Cool in-camera trick from Days of Heaven

[Ryan Patrick O'Hara]

So I was doing some late night reading and trying to do research on Nestor Almendros. In an old article in my AC collection, I found a really cool camera trick which just blew me away.

It's about how they did the flying locusts in the field shots in Terrance Malick's Days of Heaven (1978).

From the June 1979 article: "Photographing "Days of Heaven" by Nestor Almendros

When the plague of locusts descends on the fields of wheat, Terry's atmosphere of daring and essential simplicity made me suggest a simple technique that would allow us to maintain optimum image quality (without resorting to an optical), and allow us to obtain the maximum dramatic effect.

For our foreground, we used live locusts supplied to us by the Canadian Department of Agriculture, but for the wide panoramics, silhouetted tractors and blackened workers, we used a technique used in THE GOOD EARTH: running the camera in reverse and dropping peanut shells from helicopters.

When the film was projected forward the "locusts" would appear to be flying up. Of course, this meant everything had to act or perform in reverse, specifically the actors and the tractors.

Virtually everyone said "No, it will never work." But the few believers convinced them to let us try-- again, special thanks to Terry's daring. And when they saw the rushes, they were astounded.

 

[clang]

Shooting backwards can often be useful in visual effects. It also worked well in Alien -they simply filmed a rubber alien being dragged away from camera - with the film reversed, the same alien now appeared to realistically leap towards camera

 

[puredrifting]

Ryan:

I shot a project last week for LA Metro. In the scenes, various people and cars are getting hit by trains. We had no stunt people, no budget and very little time to pull this off.

We did the same thing, put the actors on the tracks, slowly moved the trains up to them, then shot the train backing up in 60 fps. Reverse the shot, apply a few speed maps in FCP and Motion, dose liberally with CUs and reactions and we have people getting hit by trains. Reversing with speed ramps can do miracles if it is done cleverly. We also had a VFX person on the shoots and we shot lots of lockoff plates that he will doing some composites with as well. A combination of silent film technology (the reverses w speed ramps) and high technology (he will doing the composites in Shake and says he can soft edge a lot of the traffic in the BG), for which we shot separate plates.

I will post when we have something to show.

Dan

 

[Ryan Patrick O'Hara]

Puredrifting, very cool! I can't wait to see it.

I suppose the amazement is half due to the backwards filming idea. What really gets me is peanut shells from a helicopter. That is some creative problem solving!

 

[puredrifting]

Here are a couple of stills from the shoot. In the first image, our actress dropped her bag and bent down to pick up the items she spilled. She looks up and is hit by the train. You can see my third camera operator getting the POV of the train operator.

In this shot, the driver is not paying attention to the train, only to their cell phone. We are getting the shot from the passenger seat with the HPX300.

Eventually, I will be able to post the edited sequences.

Dan