Next up on the green screen stage was more action taken from the end space battle of the movie. In the end sequences the military have assembled a fleet of space fighters which are docked with a space station known as ‘Pegasus’. Guiding the pilots to a safe docking with the station and also to launch them off into combat are a series of space traffic controllers one of whom is played by Cydney McQuillin Grace. Cydney did a great job of convincingly delivering a large amount of military jargon filled dialogue which when she first read the script made no sense to her at all I’m sure but now she can throw military aviator speak around with the best of them. Her favourite I understand is a command to a pilot to advise when he has a visual landing aid in sight, originally from use on aircraft carriers, so if you hear her walking around New York telling people to “call the ball” you know what happened!
There are so many space shuttles engaged in a giant space battle at the end of the movie that we needed to shoot a lot of different actors for variety in the battle scenes. Think Star Wars or The Battle of Britain and you might get an idea for the amount of different pilots we want to have involved in the final showdown. One of the ideas about the way the secret organization SABRE works is that they have their own military division, taken from the ranks of the worlds military. This includes ground troops like our Special Forces as well as pilots and for the final showdown they have trained as many pilots and military personnel up as possible to crew the X74 space borne fighter. Agents who are not flight qualified have retrained as weapons operators and occupy the right hand seat of the fighters operating weapon and defensive systems. We have shot numerous actors as pilots in various locales from actual flight simulators to Blue screen stages in London, Australia and today we add the US to the list. We were rejoined by actors Malcolm Madera and Bobby Moreno to reprise their roles as military forces , this time in combat in the cockpit of the X74 fighters. Another high energy day recreating the action of dog fighting with alien spaceships but sitting in front of a green screen in the producers living room. Ah the lack of glamour, but it’s going to look amazing on screen.
Today is my birthday and the original intent was to throw a party at the apartment but with a late change in the production schedule and filming still in full swing with a lot of work to get through that wasn’t going to happen. It’s far more important to get these sequences in the can so we decided to cancel celebrations, shoot through and try to fit in a beer at the end if possible.
A lot more green screen shooting today but with a change of pace away from the more comic elements of the 1970s and into the action packed sci-fi sections of the movie. The opening scenes of the film involve the shooting down of a UFO , the Moth, over the Nevada desert and its recovery by a Special Forces team sent to bring it back to Area 51. Much of this sequence has been filmed in the UK and is locked in the edit of the movie but the all important footage on board the Special Forces Blackhawk helicopter has only existed as animatics and storyboards up until now. It’s a high intensity action scene with a lot going on and we needed a couple of actors who could deliver the right military style and intensity, so we were delighted to get the chance to work with Malcolm Madera and Bobby Moreno who played the Special Forces team perfectly. It’s not an easy thing to sit in someone’s apartment living room on a chair in front of a giant green screen and to convincing convey the impression of flying at high speed only feet above the desert floor in a Blackhawk chopper heading into a combat engagement but these two actors nailed it. We can’t wait to see the final composited sequence when this footage will be placed into the chopper in amongst the action packed opening sequence of the film.
The second half of today was even more fun than the first. Now it was the turn of Brett Anderson to step in front of the green screen to play 1970s TV Anchorman Rod Cruckshank who is reporting on the latest mishap to befall Frankie and Joey. The aim here was to present a vain and clueless Anchorman but without simply rehashing what Will Ferrell did so brilliantly in his movie “Anchorman”. Brett is a very talented comic actor and stand-up comedian who brought a fresh, hilarious take to the role and the hardest part for myself, Chris and the rest of the crew was keeping a straight face during takes. Once the main sequences for the film were shot we wanted to shoot some additional footage which will be used as promotional tools for the movie ahead of its release. For this, writer Phil Barron delivered a series of hilarious short sequences at incredibly short notice which Brett delivered with total sincerity as part of a series of fake 1970s TV news snippets.
For the next shots it was time for TV news weathergirl Jill Pepper to join Rod Cruckshank in a series of TV promos again designed to promote the movie. The two played off each other brilliantly and I suspect many people will have a lot of sympathy for Jill, sharing the airwaves with Rod’s ego.
For the final shots of the day we shot some still photos of the pair. The intent being to put the photos on billboards in the backgrounds of many of the 1970s sequences as fake posters advertising the fictitious characters and news channel.
Today was the first day of what looks like being a hectic few days of green screen work. For many of the green screen shots we wanted to use as much natural daylight as possible to help blend together elements shot in the studio with backgrounds shot on exterior locations. Getting that much natural daylight is very tricky on a stage and finding an outside location in New York City where you can set up a green screen and film without disturbance from traffic noise and the like is even more difficult. However we had an idea. My apartment is high up on the 27th floor of a condo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and it gets lots of light and not much traffic noise so we decided to try and base ourselves there for the next few days. It worked out well today with bedrooms becoming staging areas for the art and make up department, the kitchen being home to craft services and the main living room being devoted to a 16 foot green screen, lights, camera and sound. I’m lucky I’ve got a very understanding girlfriend who’s in the business as our apartment isn’t going to be very livable until this is done!
The first shots we got today are from a sequence in the movie where Frankie and Joey are on stakeout and are supposed to be monitoring a hotel room from across the street. In their usual style they mess up the assignment and end up in the wrong hotel, looking out the wrong window with a telephoto lens in completely the wrong direction. Instead of spying on mob deals going down they end up spying on the local neighbours. One unsuspecting target of Frankie’s zoom lens is local TV personality Jill Pepper, played by Doris Regan, who is none too happy to have two men taking photos of her as she gets dressed and tells them so in no uncertain terms. Doris looked amazing in her 1970s costume and make up and the whole shoot was a fun experience. It was all the more interesting as Doris had to convey a variety of emotions from flirty to livid anger without dialogue in this scene as it all plays out through the lens of Frankie’s camera and she did a superb job.
The completed shot will involve taking the green screen footage and compositing it into background plates of New York apartment exteriors as well as a suitably 1970s apartment interior placed behind Doris. Like so many of these pickup shots, this is a scene that has been in the edit forever with just a black card which in this case stated “Girl in apartment spots the boys watching her” so it was great to finally get this filmed and get one shot closer to completion.
Another primarily logistical day today before we kick off with two solid days of greenscreen shooting. More costumes, props, lights and lining up some final members of the crew, before prepping the studio for tomorrow. As always though, we had the grab bag of shots of the city that are always on our watch list and we continued to shoot them as and when the opportunity presented itself.
The other main shot that we did today was Vincent by the Queensboro bridge, enjoying the view with a morning coffee before receiving a phonecall that will change his life forever.
Another full on logistical day today which was topped off with some night shooting. There’s various shots in the film from 1974 where we witness UFO’s flying over the city and the filming we did this evening was for background plates that will be 3D tracked to allow us to add the CG UFO in later. There was also one shot that establishes a characters apartment, we’ve already shot an element in the UK where the character is on his balcony looking up at the skies and all we needed was an apartment block facade that we can corner pin that element into. This last one was shot evening for night, the light sky will be replaced with a jet black night sky and some stars thrown in for good measure to emphasise the characters state of mind – and who knows, maybe even a Spielbergian shooting star.
One of the things we’ve enjoyed the most over the years on LVJ is working with a large number of extremely talented and professional crews, all over the world, who have all shared our passion for bringing this story to the screen. So it was a real pleasure to reconnect with Reynaldo Davis Carter, our fantastic New York Unit Art Director, to work on the final days of LVJ shooting. Reynaldo did an amazing job on the first LVJ New York shoots and gave the film great production value on an incredibly tight budget. All the exterior scenes in New York and many of the interiors were production designed by Reynaldo working closely with Chris Taylor and we were really happy with the results so we were hoping Reynaldo would be able to join us for these final pick up days.
Reynaldo spent most of today with us discussing the look of the last NY shoots, as always coming up with cool original ideas and sourcing wigs, costumes and props. We spent many hours at a fabulous costume house in New York called Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing, designing the perfect look for our new Channel 9 nightly news anchorman and other cool characters from the 70s.
With temperatures getting close to 100 degrees and humidity not too far below that, Mark and I spent some of the day traipsing around the city with the plan to collect a selection of shots that can be used as establishing shots for a police station, hotel room, police choppers and a police stakeout van. They’re all to feature in the movies 1974 era, so in a lot of cases VFX will be required to boost the production design side of the shots. The bare plate below will be enhanced with cop cars, cop vans, NYPD logo’s, flags and anything else we can glean from watching episodes of ‘Cagney and Lacey’, and ‘Starsky and Hutch’. We also grabbed a few shots of modern buildings which will be the home of SABER in New York.
Then it was off to the aircraft carrier the USS Intrepid, which was just spectacular. We were primarily there to collect reference and plate photography of the F16 that they have on the flight deck, even going as far as rotoscoping the F16 out of the plate and placing our own background behind it and comping our own pilot into the cockpit, all for the opening of the movie. Once we’d covered the F16 from every conceivable angle we then went into the bowels of the ship where we shot some more backplates to be used for shots on board the Pegasus space station and also a submarine.
Finally, we headed over to where the world famous shot from Woody Allen’s ‘Manhatten’ was filmed by Gordon Willis. We have a scene where Vincent is pondering his place in the world while tucking into his breakfast and thought this would be as good a place as any to do it, right in front of the Queensboro bridge. We didn’t actually film the shot today, but we ran through some angles in preparation for it later in the week.
That was pretty much it for day two, day three was mainly a logistics day where we did two casting sessions that were great and refined the schedule for the rest of the week.
Mark and I flew into New York yesterday for our eight days of shooting pick ups in the city and after getting into Manhatten for about 16:00, it was straight up onto the roof of Mark’s apartment to grab a couple of aerial shots of the cityscape. One was a backplate to be used for a UFO doing a flyby around some buildings. The other was a shot looking down onto the streets where the plan will be to track the shot and add police and fire service vehicles including choppers screeching in front of a building where a police bust has gone completely wrong.
Today, we’re off to the USS Intrepid to shoot F16’s on board the aircraft carrier. . .
