One of the main differences
between Raiders
and Temple is
that the first film was more oriented towards
death-defying stunts while this new one was towards
special effects, which were extensively explored
in Cinefex magazine.
The initial script for Temple
of Doom was delivered to
ILM just as the facility was finishing
work on Return of the
Jedi. Muren, Franklin and Johnston reviewed
the script in detail, broke it down into possible
effects sequences and then developed recommendations
on whether particular ideas should be conveyed
with physical effects, miniatures or opticals,
what respective costs might be, and whether the
idea was cinematically sound in the first place.
These recommendations were then presented to Lucas
and Spielberg, executive producer Frank Marshall
and associate producer Kathleen Kennedy in several
initial storyboard conferences. First the ideas
were fleshed out into often-spectacular sequences,
and then necessarily reduced to something that
could actually be done with the amount of time
and money available. "Many effects just came
from Steven's imagination," Franklin explained.
"There were things he wanted to see happen,
and whether they were done as an effect or practically
was a matter of budget and feasibility. He imagined
everything that he wanted done, and then it was
broken down-'ILM
will do this, and this will be done in England'-
and it just went from there, with everyone feeding
everyone else's imagination."
Some sequences were dropped and
others added or expanded. A minor mine car escape
became a chase of major proportions in the final
film. An aerial dogfight that had most of the
principals very excited was ultimately dropped
as too costly and impractical. Other sequences
which could have been very labor-intensive were
reevaluated and either simplified or streamlined.
One such involved Indy's escape by auto from the
nightclub in Shanghai. The principal action was
for the midnight chase was filmed in the back
streets of Macao by second unit director Mickey
Moore-with plans to dispatch another unit, either
to Macao or Hong Kong for supplemental plate photography
which would later be blue screened into interior
shots of the vehicle.
Instead of using opticals Dennis
Muren and his team came up with a more old-fashioned
approach. They brought the car and the principals
onto the ILM stage
and the whole sequence was shot very simply, using
lots of smoke and flashing lights. By not stopping
the lens down very much, they had very little
depth of field because all the out-of-focus backgrounds
helped to camouflage the fact that they weren't
actually using street footage.
Large Trimotor
model. |
|
Having eluded their pursuers Indy,
Willie and Short Round board a Ford Trimotor cargo
plane bound for India. Since only part of the
required aerial footage could be obtained with
the vintage aircraft procured for the show, the
Trimotor flying scenes were augmented at ILM
with miniatures and motion control photography.
The model aircraft nearly three feet long and
intricately detailed was constructed by model
makers Mike Fulmer and Ira Keeler. Originally
intended for use in the later-discarded dogfight
sequence, the craft was actually overbuilt considering
the limited use to which it was ultimately put.
A full-size cockpit was also constructed-mainly
by Lance Brackett, Ed Reymond and Dave Childers-
and mounted on inner tube-like blades whose pressures
could be controlled to simulate movement in the
air. The blue screens filmed with the actors in
the cockpit were composited with actual aerial
footage photographed by Jack Cooperman ASC.
En route to its destination, the
plane passes over the Great Wall of China. Not
only the aircraft itself was a miniature but,
but so was the Great Wall, a large-scale forced
perspective landscape constructed in the ILM
model shop. Since the shot was scheduled for later
in the production, and since ILMbecame
overloaded with work on Indiana Jones, Star
Trek III and The
Neverending Story, Dennis Muren opted to
give the scene out to Dream
Quest Images, an up and coming effects
facility which had previously handled some of
the scenes from E.T..
Filming the
Great Wall of China landscape and the result. |
The miniature aircraft and set were
shipped to Dream Quest's
Culver City headquarters, with Muren and Lorne
Peterson flying down to supervise the setup. Dream
Quest programmer Michael Bigelow
devised the flowing air-to-air simulation over
the Great Wall and also the flight trajectory
of the Trimotor. Photographed separately by Hoyt
Yeatman, plane and landscape elements were optically
combined at Dream
Quest and the results were shipped back
to ILM. The scene
was shot in smoke with the entire thing backlit
to look like early morning. Originally it was
intended, as background imagery for an animated
route map but it was found sufficiently impressive
that it was ultimately left intact for much of
its running time, with the map dissolved in over
only its final moments.
Abandoned by its crew and out of
fuel the plane starts an ill-fated route to the
mountain slopes ahead. At first the plan was to
have the mountain totally covered in snow, but
by the time they got around to shooting the cockpit's
POV somewhere up in the Sierras, a lot of the
snow had melted. As a result, they had to build
a miniature that looked pretty much the same.
So, they created a whole mountaintop from coal
on the roof of the ILM
building. When the mountain was made it was covered
with baking soda and micro balloons. Then they
rigged up a wire so that the plane would come
in and just skim the top, the wheels would spin,
and the snow would fly.
Preparing the
Ford Trimotor crash into the mountains. |
Originally, the three-foot miniature
was to have been sacrificed. Fabricated from thin
sheets of corrugated aluminum over an inner structure
of brass, it had been given a deliberately weakened
styrene nose section designed to collapse on impact.
Upon further consideration, however, it was decided
to build a second model half the size of the first
in order to avoid a mountain-building project
of major proportions. As it was, Peterson and
his crew still had to construct a mountain range
about twenty feet across by twenty feet deep.
Though the simplest approach would have been to
rig a pair of wires and fly the small-scale Trimotor
right into the mountain, Muren feared that after
impact the wires might still hold up parts of
the debris, ruining the shot. It was therefore
decided to construct a five-foot-long pneumatic
ram that would pull the plane into the mountain,
crushing the fuselage and collapsing the wings.
So in the beginning of the shot, they used wires
to fly the plane but just before it hit the mountain,
they jump cut to the plane being pulled into the
mountain by the ram. Since the plane was out of
fuel, they didn't think it should explode on impact
and so they filmed it. Later though, after cutting
the shot in, Spielberg and Lucas thought it needed
to explode in order to keep the action moving.
By this time, however, it was too late to rebuild
the set and restage the crash. So they went with
what they had and optical matted in one of their
stock explosions. Since then Muren found out that
when a plane runs out of fuel there's so much
vapor left that it does explode.
Managing to escape the airplane's
fate the trio employees a life raft as a parachute
and after a frantic slalom their raft goes over
a cliff and down into a gorge hundred of feet
deep passes through a series of white water rapids
before drifting to a stop. The racing-down-the-snow
shot was done in California, near the ski resort
of Mammoth Mountain. Stunt arranger Glenn Randall
supervised long shots of the raft with stuntmen,
and an ILM team
consisted of Dennis Muren, Mike Owens and Kim
Marks shot plates for later blue screen insertion
of the principal players. The scene where the
raft goes over the cliff was shot in Idaho, on
the Snake River Canyon.
For this shot they had to do a matte painting
around it because in the actual shot there were
houses and a city in the upper part of the frame.
Since the plate was photographed with a very long
lens and there was a lot of aerial haze, it turned
out to be quite difficult getting the painting
to match into it, and they were also trying to
work in a tilt. What followed was a day on a white
water river with the principals. Actually there
was very little effects work - it was either doubles
or the real actors in the real situations, though
there were a couple of blue-screen shots of the
principals in the snow, because there wasn't any
snow at the time of filming.
Filming the
wild-water raft ride. |
Matte painting supervisor Michael
Pangrazio, his with associate Christopher Evans
and fellow matte artists Frank Ordaz and Caroleen
Green produced some twenty matte paintings for
Indy II. A fair
number of them were used to represent the maharaja's
castle as seen from various perspectives. Depending
upon the extent to which the painting dominated
the frame, these and other Indiana Jones matte
shots were composited either on the matte camera
or in optical.
For a distant view of the young
maharajah's palace at Pankot Pangrazio - along
with Evans - rendered a full-frame painting. Disappointed
with the on-screen results, Pangrazio and his
unit prepared a cutout silhouette of the palace,
erected it on a nearby hilltop and photographed
it with the sun setting behind. The basic castle
shape was next rotoscoped onto a pane of glass,
to which Pangrazio added highlights and a few
details. Matte cameraman Craig Barron then combined
the painting with the latent image plate to produce
a hazy backlit effect.
Pankot Palace
matte paintings. |
Although part of the tea plantation
on location in Sri Lanka had been burned down
to give the impression of a desolate village the
ILM matte
department was required to make the shot more
effective by presenting a wider shot. There was
a shot where Indy, Willie and the boy are walking
down the hill toward the village, and the village
is in total desolation, as is the landscape around
it. Everything is dead, and there are no children.
The scene was shot on location, but everything
was alive, so Pangrazio repainted the entire scene
with dead foliage. Then the plate was timed a
little bit redder so everything looked brown and
parched. Finally, some smoke elements were shot
separately and exposed into the village area so
it looked as though smoke was coming from little
fires in the village.
Another Pankot Palace
walls matte painting and the result in the
film. |
They were rough-cutting the movie
when Spielberg felt they needed an additional
establishing shot for our heroes return to a now
prosperous village. Pangrazio and his stuff went
to Lucas' Skywalker Ranch
and set up a camera on a hill. They used a bunch
of flats, to represent building faces. Some of
them were pretty big -twenty feet long by seven
or eight feet high- and three of them had black
doorways painted in. Up close, it looked pretty
silly, but from the camera position, which was
quite away, it was fine. They had sheets hanging
out on the clotheslines, flapping in the breeze,
and about twenty people dressed in Indian costumes
just walking around. Once they got the latent
image plate, Pangrazio worked on the painting
for quite a while and then optical did a tilt-up
on the composite so that as Indy and the others
enter the bottom of the frame and walk down the
trail, the camera follows them down to reveal
the village.
Filming the
return to the village, the matte painting
and final result. |
When Indy and his companions make
their way into the subterranean temple they discover
an elaborate sacrificial altar where the villainous
demagogue Mola Ram is preparing to offer up a
victim to the goddess, Kali. Peripheral to the
altar area is a crescent-shaped fissure of molten
lava, represented on the live-action stage by
a ten-foot-deep pit with red-gelled lights upturned
from below. For the majority of the scenes, where
the chasm itself was out of frame, these lights
and some attendant steam generators were sufficient
to suggest the boiling magma. About a dozen shots,
however, from five or six different angles, did
call for the lava to be on view, and for these
the plan was to add the molten effect optically
in postproduction. They ended up using a mixture
of glycerin and water that they lit from below
with gelled lights. A mixture of plastic chips
and cork was used to suggest opaque solids floating
on the molten magma. Amusingly, one of the things
chief model maker Charlie Bailey tried when there
was still an expectation of creating lava that
could be front lit was a combination of vanilla
pudding and fluorescent dyers. The resultant goop
actually came close to being the correct color
and viscosity, but did not have quite the right
glow and intensity. It was however a major attraction
to the mouse population which would come out of
the woodwork at night to dine on the unexpected
treat.
Preparing the
lava shots. |
Returning to the film, a section
of the floor opens at the base of the altar and
from the extended arms of Kali's statue a torture
rack with a person inside is lowered down a narrow
shaft about sixty-feet into swirling vortex lava.
A thirty-foot-tall lava pit was erected over a
ten-foot diameter plexiglas vortex through which
nearly five tons of glyserine was circulated by
heavy-duty industrial pumps. Initially, the pit
was very narrow, just barely wider than the rack,
in fact. But that turned out to be not very interesting,
because if someone looked down, all he would see
was a little hole at the bottom. They changed
the design of the shot so that as the rack went
down, the shaft opened up into a bigger chasm;
and as it approached it, it got larger and larger
and eventually filled the frame. Twenty-six people
were involved in the vortex shoot, and with the
heavy-duty pumps roaring, communications headsets
were required so that Muren, thirty feet in the
air and watching the proceedings on a video monitor,
could keep in constant contact with his stage
crew and with Mike Owens who was directing the
action from below.
Filming the
descent into the shaft towards lava. |
As the ceremony reached its climax,
Mola Ram's sacrificial offering, had to be shown
having his still-beating heart plucked out of
its arteries and descend into swirling inferno.
To achieve the first effect David Sosalla took
a quick body cast off a model maker, who was physically
similar to the Punjab character, as it came to
be known by the crew. He vacuformed an understructure
and laid foam and latex over that. The mechanics
were real simple. It was just a matter of putting
some plastic slides underneath the skin and attaching
them to cable controls that Sosalla had in his
fingers. When the hand was inserted, Sosalla had
only to pull on the cables and the hand could
slip right into the chest cavity. For the healing
shot that follows, he just used the mechanism
without the hand going through and shot in reverse.
For the second effect a thirty-inch was built.
Inside the puppet was a mechanism that enabled
the arms and head to move realistically. They
shot the rack and the puppet against blue screen
and matte that into a background plate of just
the lava alone. The result ended up being too
gruesome. Nobody could keep his eyes on the screen
so Spielberg asked to put some flames and smoke
to obliterate the effect, especially at the moment
of contact. In real life, if a person came into
contact with lava like that would just blow up;
all the water in his body would just vaporize.
A second puppet was created for the scenes of
Willie being lowered in the lava pit.
Creating the puppet
for the descent. |
Willie's puppet
made for her descent and a puppet on fire. |
One of the most difficult scenes
to create was our heroes' attempt to escape from
the temple of doom in a runaway mine car. In the
original script, they just got in the mine car
and run through the tunnel and got out at the
end of it. Only a few key sequences were laid
out. Everything in-between was devised by Spielberg,
Joe Johnston, Dennis and Mike McAlister-how it
was going to happen and little tricks and situations
the characters would get into until the end of
the ride. ILM
had basically the same situation with the speeder
bike chase in Return
of the Jedi. It kept expanding and expanding
until it became the film's showcase piece. "It's
often hard when we look at a script to anticipate
where things are going to develop, especially
working with Steven and George who are both very
open about going beyond what is written in the
script", commented Muren. Originally, the
thought was for the scene to be created entirely
blue screen. Johnston and McAlister based on the
storyboards created quick-and-dirty enactments
employing the most rudimentary of sets and props
and recorded them expeditiously on videotape.
These videotaped enactments, called at the time
videomatics, were actually the predecessors of
today's animatics. They used brown wrapping paper
to quickly throw up some walls, added some railroad
tracks that they bought in a hobby shop, and used
toy cars and toy figures to quickly go through
the maggot motions of the shots. They didn't try
to finesse them in any way, but just tried to
translate the storyboards into something that
could be cut into the movie to give a feeling
for the pace. It turned out to be really valuable.
The videomatics were given to Spielberg and he
could then cut the sequence together. A lot of
changes were made on the basis of what he learned.
The sequence was restructured; things were cut
and the design of some of the shots was altered.
So basically, the videomatics gave him a chance
to firm up his ideas.
Preparing
the chase
through the mines. |
|
Muren, who was in England, got them
done just in time because Spielberg was ready
to go on the set and start shooting, and by that
time he had decided to do as much as he could
over there and not do it bluescreen. So he really
got into it and came up with ways to shoot that
sequence, mainly by under cranking and shaking
the camera a lot, by that he gave more of a documentary
look about it. Spielberg spent quite a while on
this set, shooting primary close-ups but also
some of the longer shots that he was able to get
in the limited space available. Naturally, he
was doing everything he could to make it look
as good as possible, and so he threw in steam
and gushers and all kinds of things to make it
look better- which made it a lot harder for Muren
to match up. He ended up getting over half the
sequence on that set, and it was really valuable
for the ILM artists
to have all that, both as a guideline and for
inspiration.
It was decided to do the sequence
stop-motion where everything is sort of moving
along. Right away, though, he found that scale
was going to be a major factor. They wanted to
do shots where the camera's traveling along with
the cars for long distances, so they would figure
a rough scale for the cars and then calculate
how far it would need to go for a four-second
cut, depending on the speed they were trying to
suggest. What they ended up was a miniature set
larger than one hundred feet while their stage
was only eighty feet long. The only way around
was to make everything very small.
Finishing two
minature sets for the mine chase. |
Making tiny sets and props was no
problem for the ILM
model makers. Filming them was. Since many of
the shots called for the camera to be trucking
along with the action, the mineshaft sets needed
to be built large enough to allow sufficient clearance
all around. The smallest camera in the ILM
inventory was 9-inch width and seemed to be a
limiting factor on how small the sets could go.
So they ended up using an in-house Nikon
after Mike MacKenzie slowed down its motor drive
about two-thirds and built a special magazine
for it that would hold fifty feet of film, which
is four hundred frames of VistaVision.
The end result was a VistaVision
format motion picture camera almost literally
small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.
No wider than a normal
Nikon, and only a quarter-inch higher than
one equipped with the standard motor drive, it
was mounted on a small pan and tilt head and used
to photograph almost all of the mine car sequence.
By making the Nikon
work they essentially cut their scale in half,
which meant that rather than building a set that
was sixty feet long, they had to build one that
was only thirty feet long. That saved them an
enormous amount of time and money. It was determined
that ten-inch mine cars would be employed for
most of the chase sequence.
The Nikon ready
to do its job. |
Once the basic set-building approach
was developed, with preliminary work well underway,
Barbara Gallucci and her mineshaft construction
team were relocated from the ILM
model shop into a large isolated industrial bay
across the street where Mike McAlister and his
crew were gearing up to shoot the mine chase footage.
There, over a period of four months, each specific
set would be pieced together, photographed, taken
apart and reconfigured anew as required. Further
set dressing included miniature barrels, tools
and wicker baskets, all carefully placed for subtle
effect. In addition, strings of bare light bulbs
ran everywhere establishing scale and perspective.
The
mine car puppets. |
|
A major project by itself was the
creation of the mine car's passengers, which would
be stop-motion animated by Tom St Amand during
the miniature shoot. They built eight animation
puppets, Indy, Willie, Shorty and several bad
guys and on these puppets, it was critical that
the arms be able to move naturally, as well as
the legs.
They had to be able to twist as
well as pivot. Ordinarily you can't do that with
ball-joint armature because it wants to turn at
the wrist and you end up with really weird kinds
of wrinkles. Amand designed the armatures himself,
but Chris Rand did most of the machine work. Each
puppet began as a clay sculpture rendered by Phil
Tippet. Tippet and St. Amand assembled the armatures
that would enable the puppets to be articulated.
Once finished, the armatures were fitted into
the plaster molds derived from Tippet's sculptures.
Flexible foam was then injected into the molds.
After curing, each puppet is painted and dressed.
Randy Ottenberg did the costumes for Kate Capshaw,
and Dave Sosalla and John Reed did most of the
rest. They didn't actually make suits; they just
custom-fitted all these outfits and contact cemented
them onto the figures. The puppets were basically
about ten inches high, although they didn't put
legs on all of them. In fact, they had to remove
the legs from the Indy puppet in order to squeeze
him into the miniature mine car. He just couldn't
fit otherwise. When interviewed by Cinefex
magazine St. Amand remembered a day at the bluescreen
stage watching part the live-action shooting,
"I noticed that the actors were also having
problem squeezing into the cars. Nobody suggested
cutting their legs off, though!" And continued,
"Imitating people is the hardest kind of
animation there is and we were trying to do it
under the worst possible conditions. We had scenes
where I had to animate, six figures, all moving
at the same time, going over lava, which I had
to be really careful not to bump because all it
was backlit gels with little pieces of cork on
top to represent the darker part of the lava.
So if I disturbed that, the whole thing would
go. The sets were cramped and we had to wear masks
for four or five hours at a time. Plus it was
winter and it was freezing cold. Several times
I found myself wondering why I ever wanted to
do this. A couple of shots were particularly tough,
especially the one when they're going over a trestle
and the bad guys grab Shorty and start to pull
him into their car and Indy has hold of his pants
and the kid is suspended between the two cars
being pulled back and forth."
For a few shots where the tunnels
were so narrow and remote that St. Amand could
not gain access radio-controlled stand-ins were
employed.
Though the ten-inch mine car models
were more than adequate for most of the sequence,
several shots called for high-speed photography
and therefore required a larger-scale miniature.
Included among these were scenes where Indy trips
the overhead ore loader, dumping its contents
into the pursuing mine car behind them, and a
later shot when one of the cars derails and crashes
through a trestle. "When it came to crashes
we shot them with our bigger-scale models in front
of a blue screen, but actually on mirrored plexiglas."
Positioning
the puppets in the mine carts. |
Matching the miniature footage with
the live-action photography presented another
challenge for the ILM
artists who worked close to the film's editor
Michael Kahn combining them so perfectly that
none could tell the difference.
Midway through the mine car chase,
Mola Ram gives an order for the giant water tank,
a thirty-foot-tall cistern dominating Elliot Scott's
massive ore processing set, to be overturned,
thus flooding the cave and all vital escape passages.
Creating such a deluge in full-scale would have
been both difficult and dangerous. Therefore it
was decided to make the effect with miniatures,
but miniatures proved to be a relative term when
it came to executing this effect. Outside, in
the ILM parking
lot, stage technicians under the supervision of
Patrick Fitzsimmons constructed a basic framework
for the quarter-scale replica, a giant twenty-five
feet wide by thirty feet long and eighteen feet
high. Looming over the set was a 1300-gallon water
tank, some eight feet in diameter and about six
feet in depth, rigged with a pin that could be
pulled to tip over and flood the cave. Since the
tank was to unleash about 11000 pounds of water
against the miniature cave walls, the basic aluminum
foil structures had to be sprayed on the backside
with a type of roofing urethane and then further
reinforced with a foam and lumber superstructure.
The floor of the cave was heavy-duty urethane
foam spread over a shock-absorbing bed of moist
sand. More importantly, the crew dug down three
feet into the asphalt and poured concrete piers
as if they were constructing a building. In fact,
as the set began taking shape, people passing-by
were heard to comment that they thought ILM
had decided to build condominiums on the
property.
The water tank
set: before and after the flood. |
Toppling the tank was not a problem,
but stopping it proved to be quite another matter.
"To stop the tank from destroying the whole
set when it fell," said Fitzsimmons to Cinefex
magazine, "we connected it to a 45000-pound
rated cable. For our first try, we had the tank
about half-full and no water in the lake where
it was to land. We figured the cable would easily
hold it. Well, the cable snapped. So we went to
some of the engineering wizards in our east bay
and asked them to calculate the actual force for
us, and they came up with the astronomical figure
of something like six trillion foot-pounds of
force."
The collapse of the water tank initiates
a whole of water in the tunnel shots requiring
a second large-scale parking lot setup. The principal
tunnel structure for these scenes was pieced together
from sections of four-foot diameter sonotube,
heavily reinforced and wedged up against the outside
of the studio, which acted like a brace. Once
the basic twenty-four-feet structure was completed,
by stagehands Bod Finley, Dave Childers and Harold
Cole, it was elevated on one end and connected
via a chute to a large dump tank with a simple
trap-door mechanism that could release more than
5000 pounds of water on cue. Then the project
was turned over to Lorne Peterson's crew. Inside
the tubes, they built the tunnel structures from
urethane foam and real rocks. In fact, they spent
a lot of time finding rocks that looked good at
that scale. The problem was that as they built
up the tunnels, the four-feet diameter got narrower
and narrower to the point where only Randy Ottenberg
and Marc Thorpe, two of the smaller model builders,
could get in there to work. In addition to building
the basic wall and rock structures, they cast
up a bunch of old beat-up fifty-gallon drums that
varied in scale from four-and-a-half inches to
seven inches high. When the water came through,
some of those barrels would get swept up and hit
a rock or something and go tumbling right by the
camera lens. They also had lanterns, baskets and
strings of electric lights. Hand blown glass bulbs
were made up, complete with frosted glass and
halogen light sources, and each one of them waterproofed
and sealed with silicone. Actually, the same types
of bulbs were used earlier in the mine car chase.
After each of the six water shots, the set was
cleared out and redressed so as to seem like an
altogether different area.
Making the
tunnels where the water flood will run through. |
Indy and company manages to escape
from the caves only to find themselves on the
brink of a sheer precipice, the wall of water
churning close behind them. Scrambling onto a
rocky ledge, they clear the opening just as the
water reaches it. The master of Willie and Shorty
in one side and Indy on the other is a large matte
painting. The area immediately around the opening
was an insert set shot in England and the river
was filmed on location in the Grand Canyon by
cameraman Robert Elswit. One of the major difficulties
involved just finding a river, with a sheer wall
next to it that followed a north-south direction
and therefore got enough sunlight to film. The
following shot a closer view as the water bursts
through, involved yet a third parking lot miniature
again with a large tank positioned behind it.
More than five thousand pounds of water traveling
twenty or twenty-five feet down a four-foot diameter
sonotube and then chocking down to an eighteen-by-eighteen
inch opening in the face of the cliff as it exits
were involved. They wanted to have a mine car
come flying out of the cave ahead of the water,
so they put a miniature car near the opening,
but the water was traveling so fast at that point
that it bypassed the mine car, defeating the effect.
In an effort to make the effect work they came
up with a trigger mechanism using something like
surgical tubing to launch the mine car and increase
its speed just before the water hit. They believed
that by triggering the mechanism when the water
was three or four feet away the water would catch
up to it just about the time it reached the opening
and it would look like it was being pushed out
ahead of the water. Before the shot they set up
nets to catch the mine car. They calculated the
force of the water and the trajectory of the mine
car after the mechanism shot it and decided to
play it safe and move the nets out a bit further.
When they finally did the shot, the mine car shot
out of the opening, passed about four feet over
the top of the net, hit up against the side of
the building and smashed in zillion pieces.
Painting the edge
matte painting and the result in the film. |
Water flood
rushing through an opening in the ledge and
result in film. |
Muren wasn't satisfied with the
result of a certain shot. It was a down shot of
Harrison Ford on the cliff with the facing breaking
away and a real river in the background. Muren
spent a lot of time trying to get it come together,
but it proved to be too tough. Ford had some dialogue
in it and they had to keep it. For the shot of
Indy climbing up over the cliff facing Muren didn't
take any risks and used the same model they had
when the water broke through. Ford was filmed
climbing up a skeleton frame against blue screen
and his hands sort of matched some hand holes
they had been built in the rock. The animation
department spent a lot of time adding a shadow
for him and tied it right together.
First Frank Marshall, doubling as
second unit director, shot footage of real alligators
for the close-up inserts of people being chewed
up. The rope bridge was filmed in Sri Lanka and
the river below it is in Arizona. There was a
river in Sri Lanka but Spielberg wanted it bigger.
For a shot from the top of the bridge the crew
borrowed seven two-foot-long alligators from stage
coordinator Ed Hirsh. Hirsh raised baby alligators
as a hobby and volunteered to help. They put them
in milky water and softly lit them from the top
so that they just had them silhouetted. They shot
them with the widest lens they could from the
top of the stage, and then reduced that two hundred
to four hundred percent in the printer to get
it in scale. In the end they were just little
black things from the height of the suspension
bridge, but when you look at them, they're moving
like alligators are supposed to do.
Storyboard
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During the fight on the bridge Indy
cuts the bridge in half and his portion of the
bridge is left dangling over the cliff. The basic
elements of those shots are stuntmen and actors
who are on a set piece built in England. ILM
artists once again took those shots and extended
the set piece to make it look like a steep cliff
by using matte painting. They added the river
below to give the illusion that it is the river
setting in India. For scenes of Mola Ram's henchmen
losing their grip and falling from the severed
bridge, St. Amand was able to reuse the robed
animation puppets from the mine car sequence without
significant modification. Some of it was kind
of comical, though as they're still thrashing
around after they hit the bottom. But that area
ended up being all matte painted out when they
substituted the big river with the alligators
in it.
The death of Mola Ram not as great
as the one Belloq had in the first film was very
difficult to stage. "You actually see him
falling down the cliff face and the camera follows
him all the way down," remembered St. Amand.
"He hits the cliff two or three times and
then careens off into the river. It was tough
to do. I would look at the board with Dennis and
he would say: 'Killer shot, killer shot. We're
never going to be able to pull this off.'"
The first step toward achieving the shot was to
procure a suitable background plate. So Art Repola
and Mike Owens went chasing around the Southwest
looking for a cliff facing they could shot. The
problem was finding a river and a cliff with a
sheer enough wall so they could drop the camera
down four hundred feet without hitting anything.
The best spot was found at Paige Arizona, near
the Glen Canyon Dam. Mike Owens and Mike Wood
and a couple of others went there with the Descender,
a motorized winch type devise, attached the camera
to it, and did about five takes.
Once the plate was selected, there
still remained the difficult task of generating
the blue screen puppet footage tumbling down the
cliff side. Muren programmed the camera and model
moves, expending a full week in fine-tuning and
testing before a suitably real-looking choreography
could be developed to fit the unorthodox plate.
Then Tom St. Amand stepped in to animate the articulated
miniature. "Mola Ram had this big cape, and
to help suggest that he was actually flying through
the air, we turned a fan on under the puppet so
that his cape would always be billowing like a
sail. The cape itself was made of cloth, unlike
the skirts and capes on the other puppets, which
were just tinfoil covered with fabric. So here
we had this big flowing cape, and in order to
have more control over it, we thought we'd hook
it up with strings to one of our dragon movers,
previously used in Dragonslayer.
That way we could program it and shoot tests.
What we ended up doing, however, was quite different.
Since the puppet was constantly spinning around,
the strings were always getting wound around his
body. We finally got past the problem by having
me animate the limbs and head while Dennis was
out there hand-moving the cape for each frame,
holding the strings and moving them during the
exposure so the strings themselves would be lost
in the blue. So here we had this big, expensive
piece of equipment, and Dennis was moving the
thing by hand." To further tie the falling
figure to its background plate the animation department
sweetened the shot with animated dust hits whenever
Mola Ram tumbled into the side of the cliff and
spun off. "Compared with that most of the
other faking guys were easy to do."
When the time came to cut the film
there was very little that were shot that wasn't
in the film. Spielberg was very careful as he
went along, and if the production was getting
over length anywhere, he would tend to cut from
the script before shooting, rather than the old
thing of leaving it on the cutting room floor.
Some explanatory scenes were cut from the script
and a very few scenes were shot but not used,
for instance after Short Round fights Thuggee
warriors to allow Willie to escape. There was
a scene after she apparently gets away down the
tunnel and into her room, where she's recaptured.
But when Spielberg and Kahn put the film together,
and worked out it's pace, they figured it wouldn't
affect anything.
There was a scene showing Maharajah's
dark side earlier in the film but it was never
shot, it excised only in the script. After the
banquet the Maharajah grabs Indy's whip and wants
to be taught how to use it. Indy teaches him but
in trying to use the whip, the little Maharajah
hurts himself, and Short Round laughs. Then, they
have a little scuffle, where the Maharajah grabs
the whip. The two are very close to each other
and Short Round notices that the Maharajah's eyes
are glowing. Nobody else sees it. So when Short
Round brings it up Indy thinks he's just being
a silly kid.
The first cut of the film was about
2 hours and 10 minutes and Spielberg cut it down
to 1 hour and 55 minutes. The pace was considered
too fast, so Spielberg decided to add some matte
shots in order to slow it down. An example of
such matte shots was the establishment of the
Pankot Palace exterior in night. The film was
predictably violent but Lucas felt it still needed
additional horrors. More violence was added and
the banquet scene was augmented with some even
more loathsome dishes. After the retakes, Spielberg
and Kahn fined down the film to 118 minutes, every
one of which moved with the speed of the final
roller-coaster ride.
The film originally follows the
steps of Raiders,
with the opening sequence continuing another adventure,
while it contains many tributes. The first tribute
of all is, of course, Paramount's
mountain logo embossed on a large bross oriental
gong in homage of 1939's Gunga
Din. What follows is homage to the great
Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1940s as Willie
Scott is singing Cole Porter's Anything Goes once
in English and once in Chinese!
In another scene Indy comes face
to face with two swordsmen. Remembering his encounter
with the Arab swordsman from Raiders
he smiles and reaches for his pistol only to find
out that his holster is empty!
Likewise, when Indy, Willie and
Short Round arrive at the airport they are greeted
by comic actor Dan Akroyd in a cameo as Weber
the official dispatcher at Shanghai airport, while
Frank Marshall who played the pilot of the Flying
Wing in Raiders
now plays a coolie pulling a rickshaw.
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