Director Brian De Palma and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum, ASC reteam to launch Mission to Mars..
"Insurmountable" is a term that rarely passes between De Palma and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Stephen H. Burum, ASC. However, it might have sprung to the duo's minds a few times during their initial meetings about Mission to Mars, a project that also lent new meaning to the phrase "logistical challenge."
Mission to Mars marks the pair's eighth collaboration. Their previous work together includes the 1987 gangster epic The Untouchables and the 1996 action blockbuster Mission: Impossible. In addition to his work with De Palma, Burum has photographed the stylish films War of the Roses and Hoffa for actor/director Danny De Vito, among other pictures. Although the cameraman is no stranger to the rigors of digital effects filmmaking, nothing in his lengthy filmography, which also includes such effects-heavy productions as The Shadow and Mystery Men, quite prepared him for the rigors of filming on Mars. But, as Burum notes, "When I was starting out, I did a kid's TV series set in space for Sid and Marty Krofft. It was called The Lost Saucer, and it starred Ruth Buzzi and Jim Nabors."
De Palma's insistence that Mission to Mars be handled as realistically as possible demanded an accurate re-creation of the Red Planet's surface. "Originally, everybody wanted to do the exterior of Mars on a big interior stage so we could control the color of the sky and everything else," Burum says. "We were shooting the film in Canada, however, and there wasn't a big enough space there to do that. Instead, we had to bite the bullet and say, 'Well, the only way we can do this physically and the only way we can afford to do it is to shoot outside!'"
The production found a 70-acre landfill in Vancouver, which the crew soon proceeded to transform into the Martian landscape. "We literally brought in hopper cars full of these small, red-colored volcanic rocks, like the type you would use in a barbecue, from the mining area up in Manitoba," Burum recalls. "The great thing about those rocks, which production designer Ed Verreaux found for us, was that they didn't crush easily. When you have people moving equipment around in that type of shooting environment, the ground gets all tracked up. Even so, we had a whole crew of people just to rake everything and put more rock down. There were also a lot of trees around the landfill, and the wind blew a lot because we were close to the ocean, but we solved both of those problems by building up these artificial berms. We then put a very thin layer of 'shot-crete,' which is like gunite, over our artificial mountains, which we painted the color of Mars."
Various setpieces, including the "Hab," the first mission's habitation unit, and the huge Martian "Face," a mountain resembling a human visage, were built atop the red briquettes comprising the planet's surface. The ideal positions of the sets were determined using Global Positioning Satellite information and a computer program called Sun Path. "We figured out a four-week window in which we wanted to shoot the Mars exterior," Burum explains. "Then we used Sun Path to tell us exactly where the sun was going to be at a certain time of day, how high it would be, and how it was going to track. Once we had those factors calculated, we laid out the set so it would be the best for us in terms of the sun's position. We oriented our sets north-south and east-west so that we always had good cross-lighting in the morning and afternoon. Since the Mars surface was just a barren plain, we could shift our whole operation around 45 degrees, and it didn't make a difference as long as the sun angle was correct. We'd start out in the morning shooting toward the east, then we'd shoot towards the south so everything would be backlit and all of the texture on the ground would show. After that we'd shoot north. The sun was fine on everything; we'd just work our way around the location during the day so we always had the best light."
Having plotted the position of the sun throughout the shoot, Burum subsequently faced a far more demanding challenge: changing the skies from Earth blue to Mars red. "The sun on Mars is the same color as the sun is here, but it's a bit weaker," Burum notes. "According to the people at JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratories], the atmosphere looks like a smoggy day in Los Angeles. When we started shooting tests in the Mars environment, the sun was okay, but the shadows were blue. DreamQuest did a series of tests to turn the whole environment a red color. They tried filters, they tried shifting the film with printing, and so on, but the problem was that these approaches not only changed the shadow area, they changed everything else, and suddenly the spacesuits didn't look white. They even tried using Ultimatte's Knockout System to isolate the shadows only. This all seemed like overkill to me. Finally, I said, 'Wait a minute. The problem is that we've got blue shadows, right? What can we do just to fill those in?' I finally got one of those red space blankets and used it like a reflector, and we shot a little test out at DreamQuest with somebody in a white spacesuit and it got rid of the blue! The trouble was, we couldn't use a bunch of red space blankets because they had to be too close to the subject. We needed something with a bit more punch.
"Then one day, I was watching one of these PBS home-improvement shows where they were putting on a copper roof, and I said to myself, 'Wait a minute, that copper looks pretty good!' We got some copper sheets and they seemed to work pretty well, but then we got some copper foil from an art store and covered our ordinary movie reflectors with that, which worked great. We were able to place them just outside the shot, like you would with normal reflectors on a regular shoot, except they turned the shadow areas this coppery color! When we were shooting outside, I had eight reflectors and two HMI booster lights and that's it. People always think that computers are the answer to everything, but we were able to use low-tech techniques to solve a high-tech problem."
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