94. ext year Harvey Rubin will be booth coordinator. Give him your upport by volunteering to help out.
SOC WELCOMES CORPORA TE AFFILIATES The corporate community ha re ponded well to our invitation for corporate affiliate membership in our ociety. Leader in our industry have come aboard early. Thi re ponse promi e a new era of collaborative effort and progre for the OC. Accepted at this time into CORP RATE AFFILI TE MEMBER HIP with it Corporate Affiliate Representative are, alphabetically: AGFA D1v1 1 , MILES IN , repre ented by Toni Robert on, Technical ales Repre entative; ARRIFLEX ORP, Bill Ru sell, We tern ale Mgr; TH E HOTMAKER o/ HOTMAKER D LLIE & CRANE I , Derek Church, VP ale ; EA TMA KODAK COMPANY, Motion Picture & Imaging Div, John Ma on, ales Mgr, and Don Henderson, ale & Engineering Rep; FUJI PHOTO FILM U A I , Hap Parker, VP & General Manager; LEO ARD T DIO EQUIPME T I Leonard Chapman, CEO, and harle Heunergardt, Manager; MATTHEW STUDI ELE TR I s I C, Bob ettmann, President; OTTO EME z I TERNATIO AL I , Karl Kres er, Marketing Manager; PANAVI 10 I TERNATIONAL L.P., Tracy Langan, Director of Sale ; PHOTO- ONI I c, Conrad Kiel, Rental Manager; TE H 1 OLOR, Adam Chuck, Director of ale ; and VICTOR DUNCA I , Frank Mara co, CEO. Collaboration, of course, is a two-way treet. Our page 54
NEW's contribution to thi effort are: l) Producing a quality magazine which erve our members, adverti ers and the indu try at large; 2) the tandard Committee evaluation for film and video product and ervice in order to help perfect tho e product and ervices and 3) the Technical Achievement Awards which are given in recognition of those development and innovation from the busine community which ignificantly contribute to the art and crah of camera operating.
SOC AT IATSE CENTENNIAL CONVENTION Two of our member , Bill Clark and Bill Hine , were elected delegate by the International Photographer Guild, Local 659, IAT E, to the centennial convention of the Alliance held in ew York City 17-24 July 93. What make Lhis notable is that Alfred W DiTolla, International President of the IA, approved a pecial commemorati e pin design which featured the lA emblem. He al o provided a special booth, located ju t out ide the convention floor, for the purpose of promoting donation , in exchange for the designer pin, to the Eye Care linic of the hildren Ho pita] of Lo Angeles. In addition, member hip application , brochure , and order form for the SO magazine ub cription , cap and jacket , which have re ulted in ub tantial re pan e. A pecial certificate of appreciation from the OC wa pre ented to Pre ident DiTolla by Bill Hine , at the tart of the convention and total upport and cooperation followed for the duration of the convention. We managed to ollect nearly 3,500 in donations for the Eye are Clinic during the even days we were there, which will provide contact len e and help save children' eye ight.
Society of Operating amerame11
'Winter 1993
AN SOC EVENING WITH EASTMAN KODAK "A EVE I G WITH EA T M AN KODAK" inaugurated a new era of collaborative relationship with our recently accepted corporate affiliate member of the business community. Organized by Eastman corporate affiliate representatives John Ma on, and Don Hender on, the evening started with a meet -and-mixer of those attending, featuring food, refreshments and socializing. The attendee were treated to a thorough pre entation of the digital imaging Cineon proces by Marty
Shindler, VP Sales & Mktg for Cine ite. Special visua effects, and archival restoration are achieved through Cineon digital image processing. George Gush, ale & Engineering Rep for Eastman, presented a talk and demo on the grey cale, its purpose, and its use in the industry by cinematographers, film timers and telecine colori ts in tran fering film to tape. George would like ome input from our readers on the fol lowing: Whether or not a late-size (or larger) grey- cale chart should be produced by Eastman for u e by shooter ; and whether or not color bar hould be included on the chart. Cali George with your ugge tion at Eastman Kodak, 213/261-1885.
SOC LETTERS LETTER FROM MIKE FREDIANI, soc
no n-union (read non -IA) into feature film , eries T. V. a nd with movie of The recent signing of the BC th e wee k no w a t a rock bottom 3% Production Movie of the Week con- signed to IA agreement (and flouri shtract by the IAT E raises many impor- ing) it appear that th e bitter end i tant i ue , the most important being; staring us quarely in the fa ce! Options can we live with it? The agreement m ay b e few but we are till in th e contains provisions that call for wage ga m e. A long a there are production reduction , loss of drive-to pay, holi- companie that decide to bargain w ith day and vacation pay, golden time the IATSE, it is incumbent upon us to delay and most important to many of listen to their concern s and negotiate us, the elimination of the camera th e best possible contract. Companie heretofore non - union operator' position. We mu t ask ourelve if these conce ion are fair th at are willing to show a commitment game in today' market. Motion pic- fo r a 2-3 year contract that maintains ture profits in 1993 are at historic h ea lth a nd we lfare b e n e fit m a kes highs and even network T.V. license m o re en e th an u s sitting idl y by fee have risen in mo t ca e , yet ome while o the rs take th e jobs. If more producer are being pre ured to do production can be igned on we stand more with the same funds. Many pro- to m a ke more progre in th e lon g ductions till hire a plethora of pro- run. But on th e hori zon looms a dark ducers and they are not working for m1n1mum wage . o what we are clo ud , the proposed elimination of th e receiving from all of this are mixed ca mera operator's po ition . If a line is to be drawn in the sand let it be drawn me age , though one message alway remain : Will the IATSE bend over h er e, for if it is implemented , both director and director of photography (backwards) to erve the producer financial bottom line while the DGA will ru e the day of it inception and and AG contracts remain in force on the rea ons are clear. The cinematognearly all productions? One very r a ph er 's work load and tre s level important reason why the IATSE is left would rise accordingly given the fact out of the mix has to do with the fact th at he or he i on the et from call that they are 22 local unions not of time to wrap tim e without a break to one mindset. Their collective hou e is b e h a d outs ide of lunch ( dailies , so divided that it cannot stand up to scouts, inquiries) . The cinematogra the on )aught of those who call the pher' job entail plea ing the director, producers, the studio's budget con hot . o what are our options at thi straints a well as pleasing hi or her juncture? ome local re pond: "Let's stand own artistic values. All this while tryour ground, keep the Basic Agreement in g to keep the crew working as a intact, status quo 'til the bitter end." cohe ive unit day in and day out. Can Well with the heavy encroachment of this job be done without the benefit of Society of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
SOC LETTERS the camera operator? The answer is that it indeed ha been done in isolated ca e due either to the greed of the production company or the lack of will of the director of photography to fight for a camera operator. But does it make economic sense for a company to add to the ta ks of a job that is at best tough to accomplish within a 1214 hour day? And are the added phy ical demand worth taking on? The ability of the camera operator to buffer the director of photography from some of the time-consuming question that ari e from the AD' , props, ound dept. etc. aJlow the cinematographer to spend more time concentrating on Lighting the et. Also if the D. P. i suddenly unavailable due to illness or emergency, the camera operator stands by next in line ready to bridge that temporary gap. The triumvirate that is the director, director of photography and camera operator must not be compromised for it would be to the detriment of all. Fight hard to keep alive the crucial position of the camera operator!
LETTER FROM JOE STEUBEN, soc The right to organize and bargain collectively in the Motion Picture Industry was won after much courage and sacrifice on the part of tho e who came before us. For the most part, we who work under the I.A.T. . E. umbrella enjoy many benefits and a standard of living that is the envy of other working people. And yet, there eems to be a mean spirit afloat that i trying to eviscerate and retrofit our page55
SOC LETTERS life-style. Why the hubris? W h at's going on? At this moment, we the working folk in the Entertai nm ent Indu try, are being a ked to under write the alvation of the three major Televi ion Networks in Ame ri ca. Never mind the year of "what's good for NBC is good for the world." Never mind that the credits on mo t of the Televi ion hows get heavier and heavier "above the line" even as the licen ing fee and ancillary markets dry up. Take pay cuts, give back benefits, cut out crew people and maybe, ju t maybe the BCP types will dain to catter 12,000 man hours (like rose petal at a Mob Wedding ) at our members who have watched their Medica l and Pe nsion Plans sift through their fingers a their work call get farther and farther apart. Do yo u even remember the give back that we have thrown at the Producer during recent cont ract negotiation in a futile attempt to get them to bring their bu ines back to L.A.? Do you think that the MPPA i n't taking extensive notes? Do you think that they are not watching our Bu ine s Agents override and ignore our Charter and Constitu ti ons as they roll over and let BCPers rub their bellie ? Do you think that the MPPA won' t be ready for ' bear" when the next Motion Picture Contract talk begin? Right now, Camera Operator are taking the heat. Who's next, the Loaders, the econd A i tant ? Do you remember the plaintive wail for olidarity that the till Photographer et forth not that many year ago? What is a Union an d how doe it influence your abi lit y to h ave a career and a modicum of fi cal tability? Look into your heart,answer these questions in your own way, then stand up and be counted. THANK YOU.
LETTER FROM MICHAEL A. GENNE I h ave been a amera Operator for ten year . I've been very fortunate in the e pa t ten years to pageS6
SOC LETTERS have been involved with some great projects with wonderful Director , Director of Photography and other Crew Members. A you may have noticed, I mentioned "other rew Members". The Camera Operator i and should be thought of a a vital link to this chain. I tried to think of a word to be t de cribe a Camera Operator. One word that readily come to mind when I think of a good Camera Operator is support. A Camera Operator upport not only all of the technical craft , but the Director and the production in general. I believe it is the re pon ibility of the Camera Operator to become involved. Involved with both the creative and the technical deci ions being made on the et on a daily ba i . To do so you, the Camera Operator, mu t make your elf invaluable to the Production company by becoming such an asset that a Director, a Producer or a Director of Photography would not consider doing a film without you. We, a amera Operator , mu t go out of our way to attain renewed indu try re pect. We mu t work very hard. Time are changing rapidly and unle s we do not want to become ob olete we mu t do what i expected of us and more so that we will be appreciated and requested. This hard work will pay off in the long run. And, in o doing we will be needed so much by a Director of Photography, Producer or Director that they would not consider doing a show without us. We mu t show them that we are a valuable a set to the team and worth every dollar. Thoughtfully, Michael A. Genne
will keep it on the front row.. . Looking around last night and eeing all the good talented people makes me proud to be an a ociate member.. .I gue I'll be a photographer forever and I will take the e memorie with me... Cheer and thank , Clayton Bud Gray 17 October, 1993 Memories of happy tin1e are all we have to keep, as we travel down life' road ... They help us climb the trails so steep and lighten up our load ... Vi ions of nice days gone by warm an aging soul... and they make us want to try to reach our lifelong goal... with Hope, - Bud Gray
LETTER FROM KEMP R. NIVER To all the Member of The ociety of Operating Cameramen Thank you very much indeed fo r the honor yo u bestowed on me on October 16th. I wa tru ly plea ed, all the more o becau e it was so unexpected.
All the be t wishe for a good year. incerely, Kemp R. Niver 20 October 1993
SOC BENEFACTORS We wish to thank the our special donors and sponsors for their generous support.
LETTER FROM CLAYTON BUD GRAY
BAUSCH & WMB, INC
HI! I'm much better behind the cameracertainly not a speaker...! think I aid "It's really great to be remembered by friends and I am really happy and thankful for your remembering .." At least that' what I wanted to say... Over the year I have collected a few mementoe --this one I cheri h and
RUSSEL & LISA OFRIA RALPH EDWARDS PRODUCTIONS ROSE STEINBERG WAPNER WESTLENS, INC
SociP.ty of Operating Cameramen
'Winter 1993
~ Society of Operating Cameramen 1993 RPORATE AFFILIATE A FA D1 v1 10 , MI LES I
Toni Robert on RRl~U.X CORPORATIO
Bill Ru sell
Dan Norris kip orton David owell Wayne Orr Richard Price Ernie Reed chwiebert
Donald Hender on John Mason FUJI PH TO FILM
U A, l
H.A. Hap Parker MATTH EW
TUDIO
ELECTRO I
,
I
Bob
Tracy Langan Pr 10TO-
NI
,
I &
Derek Church
ICTOR D ,I Frank Mara co
A ' Tl E H RTER
Parker Bartlett Paul Basta Michael Ben on Bob Bergdahl Howard Block Jerry alJaway David all way Mike hevalier teve onant am Drummy Joe Epper on Mike Ferra Ron Fran i Bill ahret ii Haim on Peter Hapke Bill Hine John Huneck Wane Kennan Bob Key rm Langley Tom Laughridge Bri e Mack 111 d M rey Tom Munshower Lee akahara Jay efcy Rik ervik ichol on ichol on ogle
A TIVE Art Adams Jame Ander on Ted Ashton Jr. Bill Asman Brett Babcock Paul Babin Liz Bailey Vincent Baldino Gerald Banales tewart Barbee d Barger Loui Barlia Tom Barron Richard Benda Bob Berry Al Bettcher Joe Blai dell Jame Blanford Peter Bonilla Billy Bragg Garrett Brown Bob Bryan Robert Carmichael Joe he Jr.
or o Ron ourtney Ivan raig Richard ullis Rocky Daniel on David Diano eorge Dibie Alexi DuPont David Elkin James Etheridge Tom Faigh Michael Ferri Bruce Finn Howard Ford Thomas Fraser Da id Frederick Michael Frediani Jag Gaynor Rusty eller
Wayne Getchell Allen Gonzale John oode John Gutierrez Anette Haellmigk Terry Harkin Ronald High Patricia Hill William Hir h Jeffrey Hoffman Joa him Hoffmann David lrete Levie I aack David Judy Burl Kinney John Ki er Dougla Knapp Dan Kneece Robert La Bonge Jeffrey La zlo Henry Lebo Mark Levin Michael Little Patrick Longman George Loomis Allan Lumli Kenji Lu ter Braden Lutz am Macdonald onstantine Makri Jame Mann John Ma kall Richard Ma on tan Mc lain D n Mc uaig Ron cManus Mike Meinardu Robert Mill William Molina Joseph Montgomery hri topher Moon Jeff Moore Deni Moran Jo hua Morton Rick eff Michael egrin huck icklin Ed iel en Rand y olen Philip Oetiker Ru el Ofria Michael O' hea David Parri h Aaron Paza nti Robert Peeble David Plenn Ronald Preciou Robert Pre ley La zJo Rego Bernard ReilJy Herb Robert Randall Robin on Harvey Rubin Jame Rush
Frank Ruttencutter teven choedsack Philip chwartz Jonathan mith tephen t. John raig tewart Michael trami ky David tump Bill wearingen Gene Talvin Richard Tiedemann John Toll Daniel Turrett Pernell Tyu Robert Ulland Gregory Van Der Veer Victoria Walker John Ward Bill William Ben Wolf Elizabeth Ziegler A 0 LATE Gary Armstrong Eugene A hbrook huck Barbee Mitchell Block Jo eph CaUoway Bruce ardozo Jeff lark Don rapper hri topher Daw on Jame Dennett Ronald Deveaux Kevin Downey Robert Feller Dan Fetler Gerald Finnerman John Flinn Ill teve ainer Richard Garbutt Jame arvey Harvey Genkins Wayne Goldwyn Bud ray Jeff reene Kevin Haggerty Donald Halliday Wynn Hammer John Hill harle Hou e John Huggin Philip Hurn Gregory Irwin hri I hii George La Fountaine tevan Larner John LeBlanc Brian Le rady Dr. Ellen Matsumoto Annie McEveety John McPher on Mark Melville Charle Min ky
Karin Modlin Gary Moore ol egrin John ewby ichola izich Eric Jetson Pfoutz Ted Polmanski erge Poupi Bill Reiter Marvin Ruh Lee afar Richard alvatore Bob eaman Jan luchak Kenneth Wade HaskelJ Wexler Shaun Wheeler Tony Yarlett HO ORARY tephanie Ben on Bruce Doering Bill Fraker Ron Kelley Davlat Khudonazarov We ley Lambert Jerry Lewis A. Linn Murphrey M.D. David Myers Jay Roth Frank tanley George To ca Harry Wolf RF11RED Bernie Abram on Ce are Allione Rupert Ben on Jr. Don Burch Phil aplan Bruce atlin Bill lark Cliff oncialdi Jim Connell Ralph erling Jeff Goldenberg Jerry Good Lutz Hapke John Hu ey Bill John on David Kurland teve Lyde ker Owen Mar h Bob Marta Michael Mc lary Emmanuel Metaxa Arnold Rich David Robman am Rosen Jim aper Lou chwartz David utton John Thoeny ven Walnum