Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Motivating a Bird's-Eye-View

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

After a few takes, the crew quickly reset and a Lenny Arm 2 Plus mounted with a Hothead II was wheeled into position. While the lighting was adjusted, a new shot was blocked out: a bird’s-eye view beginning at about 40’ that swooped down through a cluster of practical chandeliers into a close-up on actress Lili Taylor, isolating her from the others. This would represent the film’s second distinct POV, that of Hill House and the twisted soul of Hugh Crain.

"This is the first film I’ve done in which such high-angle shots are used to good effect. Other directors have suggested them, but there was never a reason to do such shots, because they can actually take the audience out of the story by being so subjective. In this case, Hill House is a major character, and it watches the other characters very closely as they get lost in its maze of rooms. Cutting to that second point of view helps remind the audience that there is danger always looming over everything. These shots were generally done with a crane and a wide lens, usually a 35mm, which distorted things correctly and emphasized camera movement if there was any."

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Lisa Rinzler: Rough Terrain & Camera Cars

From American Cinematographer, Culture Clash by Vincent LoBrutto (February 1999)

"The Dry Season took place predominately on a moving cyclo, but in Vietnam there's no such thing as a Shotmaker truck. Instead, we used a Jeep with bad shocks — or seemingly no shocks at all — as a camera car. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City can be potholed and bumpy. A cyclo is approximately 8' long, and the camera lens on our Jeep was approximately 12' from the actors. As a result, we were forced to use a 75mm or 100mm lens for close-ups — lenses that are, quite frankly, too long for unsteady moving-vehicle shots with dialogue. Bumpy footage would have distracted from the story, so we brought in Will Arnot on Steadicam to minimize the bumpiness of the roads. Another time, we used the Steadicam to create a makeshift crane, since the only one available to us was ancient, unsafe, and too heavy to move onto location. We created a rig which allowed the operator to simply walk down a ladder, creating a cranelike effect."

- Lisa Rinzler

John Toll: Akela Crane...Uhhh 'Dolly'?

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"The Akela was a great asset. One of our biggest challenges was a daytime battle sequence in these grassy hills. The Japanese were in the hills, and the Americans had to go up there, find them, and kill them. To deal with those scenes, we brought in the Akela, which came with two American technicians. The terrain was very uneven; the grass was about waist-high, and underneath it there were a lot of rocks and holes. We spent weeks climbing up and falling down these hills. At times we could use the Steadicam really well out there, but at other times it became impossible because we wanted to see the soldiers actually going up the hills. One of the tougher challenges we faced was preserving the look of this waist-high grass. You couldn't walk through the grass more than a couple of times without leaving these huge paths. It was like working in snow, where you've got to cover your tracks. There's only so much you can do before you destroy the look of the location.

I was contemplating this problem long before we got to the location, because I knew what we were up against with the grass and the steep hills. I began thinking about using the Akela crane, which has an extremely long, 72' arm that would allow us to get the camera into places where we couldn't walk or lay dolly track. The only problem was that I wanted to install the crane on the sides of hills, which involved building some fairly substantial platforms, because the Akela weighs about 6,000 pounds. It worked out fabulously, though. The Akela's arm does have a slight arc, but it's a much more minimal arc than any conventional crane arm. Because of that, we could make shots that had the appearance of a dolly shot. That was the whole reason for bringing in the Akela, and we constantly had it at very low angles; I don't think we used it more than once or twice for a high-angled shot. Our expert technicians, Michael Gough and Mark Willard, kept wanting to show off how high it would go, but I kept hammering them with my mantra: 'It's a dolly, not a crane.' We basically turned our crane technicians into dolly grips, but they did a fantastic job.

There are some great Akela crane shots in the film where we follow the soldiers over really long distances. We did have to train the actors to stay with the crane arm, because it doesn't move in a perfectly straight line. If we were ahead of them, they could just follow the lens, but if we were shooting from behind, we would trace out the arc so the actors could follow it. But using the Akela really allowed us to get down in the grass and get shots that just wouldn't have been possible with a dolly or even a Steadicam because of the uneven terrain."

- John Toll, ASC