Starburst #7 -

Superman - The Effects page 2

Derek Meddings — model photography

Compared to Colin Chilvers and Roy Field, Derek Meddings spent a relatively short time working on Superman — a 'mere' seven months. Of course, on any other film seven months of special effects work would be something out of the ordinary. Meddings is probably Britain's top model effects expert and is best known for his work on television's Thunderbirds and on the last few James Bond films such as The Man With the Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me (both films, particularly the latter, contain much more model work than the average film-goer realises).

When I spoke to Derek Meddings recently he was in the midst of months of effects work for the latest Bond epic Moonraker which features a climactic battle between space shuttles and the villain's vast space station (there will be more about his work on Moonraker in future issues). I asked him what he'd done on Superman. "I supervised all the miniatures, such as the destruction of Krypton and the sequence with the San Francisco bridge after the earthquake. For the latter we built a very big miniature of the bridge at Pinewood complete with a pool of water beneath it to represent the San Francisco Bay. We did all the vehicles travelling across the bridge, the scenes where it starts to crack up, cars smashing into each other and the school bus swerving to avoid the crack in the surface and then crashing through the railing to hang suspended on the edge of the parapet — all in miniature. This was intercut with shots of full-sized vehicles that we filmed on a section of the bridge built on an airfield but as this wasn't built above the ground we could never show over the side of the full-size section—so whenever you see a shot in the film showing over the side of the bridge and the water below, that was all done in miniature . . . I think it's an excellent sequence. But I shouldn't say that, should I?"

Having seen the sequence 1 told him to go right ahead because it is excellent and the model shots are impossible to detect.

I then asked if he had been responsible for the actual blowing up of the planet Krypton when it collides with the sun. "No, I didn't do that ... we did the shots of the ice city, where Jor-El has his laboratory, when it starts to fall to bits and the crystal stalagmites penetrate its sides. We built a very, very large miniature that included the city itself and the surrounding Krypton landscape. It was very complicated and rigged with all sorts of devices and small explosive charges so that all the various sections would collapse on cue. Then we had to show the spaceship, containing the baby Superman, emerging from the roof of Jor-El's laboratory and moving over the city . . ."

Returning to the subject of the exploding Krypton I said that I thought the sequence in Superman shared the same fault as the similar shots in Star Wars when the planet, and later the Death Star, were blown up— the actual explosions were over too quickly for objects that were so big. An exploding planet shouldn't disintegrate immediately but should break up slowly at first, to suggest some of the immensity of the object involved. But I realized that this effect would be difficult to achieve with a model because you would have to use either a gigantic model or film it at an impossibly high speed (all miniature explosions are filmed with high-speed cameras, thus slowing up the process when projected at normal speed on a screen and making the explosion seem a realistic full-size).

"Yes," said Meddings, "but it's always the problem when you get into the area of trying to do something different with explosions. The only way you can do that sort of shot, really, is to attach the model to the roof of the stage and shoot it from below. When the charge goes off all the pieces fall down towards the camera—it's probably the only way you can do it at the moment for the simple reason that if you're in space and an explosion happens the fragments expand uniformly in all directions because of the lack of gravity . . . but there's a limit to the size of the model (and explosive charge) that you can use in these circumstances." He paused and then said: "I'm hesitating in answering because I'm thinking of what we've got to do on Moonraker . . . we've a lot of explosions in space and certainly at this moment I can't think of anything new or special that I can do with them . . ."

Speaking of Star Wars I asked if the release of Star Wars, which occurred half-way through the production of Superman, had any influence on the style of the special effects in Superman: "No," said Meddings. "Star Wars came out during the time 1 was working on Superman and by that time it was too late to do anything or to change the script. But Dick Donner wouldn't have wanted to copy anything from Star Wars anyway, which I think is the right attitude to have."

I then asked the inevitable question: were all the rumours about the problems with the flying sequences true: "I'll probably get hung for saying this but . . ." said Meddings, and then he paused before continuing, "they spent a lot of time and a lot of money on Superman and I admire the director and the producers for going as far as they've gone because. it's the sort of picture that if the special effects aren't convincing then that's the end of it. But as Dick Donner said at the beginning—'If Superman didn't fly there was no point in doing the film, because the flying sequences are the key special effects shots in the film." It's no good having Superman look as if he's lying in front of a revolving backing, anybody can do that. He's got to look as if he can really fly and convince everybody that he's flying. So yes, there were flying scenes shot on Superman which, when they were looked at the following day, were not as good as they looked when they were being shot. So Dick Dormer would insist they were reshot, and I think that's the right way to do it. But there are lots of shots on every film that have to be redone, it's nothing unusual."

Though Meddings hadn't been involved in the shooting of any of the flying sequences I asked what he thought of the finished product: "I. think they work very well. Fundamentally, of course, they weren't done any differently to the early days of Hollywood when they flew people—actors wore harnesses attached to wires, or they were stuck onto mechanical arms, if they could hide the arm from the camera. Really until you can come up with some sort of amazing magnetic field that enables people to fly you're limited to the traditional ways. If I could invent something like that 1 could make a fortune. But flying anything, models or whatever, is always a problem in any film. From what I can gather John Dykstra in Star Wars did his flying sequences in a totally different way because the models stood still and the camera did all the movements, which does away with the problems . of wires completely ..."

Had Meddings found working on such a" vast picture as Superman very different' from more conventional types of movies in terms of the available money, resources ' etc? "No, not really. The same problems exist on every picture no matter how big . the budget—you've got a production office ' that's chasing you because you're spending " too much money and you're chasing them because you need more money to do the shot the way the director wants it. In the end, on almost any picture, if they have faith in you they will let you go ahead and do it properly because in the long run they know it's got to be good on the screen. The producers don't want to have to go on tour with the film explaining why it was a lousy shot."

And he was satisfied with all his work in Superman? "Yes, very. But really, when you do a shot and you know it's good then you know most other people are going to agree because one is very critical of one's own work. It's a bit like being an artist— the picture in your mind is never the one you get on the canvas, or in my case the screen. It doesn't matter how good it is, when you see it on the screen you say to yourself, I wish I'd done something else, or I wish I'd done it a different way. But then the director and the producers are thrilled to bits with what you've done then you forget the picture you had in your mind . . ."

Roy Field — optical effects

The third Superman effects expert I spoke to, Roy Field, was responsible for a totally different area of special effects—the opticals. Optical effects basically include all those types of visual effects that involve combining all the various image components, usually by means of an optical printer, onto one single piece of film. Like Colin Chilvers, Roy Field began his effects career with Les Bowie: "I joined Les back in 1954 when he was doing The Quatermass Experiment at Bray with his then partner Vie Margutti who was an optical effects expert. Then later Bowie's company broke up and I went to the Rank organisation for 17 years, then Les and I joined up again on Superman. When I was with Rank I worked on the first 6 or 7 James Bond films with John Stears, who's a great friend of mine, then I went freelance in the early 1970s . . ."

I asked if he had decided to specialise in optical work at the very beginning of his effects career: "Yes. 1 started off on the camera side but in optical work. In other words, making a dupe (duplicate) negative which L think is the basis of all optical work. But I don't call myself an optical man—I call myself a cinematographer really because in my position one has to know exactly what a camera does and be able to converse with a cameraman of quite high standing and understand exactly what he's doing. So you've got to know both sides of the fence—all the optical side and all the camera side. That's why I was lucky when I went to Rank because I was trained by George Ashworth, who was head of Rank's camera department at Pinewood for many years and a very great man, and by Vie Margutti. So I had an all-round training."

When did he get involved with Superman and did he realize at the time it was going to become such a huge undertaking? "I got involved at the very beginning, in April 1976, when the project was first being set up. Colin Chilvers was already on the picture by a few weeks and so was Les Bowie. That was 2J years ago . . . and, of course, when one read the first script, the original script, one knew it was going to be a pretty momentous task and that if they stuck to that script it was going to be the equivalent of making quite a number of normal pictures tied together."

And are there any major differences between the original script and the finished Superman film? "The original storyline didn't change much," said Field, "but obviously the conception changed with the change of directors. Guy Hamilton obviously had a different approach to the picture and when Guy left the new director, Richard Donner, brought in a script consultant called Tom Mankiewicz (co-writer of the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever) and so the conception changed but it was still a momentous task whichever way you looked at it. But basically it became more realistic in approach and in a way more difficult from the special effects point of view.

"I supervised all the optical work which covered a tremendous area and I was involved with nearly everything that went on. We used many of the old effects systems because L always try to have a back-up system in case one system doesn't work, or doesn't look as if it's going to work. This was important on Superman because a lot of the things had never been done before and we were never sure about how they were going to work out—so if one system should prove, for whatever reason, not acceptable to Dick I would have a back-up system prepared to make sure it would work Of course, when you're shooting the different components of a scene many months apart, as we were often doing on Superman, one is never sure until you've got all the components together that it will work . . and the other big problem is getting as high a quality as possible."

I asked how closely he had to collaborate with the other effects men on the picture, such as Derek Meddings and his team of model technicians: "Well, if it was a straight-forward model shot that didn't involve anything else then obviously one wouldn't interfere. But if it was a shot that I had to do something with optically, like place into another scene, then we would have to collaborate quite closely. The great thing about this picture is that Dick Donner insisted on storyboarding every sequence which was tremendous help to everyone though we didn't stick rigidly to it. With a lot of the really difficult sequences Dick held meetings where we went through a preliminary storyboard that the art director had laid out and, with the help of a sketch artist, we revised them according to our discussions. If Dick wasn't happy with the way the storyboard had been laid out or if a sequence was technically impossible from the effects point of view then we would alter it until we found a way of making it work. So a very early stage good storyboards that were practical to film were developed . . . it's no good having a storyboard of a sequence that you just can't put onto a piece of film."

As an example, I asked how the sequence where the starship carrying the baby Superman approaches the Earth would have been handled by the various effects departments: "Well, in that sequence there were probably four different components—the moon, the Earth, the starry background and the spaceship itself. First the art department and the model people would build the various pieces and they'd be shot separately . . . then it would be necessary to combine them all together optically, which is where 1 come in. Sometimes, of course, it's possible to film two of the components together at once on the studio floor. Normally I wouldn't be present during the actual shooting—1 would be called in beforehand to discuss it, or if something looked as if it wasn't going to work out as planned then I'd be called in to help devise another way of doing it. Often you've got to work out a lot of revisions on the floor because it's not until then that you actually find out whether something will work physically."

Naturally Field was involved with the flying sequences and he discussed the different processes that were used to get Superman into the 'air'. "A high percentage of the flying scenes were done with front projection. There were other ways it was done—with travelling mattes and 'small models of Superman — but basically it was front projection which meant that Christopher Reeve himself was involved in most of the shots. We found that he 'flew' in a certain way that was difficult to copy and when we tried other people they didn't look right. He was jolly good actually because he suffered an awful lot. He spent many hours at a time in uncomfortable positions but he never complained . . . you couldn't ask for more out of an artist than he gave us . . ."

Front projection, as I understand it, is achieved by projecting an image onto a screen covered with a special reflective material that bounces the light back in straight lines towards its source. Therefore to photograph the resulting image the camera would have to be in the same position as the light source, a seemingly impossible trick but one which is managed by reflecting the projected image oft" a half-mirrored sheet of glass behind which is positioned the camera. In other words, the camera is pointed directly at the screen while the projector is positioned at right angles to the screen. The image from the projector bounces off the mirrored area of the glass, which is placed at a 45 degree angle to the screen, hits the screen then travels back towards the glass but this time passes through the unmirrored area to enter the camera behind it. The obvious problem with front projection is that if you want to move the camera you've got to move both the projector and the glass simultaneously which naturally makes it very restrictive. I asked Field if these restrictions still applied to front projection or whether a new technique for creating the effect had been developed. "No, the general basis for all front projection remains as you described it. Various improvements have been made but you are still very limited when using front projection. When you want to move the camera you have to have a very mobile and complicated rig to move all the accompanying equipment which is very heavy. You're also limited by the size of the screen available and also the size of the picture you can project—after a certain size the quality of the image degrades too much. That means in the case of Superman there was a limit to the size we could reduce Chris to in relation to the background whereas with the travelling matte there's no such limit — as long as the blue-backing covers the area all around the artist you can put him into any background you want and reduce him to any size you want in relation to it."

Before going on to discuss the pros and cons of the travelling matte system 1 asked whether he didn't think that front projection gave more realistic results than, say, rear projection (rear projection is achieved with a projector behind the background screen but this means that the background image appears 'washed out' in comparison with the foreground image, whereas with front projection, because more light is bounced into the camera, the background and foreground images are of the same intensity). "Yes," said Field, "the quality is obviously better with front projection than rear but we don't use rear projection much anymore. There are certain things you have to do with rear projection but it's very limited and only a small amount of it was used on Superman . . ."

I asked if front projection was at its best producing still backgrounds. "No," said Field, "I would say that fast-moving backgrounds are the easiest things to do with front projection. They work very well —it's the static scenes where people have time to look and examine the backgrounds that you have problems." This answer surprised me as I had in mind the remarkable front projection scenes at the beginning of Kubrick's 2001; A Space Odyssey which created the illusion that the ape men were surrounded by a prehistoric desert landscape. Field agreed that these scenes were impressive but explained: ". . . Kubrick was using 10 x Sin front projection plates and that's another sort of system completely. Obviously you can only use plates that large on static shots but there are so few such shots in Superman it wasn't worth us setting up that sort of system as well. Superman had to be a fast-moving picture ... to make the action flow Dick wanted the whole thing to move all the time, which meant that everything had to move, the camera and everything. And this is another big drawback to front projection—speed—because if you want to move front projection fast you're limited by how fast you can move the rig and the actual lenses themselves. The system we used on Superman was extremely good in its way—it was designed by Zoran Perisic who had developed a series of zoom lenses which allowed us to zoom in on both Superman and the background at the same time, thus keeping him in relation to the background. Of course, yet another problem with moving front projection is that you need a large blank area of screen to move the background image into and as I said before, there's a limit to just how big you can make a front projection screen. Once again it's a problem you don't have with a travelling matte . . ."

At this point I should explain that a travelling matte is an 'automatic' matting process (a matte is anything that is used to mask off an area of a shot to enable another image component to be added later). The most common form of travelling matte is the 'blue screen system' which involves photographing the actor, model spaceship or whatever, in front of an illuminated blue screen. The colour negative is then printed onto a black and white film which only records the blue areas of the shot and after a further complicated series of printings the final result is a piece of film in which the background is clear and the foreground action is opaque. This is the actual travelling matte which is later used in an optical printer to mask off I he foreground action when the background footage is being printed onto the 'dupe' negative. The process is then reversed with the creation of a counter-matte in which the background area is opaque and the foreground clear and this in turn is used to mask off the background in the optical printer when the original colour footage of the foreground action is printed onto the same dupe negative. The dupe negative should then contain both image components, such as actor and background scenery, neatly fitted together (without the mattes, of course, the result would be a double exposure with one image showing through the other) but unfortunately this isn't always the case. Often a thin blue line, or fringe, is visible around the actor (which is light from the blue screen being reflected off him) or you get a slight jiggling movement between the foreground and the background (caused by the registration holes in the different pieces of original film not being in exactly the same position). I asked Field why, despite these drawbacks, it had been necessary to use travelling mattes in Superman "Very early on I decided that we would have to have a blue screen system available though no one ever wants to shoot much travelling matte in a picture because of the time it takes and the various problems involved I wanted it mainly as a back-up system but we ended up using more travelling mattes than I expected. But with the highly complicated shots of Supey flying long distances and receding to a very minute size that was the only way they could be done. Travelling matte has certainly been vastly improved even from a few years ago and it's improving all the time but you always have problems with the system and always will . . . you still get lines around the actor but we know how to lose them . . ."

An obvious question was how it is possible to use a blue screen when shooting Superman in his blue suit? Why don't the blue areas of his uniform end up having background scenery matted into them? "Because actually his costume isn't blue in the film," said Field. "It's really nearer to turquoise than blue though it looks blue on the screen. You must have some green in it to make a matte using the blue screen system. At the beginning I had to test all the various blues for the Superman costumes that the designer, Yvonne Blake, could find for us and eventually we brought it down to about two, both of which were more turquoise than blue. Then we had to get DC Comics to agree to the colour . . ."
To be honest, I personally found some of the travelling matte shots of Superman flying to be among the least convincing effects in Superman. It seems to me that no matter how technically accomplished a travelling matte shot may be, there's always something about it that doesn't look right —an impression that the foreground is not really a part of the background, even if you can't see the give-away blue line. The long-shots of Superman hurtling into the distance or circling a skyscraper as he does near the end of the film certainly looked spectacular but at the same time they looked almost like cartoon animation rather than shots of a live actor. I'm not sure but I think it has something to do with perspective—the background perspective changes while Superman's remains the same no matter how far into the distance he recedes.

As Field said above, most film makers try to avoid using the blue screen system. Stanley Kubrick, for instance, didn't use any blue screen work at all in 200T despite all the complicated effects sequences in the film (whereas most of the model shots in Star Wars utilised the blue screen system and the resulting difference in quality is sometimes quite obvious). Derek Meddings is someone else who isn't keen on using the system: "On Moonraker we're doing certain shots that involve front projection or rear projection but we're not using blue screen. I'm trying not to use it even if it means we have to cut a shot or work it out in a different way simply because we don't have the time to put it into an optical house and wait for it to come back. With rear or front projection you can see immediately whether a shot works but with travelling mattes you have to wait until the lab has combined the two films.

"In Superman they did blue screens and had the same problems as everyone else. Some of the shots are good and some of them not so good — and in the end, of course, sometimes a shot that is bad will end up in a picture because you haven't the time to do an alternative shot, so I'm trying to avoid that if 1 can."

On the subject of reshooting effects I put the inevitable question to Roy Field. "1 wouldn't say that anything in particular on Superman was reshot," he replied, "Things may not have worked out as expected in some cases and we had to revise and retake but I don't think any more than normal. On any picture stuff is reshot. Dick Donner has very high standards as far as quality is concerned — which I agree with — so sometimes if the quality wasn't up to his standards then we'd redo them. But don't take any notice of all those stories in the press about the wires being visible. Those sort of statements are made because no one really knows the truth unless they're fully involved with it."

But the flying was the big problem?

"One of the main problems, yes, obviously. It was making a human do something realistically that is humanly impossible. A flying man just doesn't look right for a start unless it's done in a certain way. So it's a very difficult area not only technically but also artistically, and I think the way Dick handled those sequences was very good . . ."

Presumably Donner was very involved with all aspects of the special effects? "Yes, Dick was very involved with everything throughout the picture which was great because you always had someone to talk to who understood what you were talking about. He had a very difficult task because there were so many things going on at once and it wasn't easy to keep track of them all, but he managed. He was a tremendous asset because he's so enthusiastic. Just when you're feeling depressed because something is not working as you'd expected he'd come in with this marvellous enthusiasm and cheer us all up. Then we'd take a fresh look at the problem and it would all start to jell. Not all directors are like this and I think that sort of attitude from a director is very important in special effects work because no matter how hard you try you can still spend hours wrestling with a problem that you didn't expect and you get so depressed about it . . ."

I asked what particular effects, apart from the flying, caused such problems on Superman. "Well, there were quite a number of things actually where we spent too much time and looking back one wonders why one did—one example is the Krypton sun that collides with the planet and blows it up. Getting that red, boiling inferno effect was difficult and we spent a lot of time on it. Finally it was done, first with a model and then had other components optically added . . ."

Were any new techniques for the optical work developed for Superman? "Yes, I would say there were but one is always developing new things in my line of work— you remember what you did on some picture years ago and you try to improve on it and develop it a stage further. Split-screen work is a good example. Split screens are much more sophisticated today—you can move the join across the screen today whereas once you were limited to locked-off camera positions . . . and today you can also pan or zoom or tilt with a split screen which is something that directors love." (A brilliant use of split-screen in Superman is the sequence where we see Superman fly off Lois Lane's balcony and then see Clark Kent appear at her door ... all in one continuous shot!)

I suggested that working on the effects for the second part of Superman would be rather easier seeing that most of the problems had been solved but Field didn't agree. "We'll have a whole new set of problems on Part 2. Each new scene will present new challenges and the problem still remains of being able to give the director what he wants. That's what makes my job so interesting. I mean, we've solved the flying sequences in Part 1 but we want to improve on them, and I think there's a lot of room for improvement. We're not stopping at this point and saying 'that's it'— we're going to try and make Part 2 even better."

Was there much still to be shot on Part 2? "Oh yes, there's a lot of work to do. A percentage of the live action has been shot but we haven't tackled a lot of the more difficult work yet because of the pressures of completing Part 1. Originally we had intended to keep abreast of both pictures at the same time but we rapidly realised that that wouldn't be possible, so we shot things for Part 2 with the main actors and now we've got to pick it all up and make it work. We're starting now (January 1979) and first we've got to look at all the film we've shot and analyse what we did and how we thought of doing certain things and then we've really got to keep working until the producers decide they want to put the picture out, which will probably be in June, 1980. And I'm afraid we'll need all that time. The one thing about special effects is that it isn't fast. There is no short-cut to any effects shot — it's just a hard, long grind. Many producers complain at how long effects work takes but you're always having to do something that can't be done in reality and that's the difference . . ."

My thanks to Colin Chilvers, Derek Meddings and Roy Field for sparing the time to talk about their work and congratulations to both them and the other effects men who helped make Superman the marvellous film it is. Roll on June 1980. — J. B.

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