[ continued from page 3 ]
One of the film's biggest setpieces is a sequence in which a pair of T. Rexes attack the scientists' mobile lab — a pair of equipment-filled camper trailers that are connected by an accordion-shaped rubber umbilical section. As the Rexes batter the two-piece lab, one half of it is pushed over the edge of an oceanside cliff, where it hangs and threatens to pull down the rest of the vehicle. To make matters worse, scientists Sarah Harding and Ian Malcolm find themselves hanging from the dangling end of the lab. A third member of the island expedition attempts to rescue them, but his heroics are jeopardized when the angry Rexes reemerge from the nearby jungle.
Filming of the sequence began on location in Eureka, then continued on Stage 24, Stage 27, and even atop a parking structure at Universal Studios. Shots that involved the trailer and CGI dinosaurs were filmed on Stage 27, while the close-ups of the animatronic dinosaurs were executed on Stage 24. For more shots of the hanging trailer, the crew added a rocky facade to the exterior wall at the Universal parking structure and dangled the trailer from a 95-ton crane; this setup was later duplicated on Stage 27, requiring the production to cut a hole in the stage roof to accommodate the crane.
"We had to shoot that sequence in a variety of different places within one week, using different trailers," recalls David Devlin. "In order to keep the lighting continuity, all of the interior lighting of the trailers was duplicated with the help of a computer program designed by the rigging gaffer, Brian Lukas. The inside of the lab is filled with practical lighting, computer screens, ultrasound machines, and so on; as the trailer is smashed, all of these things go off at certain times. Brian's program was controlled with a computerized dimming board, which enabled us to duplicate any circumstance exactly. The result is like a miniature light show inside the trailer."
A long stretch of the scene was filmed in one continuous take with the help of a 26'-long Chapman crane arm outfitted with a remote head, which tracked the scientists' would-be rescuer as he pulls up in a jeep, attaches a rope to a tree, and runs through the trailer to feed the rope down to Harding and Malcolm. "The whole move was very intricate, and it required extreme precision by the crane operator, the focus puller and the actor," Kaminski says. "As the actor was running through the trailer, the camera was following him very fast; if he stopped, the camera would have knocked him over, because we simply didn't have the ability to stop such a heavy piece of equipment instantly. Also, because we were shooting with a 21mm lens, we had the problem of trying to keep the dolly tracks out of the shot. The track was built into the stage, and we built another piece of stage over the track to cover it. As the camera moved, the grips and other crew members cleared the stage parts so the dolly could get through."
The filmmakers confronted a variety of technical difficulties while shooting the trailer sequence. During the continuous crane shot, Kaminski discovered that a piece of electronic equipment inside the trailer was creating interference. "Every time the camera reached a certain part of the trailer, the remote-control focus would slip and lose focus. We had no idea how to fix it, even after about 15 takes. We were about to give up when we decided to try a remote-focus mechanism provided by our Steadicam operator, Chris Haarhoff. We mounted it on the camera, and for some reason it didn't interfere with whatever was happening. All in all, it took us about nine working hours to get three good takes. It was very grueling."
Adding to Kaminski's headaches was the fact that the scene was supposed to take place in pouring rain. "We were constantly pointing the cameras straight up into the rain towers," he recalls with a grimace. "Gallons of water were being poured onto the lens, so we were having problems with the lens fogging and the rain deflectors dying on us. Steven was saying, 'Dammit, this never happened on the first one! We were pointing the cameras straight into the rain, and there were no problems!' I wound up calling Dean Cundey to ask him if he had ever pointed the cameras straight into the rain. He told me, 'No, we were always at a bit of an angle.' The problems were only happening when I was pointing straight up, because there was simply no way to get rid of the water.
"In terms of the lighting, it helped to put backlight on the rain; if you don't do that, you'll have a hard time seeing it. As the trailer was being pushed toward the edge of the cliff, I lit its interior with bluish-green fluorescent units. It created an interesting effect, because the fog headlights on the trailer were very warm. The strong tungsten backlight that was outlining the edge of the cliff, the trailer and the rain was a little bit bluish; I only used a 1/4 blue on the tungsten beam projectors. I didn't want to go too blue and get too clichéd with the night exteriors. So you've got this slightly blue backlight; a strong bluish-green light coming from the trailer, which is glistening from the backlight; and these warm headlights. It's a very pretty picture, but at the same time it's a very dramatic and suspenseful sequence."
Water again posed a problem during filming of a scene in which several scientists are chased through a ravine by a T. Rex, and must save themselves by taking shelter in a small cave behind a waterfall. The shot was executed on Stage 23 by Steadicam operator Haarhoff. "Chris used the Beaumont camera mounted on his Steadicam," Kaminski says. "He was running in front of the imaginary T. Rex, and in the course of the shot he had to go right through our manmade waterfall, which made the whole thing pretty intricate. The problem was to make the shot without the water affecting the stability of the Steadicam. Michael Lantieri, who is a special effects genius, overcame that difficulty by building a little rainbar that looked like a huge waterfall, even though it was only giving off about a two-millimeter sheet of water. Just as Chris was going through the waterfall, a grip would extend a flag for a split second to cut off the flow. We later did a matching shot where Chris filmed toward the waterfall from inside the cave as the T. Rex's head popped through.
"It was a night sequence, so realistically there should be no light in the cave," Kaminski adds. "But I lit it in a stylized way, with some backlight illuminating the water in a very ominous way. This huge mechanical head then comes through and starts sniffing around. My thinking was that there might be some strong moonlight backlighting the water, which then would create a soft source illuminating the cave. Of course, when the T. Rex's head comes through the water, we were able to get some shafts of very hard light into the cave as well."
Although Spielberg generally uses Steadicam very sparingly on his films, the director estimates that close to 50 percent of The Lost World was shot with the stabilization system. "Usually, I'll only do one Steadicam shot per movie," he notes. "In Schindler's List, it was the shot that introduces Oskar Schindler in the nightclub at the beginning of the story. I think we used no more than three Steadicam shots in Jurassic Park. But The Lost World is a movie about chasing and being chased, and there's not enough dolly track in the world for all of the acreage we covered. The Steadicam proved to be a very useful tool."
Equally valuable to the filmmakers were Kino Flo fluorescent fixtures. Kaminski says that his extensive use of fluorescent units represented a new experiment for him. In addition to using them to light the interior of the scientists' lab, the cinematographer found that the Kinos lent an interesting ambience to bigger setups as well. "I'd always wanted to use fluorescent fixtures, but I never had the right movie to do it on," he says. "At first, I was a bit hesitant to use them on The Lost World, because I didn't really know how to use them. But David Devlin and the key grip, my longtime friend Jim Kwiatkowski, had worked with them on other projects, and they guided me along very nicely. For example, I might set up a fluorescent tube and start flagging it, but David would tell me, 'Don't flag it, because the minute you start flagging a fluorescent tube, you're narrowing the angle of the light and making it a very hard light. Instead of narrowing the angle, take the fixture further back, because the light's falloff is really fast. If you think it's too bright in the background, don't worry about it, because the falloff is immediate, and it falls off into the shadows really nicely.'
"What's interesting about the fluorescents is that they photograph much brighter than the meter tells you. I might be shooting at 2.8, but the meter would tell me that the light was at 1.4. So I'd think, 'Wow, I'm two stops under. How will it look?' But David and Jim would say, 'Don't worry, it'll look great.' And it always did. With tungsten light, if the meter says two stops under, I know it will be two stops under. But fluorescents are different."
David Devlin elaborates: "Because it's a gritty film, we used a lot of cool white and green tubes, but we also used a lot of other colors as well. One great thing about the Kinos was that if we changed our minds about a color, we could just change the type of bulb without losing the output. If you put a lot of red, green or blue gel on a tungsten fixture, it changes everything, including the quality of the light. We could go from a yellow to a 'super blue' or to 'digital green' to a cool white or even a Kino 32 bulb. Again, it's a quicker way to work."
Devlin adds that the Kinos helped the filmmakers add some drama to shots of the big anima-tronic dinosaurs in motion. "The hardest thing about lighting the dinosaurs was that they were so big," he testifies. "In prep, I didn't realize just how big they were, and what that meant. Just a turn of the head can move it eight or nine feet, so you have to light for more of a distance. In the first film, they would usually put up a big softlight that would carry from one spot to another. But if you use a big softlight, it almost lights things too much, and you can lose some of the drama. On this film, we'd space out Kino Flos and flag them so they would work from position to position during these big moves. Something as subtle as that can make things much more dramatic than if you just have the dinosaur moving through one big, soft light; it moves into the light rather than just passing through it."
Looking back on the shoot, Kaminski offers an enthusiastic assessment of his relationship with Spielberg. "Working with Steven is very fulfilling, because he has brilliant ideas and he's always open to input from the people around him," Kaminski says. "In addition, you have the benefit of his stature as a filmmaker, which really helps on a movie this size. At one point, Steven said to me, 'Hey man, this is a Cadillac with white trims.' And it truly was — I got anything I wanted in terms of equipment and additional crew."
