Behind the Scenes of the Film "Contact"
An Interview with Ken Ralston,
President of Sony ImageWorks
by Stan McClain, SOC
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KenRalston has won four Academy Awards
for his work in Visual Effects for Return of the Jedi, Cacoon,
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Forest Gump. He is currently
president of Sony ImageWorks. He was interviewed for this
issue by Stan McClain, SOC President.
OC: Ken, before we get started
perhaps you can give us a brief background on yourself and how
you turned your childhood hobby into running one of the most
prestigious visual effects companies.
KR: I started when I was very
young and I was fascinated in this line of work and movies like The
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad by Ray Harryhausen. I started making
movies when I was in grammar school, using an old Kodak 8mm-movie
camera, and I started learning by those experiences and stumbling
around. There wasn’t any information around about visual effects,
not like now, where everywhere you look there’s another magazine
article about what’s going on and how to do it with all the tricks.
I was fascinated with a magazine called Famous Monsters of
Filmland that Corey Ackerman used to edit. It didn’t have
much in it about the business, but it did have a little taste
and a lot of photographs in it. Corey- (I had written him a letter)
connected me with Ray Harryhausen who was working at a place
called Cascade Pictures right here on Seward and Romaine Streets
where they did a lot of visual effects commercials- it might
have been the first of its kind.
Based on an 8mm movie, a friend of mine and
I made when we were fourteen, called The Bounds of Imagination,
we got a job there. I wound up doing Pillsbury Doughboy, Cricket
Lighters, and Green Giant commercials, on down the whole line
of really bizarre things. I learned an awful lot of things like
building sets, stop motion which was my main interest at the
time, how to sculpt and cast things in rubber, and a lot of camera
work using old rack-over Mitchells. And of course, as everyone
has done, leaving it racked over while you do a twelve or fourteen
hour stop motion shot and realize that you didn’t get a frame
of film shot, so you learned while doing it.
While I was at Cascade, Dennis Muren got a
script for some goofy movie called Star Wars and no one
knew much about it except George Lucas was involved and I hadn’t
even seen American Graffiti yet, I had only seen THX1138,
and loved it. Dennis went on to it and called me to see if I
wanted to work on it. I said "Oh, O.K." and the next
thing I knew after Star Wars had done its thing and George
had become "a god," I got a call about doing "Empire
Strikes Back" up at ILM. I said "well, what the
heck." I thought I’d have six month’s worth of work and
I ended up staying there for about eighteen years. I decided
to come down here and try something bigger and more grandiose,
so now I’m President of this and also still supervising off and
on as you know.
OC: Some of the concerns that
the camera operators have are that a lot of the work is going
in new directions, such as CGI and visual effects types of photography.
Can you give us as an idea of what the daily requirements or
regiments are for these camera people and what an average day
is like for them?
KR: …An effects operator varies.
If you’re doing motion control work, a camera operator is really
someone I rely on more as a DP with all the other skills that
are involved with programming all the material into the computer,
so its really a cross between a cameraman and an animator. Basically
they do all the lighting and are in charge of the whole deal.
That’s just what I used to do when I was starting up. Then it
varies. Like for high speed photography, they’re relied upon
to know as much about the effects side of the business as they
can because there’s so many odd ball quirky things that you need
to do to shoot this stuff. The more they bring to the table,
the happier I am, and the more I can trust them and I don’t have
to oversee every little thing they’re doing. So, I appreciate
the more knowledgeable they are about the history of effects,
(which is something I generally rarely find, especially in the
digital world), then know what the heck is going on with the
camera so they know how to shoot it so it’s believable.
OC: There’s One shot in Contact that
a lot of people are discussing. On American Online’s Cinematography
Board, everyone was talking about the shot where the young girl
runs up the stairs. She turns a corner, goes into a bathroom
and when she reaches for a mirrored medicine cabinet, you realize
that you’ve been watching this whole scene take place as a reflection
in the cabinet’s mirror. There’s a lot of speculation on how
that was done. I assume there was a blue screen process there,
but since you’re the horse’s mouth, it would be fun to hear how
that shot was done.
KR: There’re a lot of other
things I am that’s on a horse. But really, the toughest thing
about that shot originally was when Bob Zemeckis first
threw it at me, it was just trying to get it in my head, exactly
what it was I was seeing and try to imagine it and then start
to break it down into sections. First of all, I try to approach
every thing with "What’s the simplest possible way to shoot
the raw material I need to make this work later so it takes less
time on the set?" So I knew I had to get this running shot
of her starting on the first floor. She gets up and runs up the
stairs. We’re following her with the Steadicam and we
also have Bob, who can’t pile enough things into a shot. He also
has the speed control unit hooked up to the Steadicam, so while
she’s running, suddenly it ramps up so she’s in slow motion.
She runs up, she has to open the cabinet and you realize that
you are seeing her reflection- you have been traveling through
this reflection throughout the whole shot.
The first thing we shot was her running because
that would give me the key to what I had to do for the over the
shoulder shot of her. So we spent a good part of the day with
Greg Lundsgaard, (SOC), the Steadicam operator. He had quite
a work out, he was basically running backwards up a bunch of
stairs with this thing, trying to keep her in frame. The guys
were doing the speed control shift at a very specific spot, and
Bob knows exactly the second where he wants that to happen. She
ran up towards us, and I knew I wanted to shoot her a little
wide towards the end of the shot because I could move in a little
on her to re position her later. So she reached her hand up and
pantomimed, grabbing at a point in space I gave her (the knob
on the mirror), and pulled it open. So as I was watching the
takes, I wanted to make sure that how she positioned herself,
how she positioned her hand and where it was, the look she was
giving, and the believability of the "pull open" all
made sense to me.
So once we got that piece, and we had it on
video, and I don’t think we shot the other piece for a few weeks.
The back end shot had a mirror with a blue screen in it, and
had no glass or mirror what so ever. We started with full blue
in frame, and on the dolly, pulled back, and out of the bluescreen.
During this move she reached up, (shooting over her left shoulder,)
she grabbed the real knob and pulled the mirror open. She grabbed
the medicine and left, and someone slowly, just by hand, close
the mirror back, just at the right speed, and that was that element.
Then we shot an element of the wall, which had the photograph
of the father and daughter on it, and placed it on the blue screen
area on the return of the mirror to its closed position. We also
added dirt and a beveled edge on the mirror.
It took a lot of work to match the hands up
because when she reached up in both shots, they really weren’t
exactly right. So we did a lot of cutting and pasting on her
arm, removing fingers, shifting fingers, and changing the speed
of her reach so it would all make sense.
OC: When she actually did
her pantomimed reach to the invisible medicine cabinet knob in
the first element, what actually was there?
KR: For a while I had a C-Stand
arm there for her to reach to, and removed it later. We also
had to have crew removal in the shot because the shot was so
complicated and the lens was so wide. There was a point where
someone was bobbing up and down in the bottom of frame, so we
had to paint him out. So, you cameramen out there, you better
work out a little more and run a little faster.
OC: Don Burgess (ASC) was
the first cameraman. For being such a young man and succeeding
the way he has, he obviously has to have a lot of positive attributes
on his side. As the cinematographer he had to capture all of
Bob’s visions, and in many cases the two of you had to collaborate.
Can you tell us about the dynamics of your relationship with
him?
KR: Normally, because I have
a strong camera background, I like to connect with the Director
of Photography as close as I can, and Don and I have worked together
in a lot of different ways when he was 2nd uniting
on Bob’s other shows. With Gump and now this…we get along
great.
At the pre production meetings with Don, the
operator, Bob LaBonge, (SOC) would be there also. We’d hear all
the visions that Bob Zemeckis wants, then as time goes on we’d
start to break down what’s really necessary, away from the director,
and talk about the kinds of things we need to do and the kinds
of things I’m looking for.
Now when we’re really shooting on the set,
Bob LaBonge would take note while I would describe as clearly
as I could, about what we were going to see in the shot that
would be put in later. This way the (1st unit) camera
department could get an understanding on what we might want to
do, and frame the camera or position it so as to leave room for
the effect that would come in later. There’s a lot of give and
take and a lot of talking back and forth, and after they’d shoot
a shot, the operator would come back and ask, "Does this
make any sense at all? Am I framing too high or too low? I might
respond, "The machine in the background (which will be CGI’d
in later) will be taller, so give the talent a little more head
room so I can see more sky"
I try to get everyone’s imagination going so
they can visualize where these invisible things are on the set,
which is not very easy to do. In a lot of cases when there’s
nothing in there you have to talk everyone through the shot,
especially like a Roger Rabbit, where these invisible
characters are running around and the talent has to react to
the animated characters’ constant movements.
Even in this show, where you had a lot of odds
and ends going on, we all had to pay attention. "If we were
really here and that machine was out there or that Harrier Jet
was over here and coming in, how would you shoot it? So what
you don’t want to have is a shot look like, is too controlled.
So if this thing (The Jet) blasted in you’d probably move the
camera a certain way so that you feel like you’re just catching
it or look like a real situation where the operator is just grabbing
the shot sometimes. So those kinds of movements get designed
into some of the sequences. Its more like you’re grabbing that
image as if you were flailing around, trying to find what was
going on, and there’s a lot of that kind of discussion happening.
You also bring a lot of art work or models,
if you have them, to show everyone so they can see what the dynamics
of what that (invisible) shape is, and they can think about these
future elements while they’re doing the shot.
OC: You and I spent a fair
amount of time in Newfoundland shooting plates along the cliffs
and water with the Wescam where the second CGI time machine was
later placed and I noticed that only the footage near the water’s
inlet was used. Why was that?
KR: We never used any of the
cliff footage because the movie changed so dramatically. We used
more of the stuff we shot before we got into the inlet and the
mountains and all the other elements to piecemeal all of the
background that was outside of the control room.
OC: In your line of work I
would think that you try to put as little as possible on the
cutting room floor. That’s timely and awfully expensive.
KR: This show wasn’t too bad
that way as far as us getting too down far the line, but there
were a couple of real beautiful shots that got taken out of the
movie. There’s one scene where John Hurt’s character, which died
towards the end of the movie, gets zipped up in a bag, kind of
like a sarcophagus. You then see the space station with
earth in the background and the door opens up, where particles
and dust fly out, and they jettison his body out. It was a beautiful
shot and for some reason it always elicited laughs from the audiences
during the sneaks, so they cut it out. It was painful because
I thought it was a great shot.
OC: Ken and I stopped our
chat here. His busy schedule included a meeting across town that
he had to get to and as we sipped the last of our coffee I asked
him what big plans were on his horizon. He responded with "A
vacation…my first in many years." I thanked him for his
time and hopefully we’ll visit him again after another one of
his great adventures in the world of visual effects.
Ken has won four Academy Awards® for his
work in Visual Effects which include Return of the Jedi, Cocoon, Who
Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Forest Gump.
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