STARBURST - ZOPTIC REVEALED

How Superman Flies by Zoran Perisic

After two years of utter secrecy, Zoran Perisic, whose Zoptic Process contributed so much to the flying sequences in Superman The Movie, has decided to reveal just how he helped fool audiences into believing a man can fly. Nicholas Leahy journed to Pinewood film studios at the invitation of Perisic to attend a special demonstration.

'You'll believe a man can fly' proclaimed the publicity for the film of Superman. "If the audience doesn't believe that Superman can fly, then we don't have a film" confessed Richard Donner, the director, just before it opened. The enormous production had taken over forty million dollars and two years to make, and at the time was the most expensive show on Earth. The film was a critical and commercial success, and how Superman flew has remained a secret until this day. All the people involved in its making were not allowed to say a word about it. Superman himself, Christopher Reeve, refused to be drawn. Now as the sequel, Superman II is only months away, one of the men responsible for the unique quality of the flying sequences is free to explain how they are done. He is Zoran Perisic, a special effects cameraman and owner of the Zoptic process, which he developed for the purpose of Superman-powered flight.

A year and a half into the production of the Superman film, Zoran Perisic approached the producers with his fledgling process, and although they had already invested in conventional methods of making their hero fly, using wires and travelling matte photography, they became interested in augmenting these effects with what Perisic could offer. They told him that if his Zoptic process could pass a test, and that if his equipment could be ready in six weeks, then the job was his. It did, it was, and the rest you know . . . except how it was done.

At the end of shooting on Superman II, I went onto the large "A" stage at Pinewood Studios, England, where the flying unit alone had been working for nine and a half months, to see a demonstration of the Zoptic process. Zoran Perisic, a shy and diffident speaker, pointed to the largest front projection screen I have ever seen, pearl grey in colour, curved, of rigid construction, thirty feet tall and ninety feet long. It filled a wall of the stage, and opposite it was a very unusual camera suspended by a telescopic arm from the lighting grid, and resting on a tall, expansive rostrum. Before the demonstration, he explained how he had got the idea. From Yugoslavia, he came to England as a freelance cameraman in 1963 and worked on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"Although I was rostrum cameraman on 2001, I became aware on that picture of the problems of showing space vehicles flying convincingly in depth . . . It was almost impossible to achieve a separation between the flying object and the background. In fact in 200 this was achieved by the laborious method of hand-painted mattes. However, one thing I learned on that film from Stanley Kubrick, the director, is that any idea is worth trying no matter how crazy it may seem. That is why years later when I opened my own small studio, I decided to experiment with a hunch I had. This became the Zoptic process". I strained my imagination to see Superman aloft as he technically explained how it worked.

"I reckoned that it was possible to make an object appear to move in depth, to 'fly' towards or away from the camera, while its real position in relation to the camera remained unchanged. This could be achieved by projecting the background through a zoom lens, and rephotographing the background with an object placed before it, with a matching zoom lens on the camera. The two zoom lenses are interlocked either electronically or mechanically, with matching focal lenghts so that their focal lengths change together".

There was an illuminated model of a space ship, fixed on a rigid pole-arm, stuck through the middle of the projection screen, as we made our way up onto the rostrum. The pole is aligned so that the space ship masks it from the camera's eye, and at the end of the pole-arm there is knuckle joint, so that the spaceship can be made to pitch, yaw, or rotate, as necessary. A close look at the projector-camera unit itself, known as the rig, on the rostrum established the proximity of the two zoom lenses, with the projection film of the background, known as the plate, threaded underneath. Suspended from the ceiling by the telescopic arm and counterweighted, Perisic could move the machine with the greatest of ease. The camera and projector are extremely light. One reason why is a specially designed lamphouse for the projector, making a heavy zenon [sic] arc light unnecessary. "The most important advantage of this new rig", he said, "is the three-axis movement of the camera. Pan, tilt and rotation all coincide at one point in the camera lens. Panning and rotations can make complete 360 degree turns, and the tilting allows for 180 degree movements. The rig can be raised and lowered on the telescopic arm, and the rostrum allows for a twenty feet side to side tracking movement. The size of the stage means that the rig can be tracked back to one hundred and ten feet from the screen. The rig can be operated in three ways, manually, by remote control, and by feeding either of those procedures into a computer. A small video camera mounted in the viewfinder gives instant test results on the television monitor screens". Perisic and his small crew took their seats behind the control desks at the rear of the rostrum, and the demonstration began. "When the projector is screening a large picture, its lens is on a short focal length," he said. "The camera lens is on the same focal length to photograph the whole of the projected picture. So the size of the object in front of the screen will appear small in the viewfinder. When the projector is screening a small picture, its lens is a long focal length. The camera lens follows the same zoom change to embrace the smaller picture. Through the viewfinder, the picture appears unchanged, but the object in front of it seems bigger, and appears to have travelled towards the camera. An automatic iris has to be used on the projector to compensate for the changes in the brightness of the picture".

Just to be awkward, he demonstrated the reverse, the space ship flying away from the camera. All the working lights on the stage were turned off. Perisic said "Action". A small aerial picture of The [sic] Arctic wastes, filmed by helicopter, flashed up on the screen behind the model. The picture zoomed rapidly bigger to fill most of the screen, while to my eyes the model just turned a little inwards on its pole and remained the same size. But on the monitors, in the same rectangle images as the Panavision big screen, the ship turned and grew smaller, diminishing rapidly into and across the landscape, "flying through the mountains". Deluded by a game of perspective, the visual effect was acrobatic, exhilarating, and impressive. With the stage lights on again, we watched the video recording of the take once more.

Now how does Superman do it? A fibreglass mould of Christopher Reeve's torso was made, and attached to the pole-arm. The actor is carried to the pole-arm by a tall, moving gantry, and placed in the mould. Sometimes the shot makes it necessary for him to wear the mould under his costume. He is fanned by a wind machine in a pit in front of the screen to simulate the stream of air, and to make his cape look good. Suspended in mid-air, Superman has become that stationary object in front of the screen. But using exactly the same process in as many ingenious ways as possible, he can be made to take off from the ground at incredible speed, float around the top of The Statue of Liberty, chase a rocket, circle the Earth, and fly along the stars.

One of the technicians on the crew paid Christopher Reeve a compliment well worth hearing. Speaking of the actor, he said "Nobody else can fly. When you put stand-ins and stunt men in that mould, they look nothing. They just lie there. When he gets up there, he flies. You believe he can fly, because he believes it. He's prepared himself in his own mind because he's an actor. Noo matter how long the shot takes, he's so patient. It's really hot and uncomfortable up in that thing. He's amazing, that guy".

Not all fo the flying shots involved the Zoptic process. When Superman touches down or takes off from a fully built studio set, this is usually done with a harness and wires. When Superman touches down or takes off from a fully built studio set, this is usually done with a harness and wires. Such scenes often occur at night to help the illusion.

Traditional methods, such as models, mattes and optical effects, were used with such great skill that the late Les Bowie, (matte expert), Derek Meddings (director of model effects), Colin Chilvers (special effects supervisor), Denys Coop (director of photography for flying effects), and Zoran Perisic for the Zoptic Process, all collectively won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award, and an Oscar in 1979 'for special achievement' in making Superman fly.

In a viewing theatre in the studio, Perisic explained the process in more detail, before screening some flying scenes from Superman and Superman II. "I had done a test for Superman at the very beginning, long before Richard Donner came on the picture", he said. "For some reason very few people appear to have seen that test. But it had been rejected at that time because some people felt although it worked well with spherical lenses, it could not be made to work in Panavision, which is what SUperman was being shot in. When I was hired, they reckoned I would be needed for ten weeks. Having completed Superman II, I have worked flat out on the project for three years. On the first one, everything was make-shift. There simply wasn't the time to develop the hardware and have it built. Now we have done that, we are able to achieve effects that simply would not have been possible on Number One. Now we have a lighter, more flexible rig, a larger, curved screen instead of the original flat one, and the lenses are a great improvement. Then we only had zooms of a 5:1 ratio. Now we have 10:1. Before the plates were shot on 35mm anamorphic, this time they have been shot and projected on the VistaVision format". He promised a scene with five people flying on the screen at the same time. "There are an enormous number of plugs behind the screen, so that we can move the pole-arm wherever we want, so of course we can use more than one and reseal the screen material over the holes afterwards. The closer Superman is to the screen the better, usually about ten feet, so there is less of his shadow to mask in behind him. We never used a plate that ran for more than a minute, and then we were undercranking the camera to slow things up, or else we could never get through all the instructions in time. The producers liked us to get in at least two shots a day. Sometimes continuity was a problem. With three crews working at once, the live action unit, the model unit and the flying unit, sometimes one unit got to a sequence before another one. In which case if one shoots something differently from the other one, you are apt to say, 'The other fellow's wrong. I'm right'. Although we looked at other people's takes before shooting something ourselves, the only liaison was the editor".

By inverting the rig, Superman can seem to enter the shot flying on his back. If the upright rig pans to the right past him on the pole arm while at the same time zooming to a smaller picture, when the result is shown in a cinema there is no way to detect that the picture has diminished, so Superman will seem to grow larger as he flies towards the camera and then out of shot screen left. By tilting the rig and zooming at the same time, the picture can be moved around Superman, so that he seems to steer himself into, around, and away from the background. In fact, with the new equipment, now he can do anything he pleases. Perisic says "The trick of the thing is to get the two zooms working together. You can't get it nearly right. They're either exactly right, or it doesn't work at all".

Rushes from Superman and Superman II were then projected in a darkened theatre, to the recorded sound of John Williams' 'flying' music from the film. Even though I knew the secret, to me Superman still flew with all his dynamic power. Still invulnerable to gravity and special effects men. But not quite. On one take, as he flew through the sky with that frown of purpose we know so well, someone lowered into shot beside him a stuffed buzzard on wires. Superman laughed for a moment, and then cheerfully punched it away with a super-powerful fist. No revelation can ever knock his image out of the sky.