User:UltraEgoMajinVegeta/Special effects of Batman Returns

Batman

• Cotta Vaz, Mark (August 1992). "A Knight At The Zoo". Cinefex. No. 51. United States. pp. 22–69.

Potentially for both articles

• original batman first film to break 100 million in first ten days of release, phenomenon, half a billion dollars, sixth highest grossing film ever
• six months of principal photography began in september 1991
• frenetic post production period, new effects shots being devices weeks before the june 19 nmational release

• approximately ninety shots which because of budget and schedule concerns was reduced to about 78 shots within the first month of filming
• overseeing effects was visual effects supervisor michael fink

• principal wrapped at the end of february, effects shots started to be added until we ended up with about 115

the additional shots ranged from a new mminiature title sequence to an end shot devices to explain the fate of catwoman

• digital wire removes would also require to eradicate any telltale signs of the work of physical effects supervisor chuck gaspar
• effects included matte paintings, miniatures, CG, makeup effects, puppets and pyrotechnics
• The scale required the work to be broken up among different houses, six major effects outfits, their sucontractors and the production offices at Dictel

• approximately ninety shots which because of budget and schedule concerns was reduced to about 78 shots within the first month of filming

Costume design

Batman

Bob Ringwood and Mary E. Vogt were the costume designers. They refined the Batsuit to create the illusion of mechanical parts built into the torso, intending Batman to resemble Darth Vader. Forty-eight foam-rubber Batsuits were made for Batman Returns. They had a mechanical system of bolts and spikes beneath the breast plate to secure the cowl and cape because "otherwise, if [Keaton] turned around quickly the cape would stay where it was", due to its weight. Costumer Paul Barrett-Brown said that the suit had a "generous codpiece" for comfort, and initially included a zippered fly to allow Keaton to use the bathroom; the actor declined, however, because it could be seen by the camera from some angles. As with the Batman costume, Keaton could not turn his head; he compensated by making bolder, more powerful movements with his lower body.

Catwoman

The Catwoman outfit was made from latex because it was designed to be "black and sexy and tight and shiny". The material was chosen because of its association with "erotic and sexual" situations, reflecting the character's transition from a repressed secretary to an extroverted, erotic female. Padding was added because Pfeiffer was less physically endowed than Bening; this worked to Pfeiffer's advantage, however, since Barrett-Brown said that if it was too tight it "would reveal the genital area so thoroughly that you'd get an X certificate." Ringwood and Vogt thought that if the latex material tore it would not be difficult to repair; forty to seventy backup Catwoman suits were made by Western Costume, the Warner Bros. costume department, and Los Angeles-based clothing manufacturer Syren at a cost of $1,000 each. Other versions, made for Pfeiffer from a cast of her body, were so tight that she had to be covered in baby powder to wear them. Barrett-Brown said that because of the material, it was possible to get into the suit when dry; they could not re-use them, however, because of sweat and body oils. Vin Burnham constructed Catwoman's headpiece and mask.

Burton was influenced to add stitching by calico cats, but the stitching came apart. Ringwood and Vogt struggled with adding stitching to latex. They tried to sculpt stitching and glue it on, but did not like the look and went over the suit with liquid silicon while it was worn (which added a shine to everything). Pfeiffer said that the suit was like a second skin, but when worn for long periods it was uncomfortable; there was no way to use the restroom and it would stick to her skin, occasionally causing a rash. She found the mask similarly confining, describing it as choking her or "smashing my face", and would catch the claws on nearby objects.

Penguin

Stan Winston Studio created an "over-the-top Burtonesque" visual for the Penguin, without obscuring DeVito's face. Concept artist Mark McCreery drew a number of sketches for the look, from which Legacy Effects built noses on a lifecast of DeVito's face. Winston was unhappy with the "pointy nose" shapes and began sculpting ideas with clay, influenced by his work on The Wiz (1978) (which involved a forehead and brow prosthetic appliance for large-beaked creatures). The final makeup included a T-shaped appliance which went over DeVito's nose, lip and brow as well as crooked teeth, whitened skin and dark circles under his eyes. Ve Neill applied the makeup, made by John Rosengrant and Shane Mahan. The several pounds of facial prosthetics, body padding, and prosthetic hands took four-and-a-half hours to apply to DeVito, but was reduced to three hours by the end of filming. An air bladder was added to the costume to help reduce its weight. DeVito helped create the Penguin's black saliva with the makeup and effects teams, using a mild mouthwash and food coloring which he squirted into his mouth before filming, and said its taste was acceptable. Burton described DeVito as completely in-character in costume, and he "scared everybody". While re-dubbing some of his dialogue, DeVito struggled to get into character without the makeup and had it applied to improve his performance. Because of the secrecy surrounding his character's appearance before marketing, DeVito was not allowed to discuss it with others (including his family). A photo leaked to the press, and Warner Bros. employed a firm of private investigators in a failed attempt to track down the source.

With his hunchbacked body, webbed hands and birdlike face. Burton's horrific interpretation of both the Penguin's appearance and origin would be drastically differ- ent from the character's comic book roots. Cartoonist Bob Kane introduced the Pen- guin in 1941 as a tuxedo-clad, waddling dandy outfitted with monocle - a lover of Shakespeare, trick gadget umbrellas and bird-themed crimes. Kane's inspiration was not based on any exploration of criminal psychology, but in the visual flash of a cartoon penguin logo once used to hawk Kool cigarettes.

For Tim Burton, the Penguin had to be fleshed out into some- thing more than a visual sight gag if the character was going to impact on movie audiences. "I never liked the Penguin," Burton commented, "he never made sense to me. I've always thought that characters like the Joker or the Catwoman were much easier because they're clearer. But the Penguin was this fat guy in a tuxedo; and you never quite understood what the character was. I think it's important that you find some psychological founda- tion for these characters, no matter how absurd it is."

Burton engaged Stan Winston Studio to help create a totally fleshed-out character. Winston - who had worked with the di- rector on Edward Scissorhands-was determined to realize a makeup that would capture the Penguin's potentially twisted sensibilities. Tim Burton has a very specific look, a very cartoony, over-the-edge feeling. On the first makeup test at our studio, we went over the top, with Tim Burton-esque dark eyes and white skin. For the second test, our makeup artist, Ve Neill, did a beautiful job that looked ex- tremely real. The problem was that it was so real, it was no longer Tim Burton-esque. I told Ve to go back to the more ex- treme look. It was good that as a makeup artist she had initially put that element of reality to it; but we had to fit into the color, texture and feeling of a Tim Burton movie."

Makeup artists Shane Mahan and John Rosengrant were spe- cifically assigned to the task of creating a face that would not only be a bizarre take on the traditional Penguin look, but would also match the grotesque Penguin body design. Winston illus- trator Mark 'Crash' McCreery, starting from Burton's sketches of the character, rendered a series of drawings of a jowly, top- hatted villain with monocle and beakish nose. Portrait-quality sketches of Danny DeVito were also rendered from different an- gles, over which the Penguin features were drawn to match the actor's face. The philosophy behind the makeup was that the final look not obliterate the actor. "After the illustration phase, we made some plastic shells of DeVito's face from a lifecast," Mahan explained. "Then with John, myself, and Stan helping out, we blocked out five or six different nose shapes, little plastic plant-on appliances. We'd take the plastic shell heads over to the Warner's costume shop where they were constructing the Penguin body, and we'd put the heads up and Tim could make adjustments from there."

"The initial concept was a pointy nose," Winston noted, "but I wasn't really happy with that. The pointy nose just reminded me of a witch. So I got my hands back in the clay, which I love, and started playing with one myself. I felt the nose should have a beaklike quality. Years ago, for the Michael Jackson film The Wiz, I did some makeup for these crow characters that had enor- mous beak faces. I just loved that design, which involved the whole forehead and brow that went into this beak. Of course, that had nothing to do with penguins; but I felt I could use that concept with Danny and that turned out to be the look that was ultimately selected."

Even the teeth were a key element of the overall makeup de- sign. "Tim Burton and Danny DeVito wanted the teeth to look sharp and menacing," John Rosengrant stated, "yet rotten and neglected looking, since the character was pretty much living underground where there was no dental program. There were several sets of teeth for DeVito to try on, each with a little differ- ent look." Eventually, the teeth included both a full frontal piece and a lower set of teeth that were very long and uneven. "The rest of his teeth were colored with traditional tooth enamel col- ors to help blend the pieces," said Mahan. "The teeth really com- pleted the makeup. Normal teeth would have lessened the impact of that stark, gruesome makeup."

Unimpressed by the waddling, tuxedo-clad dandy of the DC comics, Tim Burton encouraged the artists at Stan Winston Studio to create a makeup that would clearly reflect the character's twisted persona. The Winston team prepared a series of drawings and tests, ultimately producing a makeup that included a prosthetic nose, brow and upper lip, as well as black, decaying teeth./In the early testing phase, a variety of appliance pieces were sculpted onto plastic shell likenesses of DeVito and then presented to Burton for his input and approval. Art department coordinator Shane Mahan sculpts a near- final version of the Penguin makeup. / During production, Ve Neill - who was responsible for the daily application of the makeup blends the edges of the appliance onto DeVito's face.

The Winston crew noted that the final look of the character, with his ghostly pallor and dark circles under the eyes, was very much in keeping with all the other weird characters inhabiting the Burton pantheon. "That look seems to be a theme running through all of his films, like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissor- hands," Rosengrant noted. "Tim Burton likes German Expres- sionism, which has that kind of look, with the white face and black lips. But it works. It's his vision."

Supporting the expressionistic makeup was the Penguin cos- tume, designed-along with the new batsuit and Catwoman's catsuit-by Bob Ringwood and Mary Vogt and executed by cos- tume effects supervisor Vin Burnham. With the makeup and cos- tume completed, it was up to DeVito to breathe life into the character. "No one would talk to Danny on the set because he scared everybody," Burton laughed. "I don't know if that was his usual way of working, but there was a point where he just clicked into it and was completely this character who was to- tally antisocial, that had been out of the loop a little too long. Danny was one hundred percent into the transformation. With the makeup and all, it was a complete creation."

Opening scene at Cobblepot mansion

8prologue involved in-camera miniature and matte painting effects created by matte world, a company formed by alumni of the ILM matte department

• preferred in-camera as no concerns about compositing different elements and having to fix the matte lines - matte world VE cosuperviros craig barron
• cobblepot mansion a matte world miniature filmed with the camera eye floating in wintry fog and sleet through a wrought iron gate. Dubbed the "Citizen Kane" shot homaging a similar tracking shot of the grounds of Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu
• effect combined separate gate and mansion models, photographic effects for aerial perspective and rear projection plate of a silhouetted figure in the window
• Matte world cameraman Wade Childress' teenage daughter serving as photo double for cobblepot played elsewhere by Paul Reubens

miniatures

• To build cobblepot mansion and Wayne manor as well as other models, matte world brought in John Goodson and Howie Weed of renegate effects

• The Cobblepot mansion built as a three sided twelfth scale model. Built out of high density construction board to effect the veneral rock solid look of the old house
• Vacuform bricks and roof texture to detail the roof and face of the building, scuklpted somearchitectural detail out of clay so we could take a mold of it and cast up parts.
• cherubs on the gate, found some cherubs at the right scale in a garden section of a local department store, even the right poe, modified them, chopped off hte arms and repositioning them, added some two-part epoxy to fill the scultpreu out a little bit and stippling them with an acrylic compound so they looked carved out of stone.
• The gothic gate, used a photo-etched metal cast from a drawing executed by John Goodson's brother David, drew a wrought iron gate with some eleaborate scroll work around the world "cobblepot", goodson explained went to a company called Insight Designs and they took the artwork and transferred it to sheets of brass then acid-etched away everthing that wasn't exposed, High amount of detalil that would've taken much longer to do by hand.
• gate na dmansion models place don their sides on separate but overlapping motion control tracks for filming. The rigging allowed hte foregrounf gate to pass under hte camera lens, moving faster toward hte camera than the mansion model toforce the illusion of depth. Triciky part of shooting the mansion was having aforeground object like the gate, motion contol camera operator Cameron Noble noted.
• FAlling snow effects accomplsiedh as three separate passes exposed on the same piece of film. MOst of hte time snow is just optically added over hte top of a screene which works for static shots but moving shots you want to have the snow moving through the scene with the camera. All the separate layed passes where photogfraphed with the same motion control move so tha thte mid ground layer that was in focus became more anmd more out of focus as we moved past and through it. We also came up witha techniue of adding haze to suggest there was a mass of air between the lens and the mansion at the start of the move to create more contrast.
• A process projector was place dbehind the camera to project snow onto a white four by eight foamcore sheet that was positioned between the mansoipn and the gate, we used hte same projector but moved the foamcore screen to three different positions for different snow exposre passes. Once hte motion control camera got into the black area between the snowflakes we just stopped it, took that card out and allowed the camera to move through where hte card had been. THe first pass was up front and close so that it was out of focus, the second pass was midground snow in focus falling behind hte gate and the final pass went out past the mode for the effect of background snow falling through the sky.

• scene were cobblepots skulk past the old zoo with Penguin, a Matte World painting of hte park and city skyscrapers was filmed with a live action actrear projection plate of the cobblepots. Artist bill maher worked on two four by eight sheets of masonite creating a final eigtht by eight foot painting. The surface painted with the kind of fast drying acrylic paint often used in animation cel bacgrkounds incorporated
• incportaed a rear projection window where mather woulkd tmatch the spider dead braches of the zoo treees the cobblepots passed in the live action plate.

• The look of both the zoo and gotham city background had been meticulously planned to ensure the painting would match with the overall design of the movie. "Basically, we approach all of our shots by first doing eight-by-ten-inch production paintins that go through an approvla and art direction process. These production paintings establish composition and lighting of each shot. For the background buildings of Gotham City we were trying to create the look of new york-the tops of the buildings going up through haze and lighting up the sky. THe scene was similar to New Yorks scentral park with a wall of buildings behind the park area. Often we'd reate what we were doing to New York = gotham city is basically a gothic fabrication of new york gone wild.
• Sinze hte old zoo featured a variety of odd pavillions which would be revealed in a later minuature flyover shot providing a bird-s eye view of the grounds, the logistics of the zoo painting were of particular concern. The relationship of the zoo pavilions was planned down to such details as entrances from the north gate or south gate Mather noted, there was some leeway in painting the pavilions because you dont really know what angle youre coming into for this particular shot. Because we wanted to showcase the zoo and gotham city and hte live action we had to come up with an arrangement of elements that would allow all things to read in the shot.
• A tilt-down move and a vaseline filter moved in front of hte camera helped to wash out the background buildings and provide depth. Used to selectively mush areas. we had the buildings appear to be sticking through cloud tops as if the building lights wer esetting off this glow as they pierced through the clouds.
• Noble - motion control a little too computerized, live action camear operators make subtle nmovements that he tried to replicate as inaccuracies to make it look more natural

Gotham sewers

• 4-ward production would pick up the title sequence for hte baby carriages journey through the Gotham Sewers under the old zoo to the cavernous underground stadium of the parks abandoned arctic world attraction. The company recently worked on T2s unclear explosion.
• philosophy of the sequence was literally a descent into the underworld and a perverse twist on the bliblical legend "onew of the things the prodction wnanted to parallel, strange enough, was the story of Moses floating through the reeds - 4 ward visual effects supervisor Robert Skotak. Motif was of this baby carraige floating downstream deeper and deeper into these catacbons and tunnels under Gotham City with shadow play suggestiong cathedral windows and gothic doorway shapes, before coming to rest in the arctic world lair.
• This seuencve of shots was to give a very sinister and foreboding feeling, implying almost a religious conversion or baptism of this being into the underworld.
• instead of reeds used protrusting tips of rusted rebar.
• at the very end of the sequence the carraige enters into the live ation lair where the live action picks up.
• originally consisting of only one shot of the carriage washing down a cascade of sewer water into the tunnel, hte title sequence was one of the major additions to the effects schedule after the wrap of principal potgraphy.
• Like most of hte effects sequencees, the title sequence was first worked out in video storyboards, developing the moves on first before running by Burton.
• miniature tunnels the production company had built for a batskiboat chase in a climactic sequence were reemployed for the expanded title sequence.
• The tunnels, which had been built at a length of 120 feet to accomodate the high speed batskiboat model shots were recongifgred by 4 ward for use with a fulls cale and miniature carriage. The carriage was black and very sinsiter with a big belt around it suggesting something very nasty trapped inmside. the basket weave was made out of S'gette, similar to copper insulated wire sleeve that was interlaced by hand over a plexiglass body.
• The tunnels would have been an average of thirty two feet across in real life; our minuiatre tunnels were eight feet across and just under eight feet high. We only build two thirds of the full round-the bottoms were flat and filled with about nine inches of water.
• Tehe tunnel surfaces were coverd by vacuformed brick patterns and dressed out with moss and minuatre ladders made by the model team which included Jen Howard, Pat Denver, Doug Moore, and Ricc Ruskuski.
• The tunnels were mainly constructed of a square stock streel that was weldded together with bendboard attached as abasic underusrface.
• We spray-foamed all the cracks and aalso sealed the entire base of the tunnel to keep it water tight.
• Matte artist Rick Rische handed most of the painting of the tunnels and dressings initially. For the title sequence our moel team did most of the repainintg themselves.
• Special lighting schemes highlighted the black carriage as it floated along the murky, labyrinthine tunnels. Had an arm that boomed out over hte camera that three or four little reflectorized halogen lights aimed into the water createing a lot of specular highlihgtsin and around the black shape of the carriage, which was enough to separate it from the dark water. As the carriage went away, we craned down until it became silhouetted against hte lightness of the ditsant background.
• since there was a bakground plate for the opening title with a flock of bats against the Returns title, the carriage sequence was shot in Vistavision to accommodate the compositing of the computer graphics bats created by Video Image associates.
• A key shot along the carriages methodical journey was the baptism shot of the carriage floating toward camera through a waterfall. instead of the minuature carriage this shot utilized a full-sized one. If we were really close to the carriage, tis shot utilized a full sized one, if we were really close to the carraiage nad it was very in frame or coming directly at us we found it was easier to work with the full scale carriage. If the shots were big and wide we used the sclae model.
• Modifications of hte minuiature tunnels were made so they could be used with the full isize carriage. We reworked the detailing pm tje ,omiatre timme; to create a larger brick pattern. For the batpsim shot the full scale carraige was on a track, for all the shots the carriage was either pulled along on a little sled by cables of mounted on an underwater track. They also wanted a sheeting effect with the water so we slit the top of the set and poured water from overhead onto a piece of sheet metal to spread it out. To add character to the splashing water we shout it at forty-eight frames per seccond..
• The entire job was really an art direction challenge as oppose to heavy duty visual effects the real concern was mood, tone, texture, issues of separateing foregroun from background and the rght pacing of the movemvene tot work with what we understood to be a very atmospheric score.
• Tricky shot involved the baby carriage flashing a shadow on the sewer wall that fleeting takes the form of a penguin silhouette. The question was how far to go with that, whether to make the shadow look literally like a penguin or just a submliminal suggestion. The idea is not that this shadow magically converts into a penguin its just a happenstance distortion across a convoluted surface.
• We had our modeler Jim Towler sculpt a three dimension shape which had the carriagte on one side and a penguin shape on hte other. As we roateted it slightly the shadow would shift and morphy from the

• carriage shape into the penguin shape. We could literally spin it around and play with different speeds of rotation of the sculpture and create an interesting interpaly on the wall because of course hte more bumpty the wall the more stretching and distortion would occur to the shadow.
• We could hide the transaitiion of this rotation very subtle; so it wax vbery much logic drive as if the shapes of the wall were causing it.
• The final choice was to keep the shape subliminatl.
• The shadow of the carriage passes through a smooth area momentartily and it forms up into this bulbous shape witha break on it and then rocks back and fofrht adv reverts back to the carriage shape. It's noticeable but woul alsot have a sense of seeing if after you saw it leaving a little question in your mind.
• (as the carrige washes up in the ruins of arctic world it is met by elder penguins who, in a twist on the story of baby tarzan being raised by the apes, nurture the deformed birdman to maturity.

Locations

Gotham City

The sets were redesigned in Welch's style, including the Batcave and Wayne Manor. They were spread across seven soundstages on the Warner Bros. lot (the largest of which had 70 ft (21 m) ceilings) and the largest set owned by Universal Pictures. Batman Returns was filmed on sets, although some panoramic shots (such as the camera traveling from the base of Shreck's department store to its cat-head-shaped office) were created with detailed miniatures.

Welch found it difficult to create something new without deviating from Furst's award-winning work. The designs were intended to appear as a separate district of Gotham; if Batman took place on the East Side, Batman Returns was set on the West Side. Welch was influenced by German Expressionism, neo-fascist architecture (including Nazi Germany-era styles), American precisionism painters, and photos of the homeless living on the streets in affluent areas. He incorporated Burton's rough sketch of Catwoman, which had a "very S&M kind of look", by adding chains and steel elements which would appear to hold together a city on the verge of collapse. The key element for Welch came early in design, when he realized that he wanted to manipulate spaces to convey specific emotions (emphasizing vertical buildings to convey a "huge, overwhelmingly corrupt, decaying city" filled with small people): "The film is about this alienating, disparate world we live in." The wintertime setting took advantage of the contrast between black and white scene elements, influenced by Citizen Kane (1941) and The Third Man (1949).

Welch's concept designs began by carving out building shapes from cardboard with images of fascist sculptures and depression era machine-age art. The resulting 1 by 4 ft (0.30 by 1.22 m)-tall rough model represented Gotham Plaza, described as a futuristic, oppressive, and "demented caricature" of Rockefeller Center. It was designed overbuilt, emphasizing the generic-but-oppressive heart of Gotham's corruption. Despite complaints from the film's financiers about its necessity, Burton insisted on the location with a detailed church overshadowed by plain surroundings.

Designs attempted to create the illusion of space; the Wayne Manor set was partially built (consisting primarily of a large staircase and fireplace) with a scale which implied that the rest of the structure was massive. Penguin's base was initially scheduled to be built in a standard 35 ft (11 m) tall Warner Bros. soundstage, but Welch thought that it lacked "majesty" and did not create enough contrast between itself and the "evil, filthy, little bug of a man". A 50 ft (15 m)-tall Universal stage was acquired for the production, its raised ceilings making it seem more realistic and less like a set. Minor modifications were made to the set throughout the film to make it appear to be gradually deteriorating. The location featured a water tank filled with 500,000 U.S. gal (1,900,000 L) of water surrounding a faux-ice island. Selina Kyle's apartment had a large steel beam running through its center to appear as if it had been built around a steel girder, which Welch said made it depressing and ironic. The wood used to build the sets was donated to Habitat for Humanity to help build low-cost homes for the poor.

Gotham City

• famed goahm backlot set at pinewood dismanteld and two batmobile prototypes in storage were called home
• one of te achievements of the 1989 film had been the menacing ambience of gotham city, captured that noir look thanks to production designer anton furst who won an academy award, essentially laid the foundation that ubrton and bo welch would build upon for Batman Returns. Furstdied in an apparent suicide in November 1991.
• Gotham would continue the theme of the erverse City of TOmorrow, a hellish tangle of skyscrapers erupting skyward, blocking out sun and sky and leaving the citizens below trapped in a clasutrophovic zone of steel and concrete - but provide burton and company the opprotyunity to prowl along some new avenues. What they built for the first movie was formal and serious Welch observed, this set is a little more AMerican, more with and irony, influenced by sort of Fascist World's Fair architecure mixed with generic Americfan urban decay and a sprinkling of our more contemporary, rofane mixed zoning.

Gotham Plaza

• The visual centerpreice of the city and te film iseld would be the downtown shopping district of Goham Plaza constructed on Stage 16 at Warner Brothers, one of the bigggest soundstages in Hollywood. While the first Batman movie had the luxury of outdoor space - aquarter of a mile of Pinewood backlot on which to build a main street and gotham square - the new downtown despite hte expansive soundstatge would require perspective tricks to fit in all the buildings illustrated on the production drawing board.
• Gotham plaza would ultimate rise as a city case from the burton mold, a cartoon come to life full of expressionist structureal surfaces and distinctive iconigraphy.
• In front of the town square was a gov ernment building out of an Orwellian fever dream dominated by two giagantic statues of muscular male figures straining to pull back mecahnical levels. At hte opposite end of the plaza was a new Gotham cathedral with unabashedly cartoonish figures carved into its exterior: a mummy, skeltal creatures, slinky bug.
• The city textures included such vestigates of a lost Golden Age of surface tunnels, trolley tracks, bricik roads, old buildings held up by metal supports and gargantua statuary heads sinkinginto concrete. "The idea was that this town is so corrupt, it's literally rotting-even sinking in places" explained Welch. "There is a lot of decayt-buildings are tipping over and being held up by thin metal struts and chains. Gotham Plaza was the first set I designed because I knew iot was going to take the longest to build and be the ste of a lot of action-although at the time, the script was still being worked on and we dind't know exactly what the action would be."

• GOtham plaza, build under the gun of the strickt production timetable required some two hundred fifty carpenters working seven days a week during a peak two week period.
• One of the key construction requirements was providing easy stage access for the Penguin and his red triangle gang who lirk in the city swers as well as creating a crest in a road that tunnelld between the old cathedral and a corner gift shop. To achieve the effect required construction he actual concrete street surface eight feet above the soundstage floor. We had a scaffolding company come in and they built a reinforced concrete road bed over decking and freeway construction scaffolding built to withstand the weight of cranes and equipment. We cut a lot of holes in the street for the Penguin to look out of for his gang to jump down into. The cresh in the center of the road created an intermediary layer that masked the ends of the road when we were shooting into the walls. It also allowed vehicles and people to crest themsevles and create a laerd, old city feelings.

If you just plunk down buildings on a flat stage and then try to build a road it looks really flat.

With the story taking place during the Christmas season, the sets would be dressed out in fake snow, with computer gener- ated snowfall added to specific shots. For another touch of au- thenticity - as well as the comfort of live penguins that would in part constitute the Penguin's army-refrigeration units were brought in so that the actors would exhale a realistically frosty breath. A complex process of both lowering the temperature and elevating the humidity was necessary. Chuck Gaspar brought in Aggreko, an air conditioning outfit with global contracts, to re- frigerate the set. "It was a big operation," said Gaspar, a veteran of such Burton productions as Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Bee- tlejuice. "Refrigeration units were set outside with the con- densers on stage. The system was pretty unique. Aggreko had it all on a little computer the size of a pack of cigarettes that con- trolled everything. The cool-down required two to three days prior to shooting. Once we got the stage down to near thirty- two degrees, we then needed to bring the humidity up to get that frosty breath look. So after taking two or three days to get the stage cold, we then had to incorporate water, or mist, into the system to get the necessary humidity. We used the Mee sys- tem-which sprays water almost like a fog-and spray guns to inject additional water."

"The air conditioners were the size of railroad cars," Bo Welch marveled. "The combination of getting things cold and then set- ting up a misting system to get the right combination of tem- perature and humidity was hard to maintain while shooting because the lights generated so much heat. It was a struggle. But what it did, besides getting the occasional breath look, was make everyone look and feel cold- because they were. It really completed the illusion of stepping into some cold, foreign envi- ronment. When you're outside in Burbank and it's eighty-five degrees, and then you step onto this darkened soundstage, your eyes adjust, you feel the cold, you see your breath, you're really transported to someplace else."

The Gotham Plaza set was part of a larger dreamscape of the moody old city itself. "I designed the city four or five blocks in every direction," Welch noted. "The concept of Gotham City is that it is huge in scale, and even if you just see a footing of it there's an implied weight and scope. The plaza on the stage rep- resents the first sixty-five feet of something that supposedly con- tinues up for a hundred stories; so it's very vertical and very dark. Even in the middle of the day just a crack of light might get down in there. When it's extended in miniature you under- stand the whole picture." Boss Film Studios-a major effects contributor - was as- signed the job of extending the city skyward in miniature, an aspect of Gotham barely explored in the first film. "They didn't, in my memory, stress the skyscrapers in miniature in the first film," model shop supervisor David Jones noted. "There were some matte paintings that suggested this in the distance and a sequence where the batwing is flying above the buildings, but more of this movie takes place up in that high skyline."

Gotham Plaza, conceived by production designer Bo Welch as a decaying slice of Americana. With only the lower stories of the plaza skyscrapers built on stage at Warner Brothers, it was up to Boss Film Studios to provide the expansive shots via miniatures. A motion control elevator rig developed by Boss was used to photograph a vertical tracking shot which began at sidewalk level on the live- action set and extended upward to the top of the miniature Shreck Building.

miniatures

Since the stages at Boss Film were still in production on Alien 3, the Batman Returns team used a nearby warehouse as a sec- ond stage for construction and filming of the miniatures. Jones brought in Mike Joyce to lead the team of modelmakers at the Boss warehouse annex, where the size of the buildings required that each structure be assembled in two or three sections. "It was more practical to assemble on stage in sections," Jones ex- plained. "We could move the things around and get them up on the set. We'd match the different edges and go back in and do some extra stuccoing, plastering or detailing at those places where they joined. We had plates built into each section that helped us line them up when we stacked them together. Most of the buildings were constructed from one-by-threes and door- skins, which is like a plywood. Then, once the main shape was there, certain details were done either in pine or gelutong, a very fine, even-grained pattern-maker's wood. We'd carve a de- tailed section, then we'd pull an RTV mold and do a urethane casting so that we could make as many as we needed. Before we painted it, we would seal the wood surfaces and then cover them with a lightweight stucco material which dries very fast. The lightweight nature of it helped-some of the buildings were five feet across and sixteen feet tall and needed a lot of surface area covered on them. We built almost all the buildings on three sides, but a couple of them we had to build four sides because we'd have to shoot from the back and front." With the miniature construction completed, it was then up to Boss director of photography Garry Waller to bring the 'city' to life. The art direction dictated that the models be lit from below, with darker, moonlit contrasts as the camera scaled to the top of the skyline. "The miniature was the star for us," said Waller. "Since most of the buildings were close to twenty feet tall and filled a twenty-by-thirty-foot-square area, it was basically like lighting tall objects within a box. It was very creative for us. The lighting, with cracker smoke added to blend everything, created the moody atmosphere."

miniatures

The Boss miniatures of Gotham Plaza had to match the look and scale of the Stage 16 set-a significant challenge given that the Warner's set had integrated various perspective tricks and cheats to contain all the buildings the script demanded. "The set at Stage 16 was a forced perspective set," revealed Boss effects supervisor John Bruno. "If you were twenty feet up in the air, you would see a set that was 'squeezed' down to about two- thirds the size it would normally be, with streets going off in a sort of triangular perspective. For our miniature shoots, we had to straighten and stretch it back out. Brent Boates, Steve Burg and Tom Valentine spent two weeks building and modifying a forty-eighth-scale foamcore mockup of Gotham Plaza that would be duplicated exactly as an eighteen-foot-tall miniature set at Boss." "In effect, we had to expand the live-action set by thirty per- cent in every direction so it looked right from all perspectives," Jones elaborated. "Dictel had done some hypothetical eleva- tions of the Gotham Plaza buildings and what they would look like in the real world; but by the time everything got squeezed into their sets, they had had to make some compromises. We couldn't get away with the same cheats they had, because our buildings wouldn't look right. For instance, they only had room for about half the width of the Krystler Building to really be on the set. If you just projected that up, you wouldn't have the build- ing that Bo Welch wanted to see in the wide shots.

Jones set up an impromptu art department within the model shop that went to work with Tom Valentine's line drawings of the vertically extended plaza buildings and the rest of the Go- tham skyline. "We took the art department's tight line drawings and turned them into drafts for our own use so our modelmakers knew exactly what we were going to build," Jones explained. "But a flat, two-dimensional drawing reads differently in three dimensions, so Bo and some of his illustrators would come over here quite often to look at the progress on buildings and make suggestions on color, texture and scale. It was a very surreal look they were going after."

The Boss Gotham skyline required twelve main Gotham Plaza area structures, eight background buildings and more than a dozen floater structures-nondescript buildings designed to extend the city past the main, identifiable plaza buildings. In some instances these floater buildings were used to fill in the strange Gotham skyline. "During the initial tests on mockups, we could see that there'd be quite a bit of space on either side of... the government building because it got smaller as it went up," Jones said. "So two nondescript buildings were designed by Tom Valentine to fill those gaps. Looking back in the other direction, past the church and what was called the F-15 building-be- cause it looked like an F-15 aircraft when turned on its side- was a whole area of town that had to be extended out for a shot where Catwoman is being piloted away by the umbrella and she gets dropped. We built a dozen or more buildings that were la- beled A through G to extend that part of the town. Originally we wanted to do everything in twelfth scale; but bids, budgets and time being what they were, we ended up doing it in twenty- fourth scale."

Penguin's lair

set

The Penguin's lair was in the grand Batman comic book tradi- tion of such lonely criminal hideouts as haunted mansions, aban- doned factories and redlight district flophouses. The set for the netherworld habitat required the refrigeration units used for Stage 16 both to reflect the winter time period and protect the live penguins. Because the set required the biggest possible soundstage- and since the largest stage at Warner's was al- ready filled by Gotham Plaza-Arctic World was constructed at Universal Studios. "Arctic World combined every kind of con- ceivable trick and effect," Bo Welch commented. "It was floor- to-ceiling on the biggest soundstage at Universal and three- quarters of it was water. We had puppet penguins as well as two different species of live penguins, fire effects, explosions. Arctic World was designed as this old, decayed animal pavilion with bleachers and a central performance island and refreshment stand. At one time, when it was brand new, it had looked like some soft, stylized ice flow in the Arctic; but over the years, it had gotten green, rusted and rotted, and had taken on its own style of elegant decay. There's a consistency to the images Tim is drawn to in his films, in this particular case a decayed piece of Americana. The cemetery in Beetlejuice is like that, and the old house in Edward Scissorhands. They're all part of a family."

The center of the set, and the spot where the penguins were most often to congregate, was the Arctic World island, which topped off at eighteen to twenty feet at its summit. The island would be populated by live penguins as well as penguin puppets executed by Stan Winston Studio. Since most of the puppet pen- guin shots would require that the puppeteers be positioned un- derneath the island, a major construction concern was that the island be as watertight as possible. "The island was constructed in a tank with a weir wall to keep the water out," Welch com- mented, "but the water pressure on the island was amazing. The set had a concrete floor and was basically constructed out of wood frame and lathe and pool construction concrete. It was difficult to make it waterproof, even though we had bilge pumps going twenty-four hours a day. There was a little bit of leakage where the set met the floor, no matter what, so it was a spooky place to work."

Another quirky Arctic World touch-which was in the spirit of the cartoonish flourishes featured in Gotham Plaza - was an antiquated air conditioning unit, a run-down machine clinging mechanically to life with shudders and sparks. "We called this big generating unit The Icebox," said Chuck Gaspar. "We put it on truck springs to dance it around the floor; and there were sparks coming off of it which we did using a little charge, just firing off the charges from a nail board."

miniature

While the Arctic World lair of the Penguin was constructed as a full-size set on a Universal Studios soundstage, the old Gotham Zoo in which it was situated was built in miniature by Stetson Visual Services and photographed at The Chandler Group. The sprawling model consisted of a main tabletop setting augmented by 
floater' set
pieces that could be positioned around the perimeter in response to specific camera angle requirements. Crew members ready the model for an expansive shot. / For a flyover revealing the abandoned zoo grounds and
its ghostly pavilions, Chandler developed a special motion control crane to skim the surface of the model in a carefully choreographed flight path. 

The ghost town grounds of the old zoo, which included both the entrance to Arctic World and a number of eccentric looking pavilions, would be duplicated in miniature by Stetson Visual Services. The miniature set would be used for an establishing flyover shot and as a bombing zone for the penultimate con- frontation between Batman and the Penguin. Working in tandem with Stetson, The Chandler Group began preparing for the pho- tography and pyrotechnic challenges of the sequence. Once com- pleted, the miniature pavilions were delivered to Chandler and incorporated into a ruined landscape tabletop miniature which Stetson Visual had constructed on Chandler's stage.

Bo Welch's art department provided Stetson with a quarter- inch-to-the-foot model to be used as a reference guide for the zoo grounds miniature. For art director Rick Heinrichs, the use of production models was a crucial element in achieving the graphic, expressionistic look favored by Burton. "We made char- acter models of all the major sets in the picture," Heinrichs ex- plained. "A lot of production designers and art directors are from an architectural and interior design school background. What normally happens is an illustrator or production designer will do some drawings or sketches for the director to look at and a modelmaker might turn that into a clean, white architec- tural model of whatever the set is. The whole process tends to drain the character and the emotional content out of the set. We go right for the character and the feeling from the beginning. By turning a model over to the companies that will build the sets, they can work out problems or reconfigure as need be. It's just an incredibly powerful tool."

"The old zoo model from the art department was this little jewel," Mark Stetson marveled. "We took it and went straight to work. Chandler acquired a very tiny video camera which Don Baker rigged to their motion control and did about twelve video passes right through the model. Based on those move tests, we determined that to get the timing of the move, we had to recon- figure the miniature and essentially compress all the exhibits a little closer together."

Another construction concern was that the finished model accommodate the eighty-by-eighty-foot Chandler stage. "We were originally hoping to do a sixth-scale model," Stetson said, "but we just couldn't fit everything on stage at that scale, so we cut it down to eighth scale. We constructed it so the main ta- bletop was about forty by forty feet; but by using floating tables along the perimeter, we could get the full set to about seventy feet long and fifty-five feet deep. The actual construction of the zoo took six to eight weeks." The dual elements of the construc- tion included the central tabletop section, which comprised some eighty percent of the terrain, and the wild tabletop pieces that could be repositioned as need be and foamed in to match the ridged contours of the main section. Additional wild ele- ments, which could be placed as needed in openings in the main part of the set grounds, included such pavilions and park struc- tures as the Arachnosphere and crab pavilion, the old zoo gate and the bridge from which baby Cobblepot was tossed that fate- ful winter night. "For the pavilions we used mostly aluminum wire and plaster and screen. Since the pavilions were supposed to represent temporary structures from an old world's fair or expo, we ended up using Rose Parade float construction tech- nology for a lot of it - bent wire and screen covered with thin coats of plaster that were very easy to degrade and break down. Len Ricci and Dana Yuricich did most of the wire sculpture. Weactually burned and broke through some of the structures and applied additional layers of screens and mesh to give it an old decayed look. The main tabletop was built in place by construc- tion coordinator Dickie Welch and crew, and foamed in to create the contours of the park which included all the pavilions, fenc- ing, seven hundred miniature trees, park benches and a bridge. All those details that could be lifted off and removed from the table we built in advance in our shop, stored and then brought to Chandler when we had finished the tabletop."

It was up to The Chandler Group to solve the visual effects and lighting problems for the old zoo sequence, including the swooping midnight flyover establishing the deserted grounds hiding the Penguin's lair. In theory, the lighting was to be a sim- ple moonlit source that matched the look of the first unit pho- tography. Chandler director of photography Tim Angulo found, however, that duplicating the live-action look in miniature was problematic. "There was an over-saturated blue overall and al- most no fill light in the live-action," recalled supervisor John Scheele. "With Tim Burton's blessing, we began to take some liberties and work back in other light sources and colors. Mike Fink found a clip from the live-action that justified a totally il- logical God light to illuminate the polar bear statue featured on top of Arctic World. Tim Angulo cheated the single moonlight source by employing a number of instruments to cast shadows through the trees. And he used warmer source lights on the rubber duckies suspended above the zoo, the crab and the aviary so that their original colors would stand out."

finale pyros

The pyrotechnics featured in the climactic sequence at the zoo grounds would require blasting the set with 18K HMIs to hold depth of field at a one-hundred-twenty-frames-per-second film rate. In shooting the flyover, however, Angulo could use a more varied approach. Shooting with a wide 18mm lens, and stopping down to f/16 at six-second exposures, he was able to achieve a magical, floating feel. "In the flyover," Scheele com- mented, "we crossed over a great deal more terrain and had to light the entire set at once. We also had the opportunity to em- ploy more subtlety, as in the area around the zoo sign. Tim An- gulo came up with an idea everybody liked, of spilling pools of warmer light from the street lights near the entrance. This re- inforced the sense of a border leading into a separate and colder terrain. Stetson's team also layered in a lot of small flourishes, like holes in the perimeter fence where animals might have burst out and fled the zoo."

Having fallen in love with the miniature landscape, the cam- era crew wanted to program a move that would take in all the decayed wonders of the old park in the establishing flyover shot. However, Tim Burton wanted to follow a relatively direct path through the zoo gate and over the bridge, crossing through the giant crab's claw and on to the mysterious light flickering in the windows of Arctic World. Mike Fink, Don Baker and John Scheele conducted move tests which enabled them to carefully plan the flight path. "Most of the extreme move ideas were worked out in the animatic process," Scheele noted. "Even later there were some refinements-especially as to timing. Tim was always very specific about what he wanted, instructing us via Mike Fink to 'add a little roll' as we passed through the claw or 'don't bother diving down into the riverbed' - those kinds of adjustments. Since the pavilions were constructed separately from the set, they could be repositioned to make the shot work. We ended up shifting the bridge around at the very last moment so it would play better to camera." Because the flyover required the camera to be extended out twenty to thirty feet, with close clearance over the landscape surface, Chandler had to design a special motion control camera system to accomplish the shot. "We had to fabricate an entirely new boom arm in a big rush," recalled Scheele. "Three machine shops were working overtime to get on-line by the deadline, add- ing extensions to our Tiny Tim camera system tower. In the end, we had a twenty-foot vertical reach, with a twenty-two-foot reach out over the set. In addition, another ten-foot arm exten- sion was standing by in case the move expanded. It was built like a construction crane, and this allowed us to reach out and over the various tall structures in the model without crashing into them. The linear movement of the axes also made program- ming more straightforward compared to the arcing path of a conventional boom." A pitching snorkel lens complemented the camera rig and provided the maneuverability required for the shot. "It was a fully stepper-driven system that we'd been using for a number of years," Scheele described. "It allowed for full pan, tilt and roll of the lens elements, and gave that free floating point of view to the shot. The package was small enough that we could sail through tight openings in the miniature. And since the cam- era was moving at a slow film rate, the camera assistant could reach into the set and pluck out the top of the zoo sign-the only structure that actually blocked the passage of the lens- as the camera passed through."

Batcave

entrance

As a surreal touch to Wayne's descent, Tim Burton asked Chuck Gaspar to rig up an iron maiden torture device to serve as a passageway to the batcave inner sanctum. In the shot, Batman closes the entrance; and as his back is to camera, spikes shoot out and retract around him. "The spikes all had to be done pneumatically," Gaspar said. "Each spike had its own little cyl- inder. There were something like five to seven thousand dollars just in pneumatic cylinders. One switch controlled everything, so the spikes would zip out and contract individually."

old batcave

The batcave, Batman's high-tech crime fighting nerve center, would be another redesign effort. The 1989 batcave was styled by Anton Furst in a Phantom of the Opera style, with skyscraper foundations protruding through the cave walls-a slightly baf- fling take given that the cave was located miles outside town, deep below the wooded countryside.

new batcave

The new batcave would feature sheer shale walls and precipices overhanging bottomless drops. The Batcave work areas would be realized as set pieces on a Warner Brothers soundstage, with Matte World artist Bill Mather extending the cave to its full dimensions. To begin work on the painting, Matte World journeyed to the Warner Brothers batcave set and shot latent image Vistavision camera angles approved by Burton. The final batcave painting would be exposed onto the original negative of the live-action plate, and the precomp would then be sent to Video Image for scanning and the addition of computer generated bats. Because Burton intended to rely heavily on matte paintings to create the scope of the batcave, the live-action set was unassuming. "The set was a small area maybe eight feet off the ground," Mather noted. "There wasn't a cavernous sense of depth. The biggest set in the world couldn't provide what the matte shot ultimately would, which was this huge cavern with stalactites and stalag- mites going back in perspective. Tim wanted a shale look to the cave; and there were two precipices that he wanted to meet at a point, with a little gap between them. He wanted it weird-and we gave him weird." Two separate batcave scenes required slightly different paint- ing approaches. "One shot was an establishing view, a high- angle look at the whole setup," Mather explained. "Then there was another, lower angle looking up, which was a tighter shot. Bruce is working on the batmobile on the left precipice and the butler comes in from the right to this very precarious point. The different textures of the painting were established by the shale look of the live-action plate. There were a lot of intense blues and purples which were fun since I rarely work with those 'un- natural' colors. During the painting I had to keep in mind that the CG bats would have to play against something in the bat- cave, so there had to be some areas of light to give the bats something to silhouette against. I also put a floating island of rock in the matte that was really strange because it tapered down-which is the reverse of what would happen in nature. The batcave was a total fantasy."

The second batcave shot-in which Alfred the loyal butler discusses with Bruce Wayne an invitation to a Max Shreck cos- tume party-had a technical problem that was of concern to Burton: a highlight on the edge of the precipices brought the points too close together. Since it was an original negative matte painting and the highlight was already on film, Mike Fink elected to fix the problem when the shot was delivered to Video Image for the addition of computer generated bats. "I sat down with Richard Hollander and sketched where the tip should be, the distance between the opening," Fink stated. "It was a digital composite; so after the shot was scanned into the computer, Richard was able to paint out the tip by picking up some blacks in the background and painting them back in.""

Shreck's building

miniature

The Shreck Building, where a lot of action takes place, also had to be fore- shortened to a smaller scale but perched into a set so you could see the building from any angle without giving the foreshor- tened look away." In addition to stretching the foreshortened set, the Boss model team had to match the design features of the Stage 16 structures. "In some films, the miniatures of a live- action piece might be separated by a half hour or more so you can take some liberties. In this case we would be intercutting back and forth with live-action, so we had to be very careful and get everything as close as possible, which was a challenge."

'Batman Returns was filmed on sets, although some panoramic shots (such as the camera traveling from the base of Shreck's department store to its cat-head-shaped office) were created with detailed miniatures.

The use of miniatures would be a significant aspect of the entire production, particularly for making the transitions from Gotham's streets to the penthouse offices and rooftops where many key scenes would unfold - including a scene in which Max Shreck plots his corporate takeover of Gotham in his pent- house suite. The scene featured an important crane-up shot of the Shreck Building, from street level to the giant, rotating cat's head above. Boss Film was tasked with completing the shot. "We were asked to devise a way to crane up off of the Shreck set at Stage 16," John Bruno explained, "accelerate to a blur and end up on the giant rotating cat head that sat above Shreck Tower, which was a twenty-fourth-scale model. Using a forty-eighth- scale mockup of the Stage 16 set, supplied to us by the produc- tion, Neil Krepela and I calculated that the vertical move neces- sary to achieve the shot would be close to forty feet and would have to be repeatable to at least one-thousandth-of-an-inch." Mark West designed what Boss Film would dub the elevator rig' which could carry a 65mm camera package, remote head and all, vertically at speeds upwards of thirty-two miles per hour and repeat the move to within five-thousandths-of-an-inch. Garry Waller supervised the complex vertical shot on Stage 16. Then, back at Boss, he took the motion control data from the live- action shoot and recalculated it for the miniature camera move. "The live-action move was actually slower than we thought," Waller noted, "so when we came back to shoot the miniature we had to speed up the move to give it more scale. We transitioned the vertical pan by using a beam to blend the higher speed, and continued all the way up to the Shreck cat head."

logo

Shreck Building department store and corporate headquarters most integral to the plaza structure, with a cartoonish maniacally grinning cat head htat resembled a hybrid of felix the cat and alice in wonderland cheshire cat illustrations of Sir John Tenniel. "We were all fascinated by the choice of logos made by american busiesses to protejtect a friendly corporate atmosphere"Burton said "YTou htink of the pillsbury dougboy or the planters peanut-theyre cut but there's something evil about htem."

set - blowing it up

In contrast to their rooftop encounters is a street-level meet- ing in Gotham Plaza where the Catwoman cartwheels to a con- frontation with Batman moments before a bomb she has set rips through the department store of her hated former boss. For the live-action pyrotechnics, in which display windows and revolv- ing doors blasted outward on the Stage 16 set, Gaspar and his crew set down some eighteen mortars in the interior lobby, cam- ouflaging the explosives with Christmas decorations. A combi- nation of explosion mortars and map gas mortars provided the blast. "Map gas is a stabilized, settling gas that gives you a lot of flame," Gaspar explained. "The gas was in big mortar holding tanks; so once it was released and it ignited, we could control the fire. We could blow it ten feet, twenty feet, five hundred feet if we wanted." As with the pyro work for the exploding dance floor, the Shreck department store windows were blown out by detonating tempered glass. "We used a little detonator wired to a battery - the same setup as any basic bullet hit effect. Since we had a lot of glass to break at one time, I brought in a big generator to make sure we had plenty of current going." For the big explosion on the set-which would be rebuilt later for fu- ture filming the Burbank Fire Department was on hand on Stage 16. When it detonated, the explosion sent a huge fireball up into the grid of the stage. "The fire department got a little excited, but we had enough fire people on hand that I wasn't concerned about it. Tim had said he wanted it big!"

the ball

Biding his time before releasing his avian army, the Penguin steps up his terrorist attacks on Gotham, beginning with a kid- nap plot against Max Shreck's son Chip in retribution for the mogul having betrayed him. He finds his victim at the Shreck Building where Gotham high society is attending 'Max Shreck's Max-squerade Christmas Ball. Among the costumed couples waltzing under the grinning Shreck cathead hanging from the ceiling are Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne-appropriately, the only couple not wearing masks. Selina has come armed with a small derringer that holds a bullet meant for Max. Just as Kyle and Wayne realize each other's secret identity, a Penguin missile literally crashes the party.

Super criminals have been busting up high society Gotham gatherings in the Batman comics for more than half a century, but translating the typically comic book visuals of the live- action bomb blast-which featured the ballroom dancers be- ing blown skyward as the dance floor exploded-would tax even the considerable ingenuity of Chuck Gaspar's special ef- fects squad. "I was more concerned about this one job than any other part of the whole picture," Gaspar admitted. "It was a dan- gerous, dangerous move."

A sixteen-foot-diameter area of the dance floor set was desig- nated ground zero- or what the crew called 'the hole' - where the pyro work was set. To achieve the illusion of the dancers being blown upward by the blast, Gaspar's crew rigged a system of pneumatic cylinders that were hooked to stunt couples from a grid above the stage. "These cylinders were like cables that went back to the high side of the stage wall," Gaspar explained. "The cables were about an eighth-of-an-inch in diameter and about thirty feet long, and were powered by air driven compres sion. We need a very high-pressure zap to get them out of the hole real quick." The cables were attached to form-fitting har- nesses worn by the stunt performers. The harnesses ran from the legs over the chest, strong and snug enough to keep body and soul together for the high-speed ride out of the hole. "The cables actually snapped them away. We timed it so that we detonated the dance floor once their feet were about fourteen inches off the ground."

The actual explosion entailed electronically detonating tem- pered glass to produce an opening for the big blast to follow a mere millisecond later. "We had three cues," Gaspar explained, "pulling the stunt couples back, electronically breaking the glass and blowing up the floor. We didn't shoot off the explosion until we saw the dancers start to move. Once the cables pulled their bodies out of the hole, some of them landed as far as fifteen to eighteen feet away. Since the cables stretched to the high side of the wall, they were actually being pulled back and up at the same time. Even though we had established through testing where everybody would go when they were yanked back, and we tried to pad all those areas, a lot of people still got slammed against the wall. Fortunately, nobody got hurt -just a couple of scratches."

The exploding dance floor scene required more wire removal work by Pacific Data Images. Unlike the batmobile crash se- quence-which was simplified by the amorphous background of the shot - the dance floor was well lit and full of complicated background elements. "There were wires going past a balcony with musicians on it and a lot of architecture," noted Fink. "PDI did a great job-some of the wires were extraordinarily hard to find. One of the things I always recommended on set was to paint the wires day-glo orange. But nobody ever wants to paint wires orange because they feel that the wires may not be visible if they're black. The orange paint forces you to use some wire removal technique. Everybody was convinced that we wouldn't see the wires on the dance floor. When that turned out to be wrong, PDI had to remove them."

Becoming Catwoman

The penthouse office of Max Shreck would be the setting for the pivotal sequence in which Selina Kyle, a cute, but mousy aide to the Gotham mogul, undergoes the transformative expe- rience that makes her into the leather-clad, whip-cracking Cat- woman. Suspecting that Selina has discovered his takeover plot, Shreck pushes her out the penthouse window. Selina crashes through successive levels of awnings - embossed with the grin- ning company cat- and lands in the snowy alley below. For a time she is still, her eyes closed in death's cold repose. Then cats come out of the shadows to awaken her. The sequence began with a locked-off shot of a stuntwoman crashing out of an office window. With subsequent live-action stunt footage establishing the long shots, it was up to Boss to create a down-angle move that would follow Michelle Pfeiffer as she fell through each awning. A motion control camera would punch through a miniature awning set and be composited with a bluescreen down-angle head-and-shoulders shot of the actress. "The model of the Shreck Building for Selina's fall was twelfth- scale," said Dave Jones, "which was large enough to accommo- date the camera lens as it passed through the individual awn- ings. Since that model was almost twenty-five feet tall at scale, we elected to turn the whole thing on its side. That not only facilitated shooting on our stages, it also meant we didn't have to use a long boom arm, which would have tended to swing in an arc rather than creating a straight fall. We could do a simpler move through the awnings using our motion control camera track, with the camera going parallel to the floor for most of the move. Garry Waller, using a motion control camera fitted with a snorkel lens, programmed the simulated fall through the mini- ature awnings as they were pulled apart by hidden wires."

Looking for an extra element that would add life to the shot, Bruno noticed a miniature van in the Boss model shop that had been created for a series of DHL commercials. Bruno proposed shooting the miniature turning the corner of the Shreck build- ing below to provide a little bit of background action. "We at tached the van to a simple swing-arm mechanism that would move perpendicular to the floor of the stage at the base of the Shreck Building," Jones explained.

Once the background was approved by Tim Burton, the all- important bluescreen shot of Michelle Pfeiffer could be com- pleted. The actress, sitting on a stool with air blowing her hair to simulate the freefall, had to act out the scene in slow motion to sync with the required motion control camerawork. "What Tim was trying to do was to show that during this fall Selina becomes the Catwoman," Bruno stated. "The camera had to be on her face so you could actually see the terror in her eyes as she was falling, hitting and ripping through the awnings. Neil Krepela shot Michelle Pfeiffer against a bluescreen as she sat in front of a motion control dolly which repeated the move. Be- cause the move was preprogrammed, Michelle and Tim were left free to concentrate on performance."

Rooftop fight

Much of the action-from hand-to-hand combat to explosive pyrotechnics-involved fight sequences between Batman and Catwoman. One rooftop encounter between the Bat and the Cat involved both set work and a Boss optical composite effort. In the scene, Batman hangs from a ledge at the end of Catwoman's whip, dangling far above Gotham Plaza. The shot required a fore- ground set piece of Michael Keaton hanging some fifteen feet above a front projected bluescreen placed over stunt pads. In- cluded in the composite were Boss miniatures of the Gotham cathedral and the Shreck Building. "Once we had the bluescreen footage of Keaton hanging from the ledge," said Fink, "we had to compose the background miniatures to match in perspective the angle we had on him. That wasn't a problem - it came out matching the storyboard nearly exactly, and it looked quite good-but when Tim saw it he asked us to reposition the back- ground. We lost some of the visual clues that helped tie Batman into the background, so the composite became a bit more diffi- cult to complete successfully. But Boss pulled the shots to gether-largely due to Michael Cooper, their optical lead on the show."

The rest of the fight scene, as well as other rooftop scenes, required a special set built on a separate Warner's soundstage. The set, which also included Selina Kyle's apartment, featured some fifty permanent structures built into the perimeters of the soundstage, complemented by eighteen wild rooftops of differ- ent sizes that filled the soundstage's central area. "The whole rooftop set was very dense and romantic," Bo Welch said. "Basi- cally, the perimeter consisted of a lot of buildings of manipu- lated scale to get some depth. Selina's apartment was built into the perimeter as a permanent set so we could look into her apart- ment from the rooftops and vice versa. The wild rooftop pieces were sliced out of various heights and set on wheels so we could move them around. The buildings were all wood frame construc- tion-with a little bit of steel to reinforce them with plastic brick, lathe, plaster and paint for detail."

setpieces

Christmas Tree lighting ceremony

Doug Moore and Pat Denver finish painting and detailing the most elaborate of the street models.

ice priness fall

As the Penguin wreaks havoc on a tree lighting ceremony in Gotham Plaza, the Ice Princess (Cristi Conaway) takes a fatal plunge from a skyscraper rooftop. The fall was a forced perspective shot, with Conaway on a special crane developed by Boss and rigged to boom down into the plaza miniature. Garry Waller, riding 
on the same rig, filmed her descent from directly above.  

bats

At the crucial moment of the tree lighting, a flock of bats- at the behest of the Penguin - suddenly flies out of the tree, swooping down on the unsuspecting crowd. All the bats through- out the film-from the screeching flocks in the sewers and the batcave to those in the plaza attack-were computer graphic creations of Video Image. While the facility's batmobile cloak- ing team had produced a mechanical-looking effect that oper- ated with some structural logic, bat animator Andy Kopra was tasked with creating organic shapes that looked real and often interacted with live actors. Richard Hollander, who oversaw the Video Image CG effort and was responsible for the scanning and compositing of the imagery, had directed his department to render realistic bats even from the start of the design phase. "Rather than create wire-frame things flying around for the director to view, we felt it would be more efficient to give him fully rendered bats-at least as close to a final as we could get," Hollander explained. "The shape, size, color and motion blur had a lot to do with the dynamics of the bats. They're so abstract that as soon as you take away even one little bit of detail, they don't look like bats anymore. So I realized early in the ballgame that we couldn't isolate any one thing. We were going to have to effectively de- liver fully rendered images for all takes."

Creating the flying creatures required an extensive amount of hardware and software. A Symbolics XL-1200 computer was used to program the specific bat behaviors for each shot, while the actual animation utilized the 'Boids' program, a behavioral animation system. "The Boids software system defines what it means for birds or bats to fly in a group," said Kopra. "It allows them to fly, avoiding obstacles and each other, but still have goals for behavior and direction. In the Christmas tree shot there was a sense of the bats swirling around, while in other shots they had to appear to be attacking people." Another important piece of software was Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman. The po- sition and orientation data generated by the Boids system was saved as files of transformation matrices, then used as input to the Renderman scripting system to produce the bat image files. These images were then composited with the scanned back- ground elements. All together, Video Image would create flocks of bats for twenty-two separate shots.

For the Penguin's Christmas tree surprise, Kopra approached the digital compositing of the scene in spatial terms to create the illusion of the bats coming from within the thick branches of the live-action tree. "By using a matte for the Christmas tree," Kopra explained, "the bats could appear to begin their motion behind it. The bats in front of and behind the tree were rendered as separate images. They appeared to move through the tree be- cause I matted out the part of the flock that was behind the tree with the tree image. The speed of the bats and their size in the frame helped to maintain that illusion." Controlling the bats entailed making adjustments to flock characteristics defined by the software. "The simulation of flocking behavior consists of a set of general rules that all the bats follow. For example, the flock tries to stay together, but individual members try not to bump into each other. For each shot, however, changes are made to individual bat characteristics, like their maximum speed and their current target. Animating the bats consisted of changing values like those, as if I was turning control knobs on robot bats. Making those changes was the directorial part, getting them to behave the way I wanted."

While the Boids system generated position and orientation data for the flying maneuvers, the creatures themselves were given shape and form by Photorealistic Renderman. "The bat models were designed from the profile of a bat's wing," said Ko- pra, "which consists of a shortened thumb, four fingers and the skin that stretches between them. An outline was developed from that form and rotated into a number of positions for the flapping motion of the wings. Cross sections from those posi- tions generated the three-dimensional model. I wrote software to take those bat models, as well as the position and orientation data from the flocking simulation, to produce the input required by Renderman to generate an image of a flock of bats in mo- tion." To add to the terrifying impact of the bats, particularly in closeups, the size of the bats was scaled to more than a foot. Throughout the film, the bats were rendered with motion blur to provide a more realistic look. "The simulation provided the beginning and ending positions for the bats for each frame, and the renderer motion-blurred between them."

All of the computer generated bats in the film were compo- sited digitally by the Boss digital department. "As far as I know," said Mike Fink, "this movie marked the first time that shots gen- erated by different effects houses were transferred between those houses digitally-without even a single piece of film ex- changed. Richard Hollander created eight-millimeter computer data cassettes - which are the current coin of the realm-to move computer data from one machine to another. He would output his bats to the data tape and then give the tape to Jim Rygiel in the Boss CGI department. Jim read that into his com- puter and composited the shot." One of the challenges of com- positing the shots was that the film was quite dark. "It was set at nighttime and lit almost entirely with blue light-and the tonal range between blue and black is pretty limited. Scanning and compositing shot after shot that was in that tonal realm was a learning process for all of us. Luckily, the turnaround in CGI is so fast that we were able to go through many iterations of these composites and try many different things."

Computer generated bats were also added to the beginning of the forced perspective shot. "They were mostly just a motion blur," said Fink, "but if they weren't there, the shot would have jumped like crazy. It was very subtle." To add layering to the CG bat attack, Fink brought in Optic Nerve to rig mechanical bats onto select members of the crowd, as well as the Ice Princess prior to her fatal fall. "Optic Nerve ran a wire from the belly of the mechanical bat through a slit in the clothing to a molex connector attached to an undergarment. The most effective use of the mechanical bats was when the Ice Princess was on the ledge. We put one on the back of her hand and had her run her hand through her hair trying to remove it."

Video Image was also responsible for creating swarms of computer generated bats for several sequences in the film, including the opening titles and scenes in the batcave and in Gotham Plaza. Unlike the cloaking effect, which had involved strict mechanical parameters, the bats were organic shapes requiring random, lifelike movements. Andy Kopra, who rendered and animated the bats, studies one of his shots.

/ To provide subtle movement to high-angle shots of the chaos in Gotham Plaza, nonarticulated puppets attached to wires were pushed and pulled from off camera. Modelmakers Monty Schook and John Merritt position the figures on the plaza miniature. /

Thousands of bats swarm out of the plaza Christmas tree and proceed to attack townspeople gathered to witness the tree lighting ceremony. Andy Kopra of Video Image computer generated the bat swarms, employing a behavioral animation system to program the flocking maneuvers. Once the basic flight patterns were determined, the bats were more fully rendered and composited into the live-action plates with convincing motion blur.

/ To provide subtle movement to high-angle shots of the chaos in Gotham Plaza, nonarticulated puppets attached to wires were pushed and pulled from off camera. Modelmakers Monty Schook and John Merritt position the figures on the plaza miniature. / Watching

flying batman

the horrific scene from a Gotham rooftop, Batman opens his cape and swoops down and over the crowd. Rather than face the logistical nightmare of flying a stuntman through a full-size set, the production opted to realize Batman's flight with a puppet built and operated at Boss by Laine Liska and Craig Talmy. An

inexpensive bicycle-parts rig provided the gross movements, while Liska produced the more subtle animation manually via rods. 

Prior to the Penguin's release of bats from the booby-trapped Christmas tree, the film featured an over-the-shoulder shot of Batman looking down, gargoyle-like, from his perch on the roof tops overlooking Gotham Plaza. Rather than shooting it as a traditional composite element, Boss created the shot in-camera, placing a stunt actor against their miniature Plaza structures in an extreme version of forced perspective trickery. A similar forced perspective effect would be used in a scene where a Pen- guin umbrella releases bats that force the Ice Princess (Cristi Conaway) a beauty queen snow bunny whose function is to decorate the plaza tree lighting ceremonies-to take a fatal rooftop plunge. "We did a crude test early on with a boom arm holding a stand-in for the Ice Princess, myself and the camera above the miniature in the background," said Garry Waller. "From that we saw that we could both light and hold onto her for the shot. So we rigged a crane for Cristi Conaway to lay down in. I was literally straddling her from above with a handheld Vis- tavision camera as the crane boomed down into the set. I went with her, filming at six frames per second. We used an air ram that forced air up from below and made her hair fluff straight up as if she was falling. We had to be careful not to let any of her shadow cross the miniature structures. In fact, the final shot was designed as if she was falling out of the darkness and into the lights of the plaza below. So it was lit darker at the top. As she dropped from the building, a lighting dimmer made it brighter the further she fell."

A different camera look-one consistent with the wide shots used for the above-the-rooftop action-was required for the forced perspective over-the-shoulder shot of Batman. A bat- suited stuntman was set in a lift that took him twenty feet in the air, just above the thicket of Gotham Plaza miniatures. "There was a rail and he'd lean over and look down, cocking his head to get just the right eye-line for surveying the Plaza," Waller ex- plained. "We set him up based on the initial tests we had done with the Ice Princess forced perspective shot. Based on that shot, we knew that we could hold depth of field. We could look through the camera and tell whether it was going to work or not. We'd set him up while looking at a video playback to see how he was looking in relation to the miniatures."

It was not until the shot was cut into the film that Mike Fink realized the action would work much more effectively if the shot was printed in reverse. "John Bruno picked the most likely take out of twenty-five or so- and Boss' optical department did a reverse print reduction," said Fink, "which proved to be a great improvement over the original shot. It was another case of sub- tlety carrying the day."

A highlight of the rooftop action was a shot in which Batman's cape opens to full wingspan and is pressed into service as a hang glider. As the bats are released from the Christmas tree, the Dark Knight unfurls his cape, turns and leaps from the rooftop, swoop- ing down over the terrified crowd in Gotham Plaza. Rather than go through the arduous task of rigging a live person and flying him through the Stage 16 set, the production called upon Boss to create a flying Batman puppet that could be shot bluescreen and composited over the plaza footage. Laine Liska sculpted the puppet, while Craig Talmy worked on the armatures. "The puppet was made of a rubberized fabric laid into a hollow form put over the armature," said Liska, "with the glove, boots and head done separately. It was suspended on wires with two rods coming out the feet, some two-and-a-half feet out the bottom." The body armature created by Talmy was steel and lead with articulated knee and elbow joints. The weight of the figure was important to the rigging. "Our rigging system required the figure to be heavy so it wouldn't wiggle when it was puppeteered," Talmy noted. "As a hand-rod puppet, it was very susceptible to jiggling. The rods were the only way of controlling the puppet while it was on its rig."

Because the puppet was to be hand-controlled with rods, there was concern that it would not synchronize exactly with the live-action background plates. In order to retain the superior animation achieved with hand-controlled puppeteering, while at the same time ensure the precise synchronization of motion control, a combination of the two techniques was employed. "I came up with the idea of hanging the puppet on pulleys from the ceiling to motion control commands on a turntable," said Talmy. "By rigging the puppet with wires through its chest and connecting it to a pulley above and a pulley below, it could be tightened down so there was no forgiveness at all in those wires. Also, by suspending it by the pulley, we wouldn't have to fight the weight. And we wouldn't have to worry about what angle we were supposed to be in at what time because that would be done by the motion control computer."

The rig itself was the stuff of backyard effects magic, as sembled in a down-and-dirty guerrilla effects fashion with parts from a bicycle shop. A bike wheel and ball bearing rig was at tached to a ceiling beam of a Boss shooting stage and connected to a rotating platform below. Perched on the platform, Talmy could work a pulley wheel to give pitch and banking motions to the puppet, while Laine Liska provided the performance by work- ing the puppet rods as puppeteer Doug Miller manipulated the collapsible wings. The platform was set between a bluescreen wall and the intersecting motion control track where Garry Waller could move in with his motion control camera. "The plat- form we sat on to manipulate the puppet was sturdy steel and wood with a circumference of six feet," Talmy noted. "With a two-hundred-to-one gear reduction inside, the motor could spin at two hundred revolutions and we'd only get one revolution out of the turntable and a sense of articulation. As the camera came at us with its computer-driven move, the turntable would start to turn. Garry let the computer control it, just took it frame by frame on the background plates and positioned us frame by frame to match the background plates."

Finale

crane up

Just as in the first film, Batman Returns would end with a signature crane-up through the vertical levels of Gotham City to reveal the batsignal triumphantly emblazoned on a cloud. To create the shot, Matte World crafted a multiplane miniature setup that was filmed horizontally along a forty-foot motion con- trol track. The final crane-up would be a complex layering of live-action, model buildings and painting elements. "We started the visualization process by doing a smaller version on video with the different planes cut out of foamcore," Craig Barron de- scribed. "The test allowed us to show Tim Burton the shifting perspective and overall distance traveled. We then just scaled that up, multiplied by the factor needed to keep all the different planes in focus."

The journey skyward would begin with a live-action plate of Bruce Wayne's black Rolls Royce driving down a Gotham street, which was shot by Matte World on the Warner Brothers backlot. As the car drove down the street on the rear projection screen, the horizontal motion control camera would move left along the horizontal multiplane set with an eighth-scale miniature al- ley foreground complete with steam pipes and trusses, mid- ground seventy-second-scale buildings and a matte painting of the city background. The batsignal in the night sky was pro- jected against fiberfill clouds on background scrims. "The feel- ing of the shot is even more expansive than a crane-up since, in reality, there aren't cranes that go up more than sixty feet in the air," artist Chris Evans noted. "It's more like you're on a little helicopter and you're lifting off from a second story window that the car drives under and you fly straight up into the Gotham sky. The start of the shot transitions from live-action to the paint- ing like bas-relief to low-relief, something in between three- dimensional and two-dimensional. There's a fire escape in front that is a miniature that actually overlaps both the bottom plate and painting. When the camera moves up you see parallax be- tween the plate and painting and the miniature, so the whole thing is tied together with different perspective tricks. The mi- niatures were all lined up in such a way that you wouldn't notice the lack of perspective shift between the three-dimensional fore- ground and the two-dimensional midground."

"There wouldn't have been any change in perspective if we had just projected the live-action plate onto a matte painting and craned up a painting that was obviously a two-dimensional piece of artwork," Barron added. "So what we were doing was fooling the eye by adding miniature pieces in front and behind the painting plane to give you the visual cues that you're actu- ally moving through this big cityscape."

Matte World's in-camera effects placed particular demands on the motion control camera operatives. "One of the things that our camera assistant Rich McKay had to do that was unusu- ally demanding," said Barron, "was to keep track of all the latent image film we used for our multiple camera exposures to main- tain the shots on the original negative for first generation qual- ity. By working on the original negative, our shots would cut very cleanly with the production footage.

catwoman

The crane-up was originally slated as the final shot of the film, until preview audiences who saw an early cut expressed con- cerns about the fate of the Catwoman. Although a suggestive shot of the Catwoman's shadow catching Batman's attention as he drives away from Gotham had been included, the original ending had left it ambiguous as to whether Selina Kyle had sur- vived the electrical explosion in the Penguin's lair. In the last week of May, the production decided to devise a new closing shot with the Catwoman gazing up at the batsignal. "I thought the shadow of the Catwoman that Bruce sees as they're driving past the alley was fine," noted Mike Fink, "and so did everybody who made the movie - including Tim. But they kept getting cards back from the test screenings asking about whether Cat- woman had survived or not. Apparently, the shadow wasn't clear enough. Well, it was May 22. We had finished the show, and I got a call from Larry Franco, the producer, telling me not to pack up. Tim, Larry and I spent Memorial Day weekend trying to nail down what we were going to do. We ended up shooting a double of Catwoman in front of a bluescreen. Then we composited that bluescreen element into the foreground of the original Matte World crane-up shot."

Penguin death

In the final, deadly encounter, the Penguin releases bats to attack Batman - but the screeching creatures turn on the bird- man instead, forcing the terrified Penguin to crash through a skylight into the waters of Arctic World below. For the bat at- tack, Danny DeVito had to act in response to invisible attackers, with Video Image animator Andy Kopra designing his CG bats to interact with the live-action plates. "Getting the bats to attack people was challenging," said Kopra, "because I had to make something that essentially had its own behavior work with an actor's reactions. I wasn't really controlling the individual bats; I was tuning their simulation values until their behavior seemed to match the way the actor was behaving. Initially, the bats were rather mosquito-like, and didn't move very fast. We struggled with their size, as well as their speed. The size of the bats was finally exaggerated, which made them seem more threatening and look as if they were really attacking the Penguin."

Staggering from the bat attack, the Penguin falls through the skylight just as the lair begins to rock with the concussive ef- fects of the rain of missiles. A Penguin-suited stuntman was called upon to crash through breakaway glass and freefall forty feet to the watery set below. With solid set pieces close at hand, and the water a relatively shallow fourteen feet, the stunt was a nerve-wracking one for those involved. "The skylight was steel," Chuck Gaspar noted, "and one portion of it had real tempered glass, along with a section done in sheet lead and breakaway glass for the stuntman to fall through. It was a really small area that he had to hit. It was also tricky because he couldn't see his target once the glass was installed. He had to calculate his jump before we put in the breakaway glass. We ran several tests, put the glass in, and did the jump. It was a little spooky, but there were no problems."

The special effects crew also had to orchestrate the fiery de- struction of the lair as the errant missiles impact upon it. A struc- ture was built high above the set-out of camera range - from which to deploy flaming debris. "We had a double-decker house up there, all fireproofed," Gaspar explained. "We'd light debris on fire, and guys in fire suits would just shovel it down a big chute through the skylight. The fire department wouldn't allow us to use propane; so we had to go to methane gas, which is hard to find in pressurized form. We took that methane gas up to the grid and had a winch and fire bars set up. The bottom part of the double-decker had windows down at the level of the sky- light, so the camera angle looking up would see the fire flicker through the windows."

Penguins

fake dummy penguins

The Penguin addresses his troops - computer generated penguins created by Boss Film using the same flocking program employed by Video Image for the computer generated bats./One of the major sequences utilizing digital penguins was the march on Gotham Plaza. Once the basic walk cycle and body movements were orchestrated, a wire-frame penguin was modeled in the computer, then wrapped with texture and color to create a fully rendered figure. While live or puppet penguins were used for closer shots, long shots of the entire penguin army were achieved by the Boss digital team. Converging on Gotham Plaza to unleash their weaponry, the penguins suddenly reverse direction and turn back toward Arctic World when Batman jams their commander-in-chief's control frequency.

Live penguins - which were generally employed in wide shots-mingled on the island with mechanical puppets and penguin-suited actors, providing a layering of different pen- guin types and sizes to represent the assemblage. While the live birds moved of their own free will, the penguin puppets were placed strategically for each particular shot. "We'd take foam dummy penguins," Craig Caton recalled, "place them on the set using wooden dowels, and then get Tim Burton's approval on their placement. Once he approved the setup, we'd take the dum- mies out and drill holes, mount the puppets, and stick all the cables and cable controllers underneath the set. The first day it took four to five hours to place all thirty puppets. By the third day we got it down to an hour and ten minutes." In some cases, the puppets were placed specifically to create the illusion of a greater penguin population than actually existed. "If there was a dialogue shot with DeVito head on, we'd dress all thirty of our puppets behind him. Then, when they'd turn around to shoot Danny's POV, we'd take all the puppets and dress them in front of him-so you'd get the impression you were seeing sixty puppets even though there were only thirty."

Although the majority of the shots would require the puppet- eers to be positioned underneath the island stage, there were some nine isolated shots at the edges of the island where the animators had to be on the surface. Deviating from the tradi- tional black suits and hoods usually worn by puppeteers, the penguin operators had to wear white in order to blend into the ice and snowdrift look of Arctic World. The surface puppeteers, and the cables connecting them to their puppets, were further hidden using bushes and other camouflage. "Most of the pup- peteering involved paying attention to Danny DeVito, operating the puppet necks to follow his eye-line and reacting to things," Caton explained. "We operated them through fifteen-foot-long cable controls."

For shots operated from underneath the island, holes were drilled in the set floor and cables run through to the puppeteers below. The logistics of working underneath the Arctic World is- land, in a space that was only four feet high, presented daunting challenges to the Winston puppeteering corps. "We usually had forty-sometimes as many as fifty-puppeteers at any one time underneath the island," said Caton, "so there was a lot of cramping and crawling underneath. There was three feet of water around the island and it leaked like a sieve even though pumps were going twenty-four hours a day to keep the water out. It was really a logistical problem, just fighting the water with all of our electronic components and cable controllers."

"One of the big problems was when we had several puppets all clustered together in one area," Richard Landon observed. "The cables went down through the holes in the set and then we had to spread out. But the fifteen-foot length of cable was not a variable length-we had a fifteen-foot umbilical and that was it. So everyone had to be in that fifteen-foot radius. We stacked people on top of each other as best as we could. It was elbow to elbow under the set - especially when we had more than a cou- ple of puppets working."

Puppeteers were also required to animate the servo-actuated faces and wings of the larger penguins, with the actors inside the suits providing the basic body movements. Performing in the suits was no lark. "The little people went through a lot," Schoneberg noted. "They had no use of their arms because their arms were down at their sides in the suit-although there were handles they could hold onto to relieve some of the weight on their shoulders. We had a couple instances-fortunately not at all dangerous-where one of the little people fell over in a cos- tume. For them, I'm sure it was horrifying because they couldn't break their falls - they were like big bowling pins."

The elder penguin suit construction, with an entrance point at the top where the headpiece could be pulled back, required the crew to literally lift the actors into costume. "We tried to come up with some classy way of getting them in and decided that the best way to do it was just to pick 'em up and stick them in the suits," Schoneberg explained. "Most of the actors were only fifty or sixty pounds, so it wasn't a gigantic chore. The fab- ric opened on a velcro closure in the back of the suit along the lines of the shoulder blades. We'd peel that up and then the whole head and neck section of the suit would swing forward, allowing access to the inside. With the penguin head flipped for- ward and the little person inside the suit, it was a lot like some- body wearing a barrel. Shoulder straps and other things were also in the suit to make it as comfortable as possible. The suits did have plenty of air in them because the fabric was pretty po- rous, with vent holes through the vacuform shell that allowed ventilation. We'd wait until the production was done rehearsing or lighting and then we'd dress them up for camera. We'd put the heads over the little people, close the velcro seal on the fab- ric in back, and do a final brush-down of the fur. The camera would roll for forty-five minutes maximum and then we'd take them out for a breather."

With most of the Arctic World scenes populated by three dif- ferent species of live penguins, little people in suits and puppets all blended together, it became difficult to distinguish the real birds from puppets. "There was one shot," Schoneberg recalled, "where Tim was watching the monitor and he kept pointing out this one penguin, saying: 'Cut! Cut! Cut! That penguin's not mov- ing!' He thought it was a puppet. So we tracked it down and it turned out to be a real penguin. I said, 'Tim, there's nothing we can do about that one!' A lot of times when we were watching dailies, we'd see Danny and a penguin interacting and we'd ask ourselves: 'Is that penguin one of ours or is that real?""'

penguins diving scene

Exposed for the criminal that he is, the Penguin retreats to his subterranean lair where he rallies his penguin army for an all-out rocket assault on the citizens of Gotham. Augmenting some live
penguins were thirty puppet penguins created by Stan Winston Studio. / Members of the Winston team administer finishing touches to the puppets. Vacuformed bodies and fiberglass underskulls were covered with dyed fur cloth, while colored markers were used to create subtle gradations for the penguin markings. / 
Mechanical department coordinator Craig Caton assembles one of the puppet heads. Nearly two hundred mechanical parts were required for each of the animatronic figures. / Crew member Kenji Kurata works on one of the partially completed puppets. / Larger penguins - with radio control capabilities - were constructed as 
suits that could be worn by little people. Jeff Periera drills ventilation holes into one of the rigid torsos.

The scene of the Penguin making his rousing speech would include a Busby Berkeley-inspired shot of the penguins diving into the frigid waters of Arctic World. The effect, originally con- ceived as a live penguin stunt, turned into a basic logistical nightmare. "The day had arrived when the Penguin is speaking to this stadium full of penguins, urging them on to attack Go- tham City- and the penguins wouldn't dive into the water," John Bruno revealed. "Everybody had assumed that the pen- guins would just dive into the water from this two-and-a-half- foot platform. They had the shot all staged up and ready to go and the penguins wouldn't dive. We were then told by the pen- guin wrangler that penguins won't dive from a height of more than six inches. So Tim asked if we could make CG penguins dive into the water. It was Friday, so we had the weekend to fig- ure it out. Working with Chuck Gaspar's effects team, we placed air mortars in the water and set them off in succession to simu- late a Busby Berkeley water dive, and placed Stan Winston's puppets in the foreground. When that background plate was ap- proved, Mauro Maressa did an animated pencil test which was subsequently used as a guide by Andy White when animating the CG penguins." To enhance the suggestion of penguins swim- ming beneath the surface, churning effects were later animated by Available Light and composited into another shot looking down on the water.

penguins/missiles/gotham plaza set

Although the live penguins shamed the memory of Busby Berkeley, the waddling birds were up to the task of carrying their strapped-on missile payloads for the march on Gotham Plaza- which was fortunate, since the Stage 16 Gotham Plaza set had not been rigged to facilitate the Winston puppets. The puppets were utilized, however, and shot elsewhere as a separate element composited into wide shots of the march on Gotham Plaza. "There was not a cost-effective way to do puppets on Stage 16," Schoneberg said. "They would have had to basically demolish the set to provide us with puppeteering slots in the floor. They decided it would be easier for them to use the real penguins in the middleground, computer graphics penguins in the back- ground, and have a foreground element of the puppets."

march

When the penguins arrive at Gotham Plaza, ready to fire the deadly missiles strapped to their backs, Batman jams their com- mand frequency, causing the birds to turn around and head back to the zoo. Like the march on Gotham Plaza, the turnaround shot required help from the Boss computer graphics department. "There was a high-angle CG shot of the penguins entering the plaza," said Fink, "looking down from the Shreck building. We were about to complete the shot when it was decided to expand this five-second high-angle shot to three shots. This was in March-which is pretty late in the day when you're doing com- puter graphics. So the CG requirement went from five seconds of rendering to about fourteen seconds, with the penguins not only walking in and coming to a stop, but turning around one hundred eighty degrees and walking out when Batman jams the signal. Boss deserves a lot of credit for making a real rush and delivering the shots, without compromising quality."

rocket launch

In an ironic twist- for the Penguin, at least the witless, waddling army releases its payload in the direction of the old zoo. Because of the danger inherent in the rocket launches, nei- ther live penguins nor live puppeteers were in the vicinity of the pyrotechnic display. The establishing shots of the penguins fir- ing off missiles required the puppets to be mounted in place, with Gaspar's crew rigging monofilament lines behind all thirty puppets armed with two missiles apiece. The sixty rockets were released in waves of twenty and launched to the soundstage roof twenty to thirty feet above - even though the missiles were out of frame at approximately fifteen feet. "For the rocket launch scenes," Caton explained, "we fastened stands into the snow and then we attached the penguins to the stands. The puppeteers were connected to the puppets with their cable controllers and remote control and they were dressed into snow banks and gul- leys. All the rockets were on guide wires that reached up into the ceiling of the stage. One problem that arose was that they were firing two salvos of rockets per take and the first salvo of rockets would be spent and falling back along the wires as the second wave was going by. So we had people stationed up on catwalks to catch and hold the rockets as they came up. The rockets themselves weren't hot so the crew could just hold them with their bare hands."

Shots of the missiles exploding would be photographed at The Chandler Group's shooting stage utilizing the old zoo mini- ature. Because of the fire danger, Stetson Visual Services had fashioned the zoo grounds from a special fire-retardant urethane spray foam manufactured by Foam-Tec. "Regular foam burns," said Stetson co-owner Robert Spurlock, "and when it burns, it puts out cyanide gas. Foam-Tec's owner, John Blom, represents his product as the only fire-rated foam in the industry. The stuff will not sustain a flame. The old zoo grounds were constructed mainly from chicken wire covered with paper that they then over- sprayed with this foam, a couple of inches thick so that it had some strength to it."

Before model construction for the sequence had begun, Stet- son and Don Baker of The Chandler Group had engaged in sev- eral in-depth discussions with Mike Fink regarding the look and dynamics of the explosions. Thaine Morris was also brought in to consult in the development of the pyrotechnics. For a test on a stage in Glendale, Stetson Visual chief modelmaker Ian Hunter and crew built a set. The Chandler Group shot the tests, while Robert Spurlock and Thaine Morris did the pyro rigging and op-eration. "After Mike Fink reviewed the resulting test footage with Tim Burton, he came back with Tim's ultimate compliment to a miniatures crew: 'What location did you use to shoot this?' That early test demonstrated that the miniature effects could be achieved as complete, in-camera photography. The rocket smoke trails, the smoke and flame of the explosions, the spray of snow and debris from the air mortars were comprehensive enough visually so that optical enhancement would not be re- quired. Also, the camera speed and light output of the pyro were within the range of the capabilities for ambient stage lighting. This was a big bonus because it increased Chandler's ability to provide multiple camera angles and additional coverage."

When it became evident that Thaine Morris would be unavail- able for the actual effects shoot, Spurlock brought in Joseph Viskocil to assist in a second test and, subsequently, to effect the miniature explosions. "Thaine was able to show Joe the ap- proach he was using for the explosions," Spurlock recalled. "Joe brought a lot of experience and know-how to the job, so we knew he could quickly match stride with our work to date on the proj- ect, with no lost time. Together with effects specialists Roy Goode and Gary King, and with support from Ian Hunter and miniatures specialists Jim McGeachy and Ron Gress, we rigged, dressed and operated the physical and pyrotechnic miniature effects over about a one-week shooting schedule."

The pyro work required dozens of rockets to criss-cross the old zoo, exploding pavilions, including the Arctic World pavilion where Batman and Penguin would meet for their final battle in the lair below. "The whole trick to miniature pyrotechnics is to make the small look big," Viskocil explained. "A lot of it has to do with camera speeds and lenses, how fast you're shooting it, and what the object you're blasting is made of. My major concern with this film was that since we had a deep set that would be exploding all over the place, the stuff in the foreground had to be larger than the background to give it scale." To represent the penguin missiles, the pyro team employed Estes model rocket engines. "When I was a kid I used to send these rockets up into space," Viskocil related. "They're small only about an inch-and-a-half long by a half-inch-but they have a lot of power and a scaled smoke to them." The Estes rockets had been modified by Spurlock and Morris to improve their performance. "We bored out the chokes on all of them to slow their velocity and increase their smoke and flame rate," noted Spurlock. "We also tried adding little fins for directional control, but found that with the wire guidance they weren't needed. We painted them all to match the penguin rockets seen in the film, just in case one was visible in frame."

By attaching each rocket to its own guide wire, Spurlock, Vis- kocil and three other technicians could string the line to the trip switch and explosive charge at its designated point. The wire was not only strong enough for the job, but invisible on film. "The wires worked out perfectly," Viskocil recalled, "but there were a few times when one of the rockets would start off and burn through the wire and break off." These little rockets have an engine in the back that creates a fire when initially ig- nited, so there's a second where the blast can singe the wire. The trick was to prevent that; so we put aluminum foil baffles right up against the rocket's initial starting point to prevent it from burning through. Once the rocket was on its way, it didn't have time to burn the wire."

Storyboards for the sequence called for the pavilions of the old zoo panorama to be "laid to waste in a symphony of fire- balls." To accommodate the action, some of the riggings had as many as thirty separate rockets going off in one shot, in path- ways determined by Spurlock and company with direction from Mike Fink. "We had rockets going from top of frame, bottom, underneath the camera, all hitting the pavilions at different an- gles," said Viskocil. "Since the camera was shooting at around one hundred twenty frames per second we couldn't release all those rockets by eye. The ignition was patched into a timing sequencer device so we could choreograph the rockets. The real trick to this whole thing was repeatability. Once we knew when something was going to go off, we could repeat it as many times as we wanted at exactly the same time. We had everything timed down to a thousandth-of-a-second on some of them. We ran wires from the board to squibs- little match heads that cre- ated the spark that, in turn, ignited the rockets." Once the rockets were blasting along the wires to their targets, a fool- proof rigging was devised by Spurlock to halt the speeding mis- siles. "These rockets had something like a ten-second burn, so when they reached their targets they would still be burning. We caught the rockets in some cylinders underneath the model. The cylinders had an iris effect with the trip switch in front; so once the rocket tripped the switch, the rocket would go into the cyl- inder and stop right there- it couldn't possibly come out."

The explosive charges ran the gamut from black powder and gasoline to primer cord and bullet hits. In some cases, the model pavilions required additional rigging for the full collapse fol- lowing the initial explosion. "Some of the pavilions were actu- ally pulled down faster than gravity would, by means of a cable system rigged under the table," Spurlock said. "The cables went to bungees connected to the pyro trips. For example, the Arach- nosphere had a rocket come in and hit near one of the pavilion's legs that were spindly and rusted and disintegrating. The rocket tripped the switch that set off the explosion which released a tightly bound bungee cord that pulled some cables at the same moment, bringing the model down faster than it could have fallen on its own. Since we were filming at one hundred twenty frames per second it looked like it was just falling at normal speed. A lot of times when you shoot things at overspeed, espe- cially with miniatures, you have to make them act faster than they normally would because you're trying to get a sense of scal- ing and if you don't it takes too long for everything to happen. Our rocket hits happened in real time within a second and a half, but on screen it was seven and a half seconds." The spider- like Arachnosphere was one of many pavilions rigged to sustain a pyro hit and be reassembled for another take. "One half of the

Arachnosphere was steel framed with a plaster shell on the out- side and the other half was soft aluminum frame with the same plaster shell," said crew chief lan Hunter. "The cable and bungee system pulled it down onto the table on cue and that crushed the aluminum side but left the steel side intact. We could then pull it back up and get ready for take two by putting on a new set of plaster skins and aluminum that just had to be tightened down by screws."

penguin speech to penguins

Swooping down into the plaza, the Dark Knight stakes his claim to Gotham by exposing the Penguin as a criminal. Having made a vain stab at legitimacy with his run for mayor, the Pen- guin is now forced back to his subterranean kingdom where he plots revenge with his army of penguins. The surreal bird horde would be realized by an artful mixing of Boss computer gener- ated birds, puppet penguins created by Stan Winston Studio and three species of living penguins.

The computer generated penguins produced by digital effects supervisor Jim Rygiel and his team would be used primarily as background elements and for crowd scene effect. For the Boss CG department, the major challenge of the work was seamlessly blending the digital penguins with the real birds. "To create the penguins, we started with an Eadweard Muybridge videotaping session using real penguins walking on gridded backdrops here at Boss," John Bruno explained. "After noting their movements, we worked with a bird flocking program that was basically the same one used for the CG bats." Andrea Losch was responsible for creating the initial walk cycles, while the basic flocking pro- gram was customized for each scene by Paul Ashdown. The next task was to model a realistic looking penguin in the computer. "In CG, we created a wire-frame penguin model and did some interesting business with it, making it walk around and bob its head. From that point, we wrapped color and a surface around the wire-frame form. Each penguin we created had its own pro- grammed path and stopped, started, turned left or right based on that program."

Mike Fink was more than impressed with the computer gen- erated penguins. "We could have gotten much closer to them, they were so believable and the animation was so close to what the real penguins did. Each penguin was animated for head, body and flipper movement, and speed of walk - all random movement from one penguin to the next. One of the difficulties in creating the penguins was that, unlike the bats which had limited dimensional restrictions, the penguins had to be rooted to the ground. So we had the randomness of the Boids flocking program, but with restrictions imposed on it." Since real penguins were sometimes difficult to direct - the original bird brains, according to one observer - it was evi- dent that the Stan Winston puppet penguins would be the most controllable element of Burton's wild kingdom. The mechanized penguins would be particularly vital for the climax of the film in which the penguin army marches on Gotham and launches pay- loads of rockets strapped to their backs - a stunt too danger- ous for real penguins and too time consuming to construct in the digital environment. The order form for Winston's puppet makers called for thirty mechanical penguins as well as six ar- ticulated puppet suits for the omniscient elder penguins that would be played by little people. As with their digital counter- parts, the puppet penguins would have to blend in with the live penguins. "For the animatronic puppets, we had to duplicate three different kinds of penguins," Stan Winston noted. "We pro- duced ten puppets for each of three penguin species: eighteen- inch blackfoot penguins, and then thirty-two and forty-inch king and emperor penguins."

While the art department oversaw the basic design and visual aesthetics of the puppet penguins, Richard Landon and Craig Caton coordinated their construction in the mechanical depart- ment. "The three different sizes of the articulate puppets were sculpted over a sculpting armature," explained Landon. "The art department varied the sculpting a bit so they wouldn't look iden- tical to each other, although we used the same vacuform shells for all of them. Once we got a finished mold, we went back into the negative of the mold and laid in our thickness of clay and poured out the solid plaster positive in two halves that had any- where from a quarter-inch to an eighth-inch gradation. We sent those to a vacuforming company that would then fill those va- cuform cores. We brought them back to the shop, cut them in half and seamed them together, covering the bodies with fur cloth and segmenting the cores as necessary. The necks were slid into a series of half-inch bands that were then tied back together with elastic; so as the head bobbed it would expand and contract." The art department also made fiberglass under- skulls, the beaks, and all the sub-assemblies before turning the puppets over to the mechanical shop. Some license was taken in the penguin design, such as the furrowing of brows on select puppets. "There were furrows on the brows specifically for the elder penguins and others that were designated for closeups," said art department coordinator Andy Schoneberg. "Real penguins don't have furrows; but the elder penguins were supposed to be a little more intelligent, so we reflected that by giving them more expressive abilities. We also had to modify real penguin anatomy to make the suits fit over the actors. Little people are proportioned so that their heads are roughly the same size as ours, even though they're about half our height; so it's not a true proportional thing. So there were a lot of drawings and seat-of-the-pants sculpting and judgment calls between us and the mechanical shop to make sure there was clearance between the head and the outside of the costume. It is actually more complex to make a suit for a person than it is to build a puppet."

Another modification was the use of fur, rather than the feath- ers that constitute a real penguin coat. "There was no way to do the suits with feathers and have them look right," Schoneberg noted. "They would have looked ratty. The fur actually ended up looking more like penguin feathers." While the sculpting and vacuforming phase was going on, fabric specialist Karen Mason spent about two months researching materials with Natural Hair Technologies before coming up with a fake fur that meshed a variety of fur styles and weaves. "There were multiple grades of fur woven into the same fabric," explained Landon, "so it had different densities at tips and base. The fur came in white, and we had to have it custom dyed for the black areas. We also needed different thicknesses of fur-shorter fur across the head, longer across the back. The foam latex portions of the face were sprayed with a light adhesive and then flocked with pieces of fur." The subtle blending of coloring was another important detail. "We used colored markers to create the yellow and rouge tones of the head in a really slow gradation. If we had just put in yellow fur and orange fur, there'd have been a sharp line and it would have looked terrible - like a dime store display." Each of the thirty animatronic puppet penguins required some one hundred ninety-four mechanical parts-nearly six thousand for the lot. Ten cables per penguin were also required for operation. "Each of the penguins was equipped with two joy- stick controllers," Schoneberg explained. "One controlled the head movements, the other controlled the neck movements. There was also a thumb switch on one of the controllers that made the neck stretch up and down-which we felt was pretty important because real penguins do that stretching movement a lot with their heads. Then there were two radio controls for various functions for each puppet. One of the radio controllers worked head functions, eyes and beaks; the other controlled both left and right wing movements. The remote control stuff was basically broken down the same way for the suits, although the little people provided all the gross movements."

Technology

Batmobile

• famed goahm backlot set at pinewood dismanteld and two batmobile prototypes in storage were called home

Roaring out of the batcave to Gotham behind the wheel of his batmobile, the Dark Knight could rest easy in the knowledge that his vehicle boasted new superfeatures. Included among them was the capacity to transform into a batmissile which would take much of the batmobile action squarely into the vis- ual effects realm. A sophisticated, computer generated shield- ing effect, rather than the cruder cel animation of the first film, would be another batmobile improvement.

Live-action shots of the batmobile would utilize the two pro- totype cars from the original film, plus a third one built for the new production. With their curved fiberglass shells built over customized chassis, the prototype cars used a built-in twelve- volt electrical system to power the effects. But for Batman Re- turns, Chuck Gaspar and his crew would have to retool the orig- inal vehicles to get them up to speed-literally-for the new production. "The two cars had been in England this whole time and were pretty wrecked," Gaspar explained, "so we had a big problem trying to rewire and add all our apparatus. We had the suspension and transmission changed, the engine tuned up. It made the cars a whole lot quicker. The batmobile was going to be on Stage 16 most of the time, so it wouldn't be able to get to speed unless we changed all the gear reductions. We jam-packed that thing so full of equipment it was like a nightmare inside. We had schematics drawn up as we went along; and even then we had problems because things would be changed during pro- duction from the first and second unit. Somebody might change the color of a wire and that would throw us off."

rocket

Integral to the new batmobile look would be the rocket motor exhaust effect. "Tim was not completely happy with the exhaust effect they had done in England," Gaspar noted. "He wanted to intensify it, give it a violent jet aircraft look. For the exhaust flame, we used a kerosene heating element. There were six jets inside the rocket motor itself which atomized the kerosene; and when that was ignited, it created a red ball of fire coming out the back. We'd fill this little tank up with map gas and actually explode that out the back of the engine; so when it started up, it threw out a red ball of fire. When we were testing, we'd feed more air into the fire to get a hotter, faster flame. During a couple of our tests in the shop, it got so hot the heat transferred to the fiberglass body and scorched the batmobile. To prevent that, we put a heat reducting material inside and around the engine itself and then on top of the fiberglass." Ten batteries were required inside the car to operate the various effects mechanisms. To get maximum power, inverters were used to jack the electric charge to one hundred ten volts. "The original twelve volts weren't pow- erful enough to do what we wanted. We needed something with a lot of meat to it."

hydraulic stamp

In one sequence, Batman performs an evasive counter- attack maneuver using a special hydraulic device which drops from below the Batmobile chassis, hits the ground to hold the car in place for a hundred-eighty-degree turn, and blasts a pair of Red Triangle crazies with exhaust flame. To get the batmobile to turn in place, Gaspar and his crew rigged a pedestal three feet in diameter to be pushed down hydraulically from the bottom of the car, allowing the batmobile to rise up. There was a cut, the car was turned and then dropped back to the ground. Gaspar worked with the stunt performers to prepare them for the fol- lowing burn shot. "We caught the guys on fire with the rocket motor flame. We just put flammable rubber cement over their clown suits. The stuntmen had pyrex glass lenses over the top of their masks so we could do a full body burn and not hurt them at all. We had a burn time of thirty to forty-five seconds; then we had to get them out and extinguish the flames with CO2."

the batshield

A section of shield covering the batmobile wheel hub employed an irising effect. Video Image generated ten cloaking shots altogether. The completed computer graphics imagery was digitally composited with live-action plates of the batmobile and then recorded on film.

While the first film had relied on simple cel animation to realize the protective shield, the sequel would feature a sophisticated, computer generated cloaking effect produced by Video Image Associates. Starting with reference photographs of the batmobile, computer graphics technicians used the Alias software system, an industrial design tool, to model the shield in the digital environment. Working at a monitor, animator Joseph Goldstone renders a section of the batmobile shield

The cloaking effect was provided by computer graphics artists at Video Image and was one of the prime visual twists on the updated batmobile. Tim Burton had been dissatisfied with the 'magical' quality of the animated cloaking effect featured in the first film, and for Batman Returns had requested a more reality-based, mechanical look.

About ten computer graphics shots were required for the cloaking and uncloaking scenes in the film. As conceived, the cloak was a heavy, high-tension steel shield hidden within the body of the car that could iris out, completely covering the ve- hicle. However, the design of the batmobile did not lend itself to the notion of such a hidden shield. The CG team of Joseph Goldstone and Stanley Liu not only had to use their Alias soft- ware system to design a mechanical-looking cloak, but also had to provide logical moves for the emergence of the cloak parts from hidden sources within the car. "We had to deal with the fact that it was physically impossible for a cloak to come out of the batmobile," explained Liu, who has a background in auto- motive design. "We had to invent a lot of new ways for these shield pieces to emerge. We tried to make it look believable and not like the cloak magically comes out of nowhere."

Goldstone and Liu found that a separate support structure was also needed to give mechanistic logic to the effect of the shielding spinning into place. "This support structure wasn't on the real batmobile, of course," Liu observed, "it was there solely to help us make the cloaking plausible. In the case of the wheel cover, segments of the iris would otherwise appear to be floating in the air. What we did was invent mechanisms that would make the iris motion believable from the angle of the shot. The cloak was actually quite a complex shape-a series of compound corners and radii - and the Alias software gave us the ability to create that. The software is an interactive industrial design tool, so it's meant to be used to design workable models. We basically took bits and pieces, building here and there, almost like a model kit."

For the Video Image crew to be able to construct a cloak in the digital environment, on-set reflection map photography had to be taken from the viewpoint of the actual batmobile in all six directions-front, back, left, right, up, down. A full-scale fiber- glass cloak built early in the production (and used in one live- action shot) also provided reference for constructing the cloak in the digital environment. "We try to model reality as much as we can," said Goldstone. "We spent basically two nights shoot- ing the environment maps and recording the reflections on the car. The director would call out a print take, and we would jump in and do our batmobile measurements. We'd measure where the camera and the car were relative to references that we drew up: the straight sidewalk edge, reference cracks in the sidewalk, and so on. Then, to help us lock things in, we had certain desig- nated spots on the batmobile that we used as references, such as the hubcaps, the center of the top canopy, the little grill on the front, the center of the nose cone and the top back tips of the fins. On a printed take, we'd attach tiny lights to those refer- ence points and have them roll a few feet before moving the camera for the next take. Later we'd scan and use this 'reference take' for 3-D lineup. For highlights and reflections, we would normally take stuff from the environment, the scanned-in imag- ery. Other times the environment just wasn't strong enough and we'd have to paint in special reflection maps. We used the Sym- bolics XL-1200 paint system to prepare these maps and then used software written by Andy Kopra to convert the map from Symbolics format into something that the Alias system could handle." The scanning of the interpositive containing the live- action material, digital compositing of the rendered cloak and the scanned IP, and film recording of the digital composite rep- resented the final steps in completing the ten shots.

hacked batmobile

"All the cars were cabled to pull them back," noted Mike Fink, "and so on the set there was a forest of cables coming down which Pa- cific Data Images removed digitally. Luckily, we had a lot of things going for us-the scene was darkly lit and the back- ground behind the wires was kind of amorphous."

batmissile

Framed for murder and on the run from police, Batman outmaneuvers his pursuers by transforming the batmobile into a batmissile a near- cylindrical rocket machine. 4-Ward Productions created the effect, shooting the various stages of the conversion from batmobile to batmissile in miniature. An initial shot, showing center sections of the car blowing off and dropping onto the pavement, was filmed on a quarter-scale street set, as was a later shot of the batmissile rounding a comer. Doug Moore and Pat Denver finish painting and detailing the most elaborate of the street models.

Suddenly, the batmobile begins to shed its mechanical skin, turning into the sleek, rocketing batmissile, which easily passes through the narrow alley, leaving the pursuing cop cars to crash in its wake. "It's the kind of gag you'd see in a Road Runner cartoon," observed Bob Skotak, whose 4-Ward Productions cre- ated the missile metamorphosis. The sequence would be accom- plished in four-perf using quarter-scale batmobile sections for the filming of the specific shots. Required for the transforma- tion was a rear view of the car's center sections blowing out, a down-angle tracking move with the batmobile parts completely flying off, a shot of the side panels narrowing into the missile shape and, finally, a closeup of the wheels reconfiguring into a straight-line position. The initial shot in the sequence, representing the first stage of conversion, was filmed on a miniature Gotham street set. "We photographed a quarter-scale miniature on a street set that was roughly fifty to sixty feet long," said 4-Ward supervising director of photography Dennis Skotak. "The camera was on a dolly cart to which the batmobile was attached on a speedrail outrig. The cityscape background was pretty perfunctory, basically just a wet and slushy looking street we dressed on the sides with some quarter-scale cars and also a few background buildings. As the car traveled along on cue, a section of the cockpit was blown off with air pressure. Because it was a miniature, we were overcrank- ing-so it had to be done quickly and all the cues had to hit their marks."

for succesisve shots 4-ward would develop in-camera means to maximize set space while still maintaining the illusion of the vehicle rocketing along the midnight streets. To film the car's front fenders flying off, a quarter-scale model was placed on a treadmill and filmed from the front. "Because of the long travel distance required and the little space to shoot in," Dennis Skotak continued, "we used the treadmill which caused the tires to rotate. The fenders were pulled off with levers and air pressure from an airline that was attached to the inside of the model, which also threw off debris, glitter and a little bit of fuller's earth. We also used the treadmill for the shot where the wheels moved to in-line position. It had to be engineered in this case by Lee Stone and Jim Towler- in a very peculiar way to make the pieces fit. We went to a simple rod arrange- ment. We operated from behind the wheels as they were being rotated by the treadmill, and we'd pull the wheels into their po- sition by pulling levers while the miniature was in motion. In this particular case, we actually undercranked the shot. We did some tests down to four frames per second; but the final in the film is in the range of eight frames per second. At that rate, it had a very positive, locked-in-place look."

In addition to the briefly glimpsed city street backgrounds, a number of subtle touches were incorporated for authenticity. "We introduced camera shakes so it felt a little more alive," Skotak continued, "but we also had to be careful because it had to be stable. If the batmissile were real, it would be a large, heavy vehicle that would be stable because of its weight. But our min- iature was made of fiberglass and had only limited mass; so it had to be held down in place, otherwise it would tend to bounce - which you see in the kind of effects films where the army tanks go bouncing across the countryside like toys. We also added touches like mist blowing by, as if the vehicle was driving over sewer grates that had steam coming out of them."

For the down-angle shot of the batmobile completing its transformation into the batmissile, another larger treadmill was considered-again to create a sense of speed and travel in a limited space. The treadmill idea was quickly dismissed, how- ever, because of the complexity of showing the entire vehicle shedding body parts as it sped away. 4-Ward came up with a solution which, at first, seemed like a wild shot in the dark. "Rather than building the roadway as a miniature or using some expensive flying rig." Dennis Skotak commented, "Bob created artwork of a Gotham street as seen from directly overhead. We photographed it and stripped it together to form a long trans- parency that we could pull through a transparency projector as a continuous piece, projecting it onto a front projection screen. So we did this particular shot vertically, with the camera turned sideways to get the correct angle. We mounted the miniature car, also vertically, with a motor inside it to rotate the wheels. The model was mounted literally a fraction of an inch in front of the vertical front screen projection element of the roadway art- work. Mounting the vehicle vertically allowed the fenders and pieces of the car to fall off with the help of gravity, and to look as though the pieces were falling behind on the road. Creating the roadway as a front screen projection enabled us to have a stretch of road longer than we might have been able to create any other way."

Since the shot was a tracking helicopter POV, the crew also added effects of the city structures passing between the camera eye and the speeding car below. "Gotham features a lot of pow- erlines and girders and crossover trestles between buildings; so we emulated that by putting in dimensional overhead crossway pieces that we lowered on another mover rigged to drop be- tween the camera and the car at a fairly high rate of speed. We also put lights on rigs and had them drop past the car from the front to the back end, deliberately spilling light on the front projection screen, which is something you ordinarily wouldn't do. But just that right amount of spill light caused the model to cast shadows on the screen which provided a feeling of interac- tion with the projected image. Since we were doing this all in- camera, we could also impart the helicopter POV shaking. Al- though today's helicopter mounts provide very steady images, camera shake creates a lot more excitement."

A shot of the batmissile rounding a sharp corner required a more expansive miniature set featuring background buildings and foreground structures. "Modelmakers Jen Howard, Doug Moore, Pat Denver and artist Rick Rische built a quarter-scale miniature set that was roughly twenty-five feet on the side with a view of buildings up to the second story, at roughly twelve feet tall," Dennis Skotak said. "The missile had to round the corner very quickly, riding on a single track driven by in-line wheels, like a motorcycle. Even though this was a make-believe vehicle, it still had to do what a real vehicle would do, which was lean as it went around the corner with the rear end sliding out a bit. We had to exaggerate all these moves because it was very hard for the camera to detect the lean-the missile was shaped almost like a hot dog and you can hardly tell if a hot dog is leaning! The miniature also weighed forty to fifty pounds and required fine-tuning by the crew because its centrifugal forces tended to pull the track apart. To hide the track, we laid a rubber membrane over it, dressed to the level of the street so it was all one level. We then cut a slit for the missile to ride through. The slit closed right behind itself as the missile went through, so you couldn't see it. Our low angle, and the fact that the street featured a lot of slushy ruts, helped disguise the gag."

The batmissile sequence was originally designed to end with Batman speeding through the narrow alley opening as police cars crashed behind. But Tim Burton asked 4-Ward to come up with a more dynamic conclusion- the batmissile rocketing out into the horizon of Gotham's industrial waterfront district. "I made a sketch which I showed to Tim and he liked it," Bob Skotak recalled. "It was a pretty wide vista that showed a some- what more industrialized part of Gotham City that tied together the backlot location facades they used for the live-action of the police cars chasing the batmobile. The chase was away from Go- tham Plaza and the business district, and this warehouse-type industrial area down by the river was less exotic than some other parts of the city. I was basically given a free hand to design and paint the entire shot, which was nice."

To accomplish the shot required blending together the two separate elements of the locked-off batmissile miniature action and Bob Skotak's expansive waterfront district painting. "We created a road section that was almost one hundred feet long, put a quarter-scale batmissile on a wire pulley system, and shot a locked-off plate with the camera turned sideways - since the area of action was essentially a vertical composition- to max- imize the picture area," Skotak explained. "We shot in four-perf, but were able to generate a 'Vistavision'-sized plate by panning our four-perf camera to photograph the other half of the set as a single stationary frame, since there was no action occurring on that side. We got our Vistavision field of information by project- ing and blending the two images together, side by side. This combined image of the wide roadway leading into the distance was projected onto a white screen and beam-split into a blacked- out matching area of my painting of the city. Also via the beam- splitter we added reflection effects for the river by means of a 'rotating string' gag devised by Joel Steiner, and some blinking city lights. Overall, the shot was filmed motion control, starting off close on the missile as it first entered the shot and then zoom- ing back and tilting up as it rocketed away."

Batskiboat

miniature

Batman descends into the underworld behind the controls of his batski- boat to meet the Penguin on his own turf. Part boat, part jet-ski, the craft was in the tradition of Batman's one thousand one crimefighting inventions. To achieve the sequence, 4-Ward went to work on another carefully orchestrated series of miniature shots using a batboat model and staging the action in the tunnel they would later find themselves using for the expanded baby carriage shots that comprised the title sequence.

Unlike the title sequence, which required more detailing of the tunnel for the closeup shots that followed the floating car- riage's meandering course, the batskiboat tunnel shots would be focusing on the action of the speeding craft. "The boat was a quarter-scale miniature driven on an underwater track," said Bob Skotak. "It was pulled along on a chain-link mechanism, engineered by Lee Stone and Steve Brien, that was actuated by an air motora turbine-like motor driven by air pressure. The advantage of air motors is their ability to start and stop very quickly. One of the things we needed to do was absolutely max- imize the travel distance by minimizing our start-up and stop- ping zones. The speed that Tim wanted for the batskiboat was around seventy miles per hour in real life, which meant our model needed to travel at thirty-five miles per hour, at forty- eight frames per second in scale. So, even with a hundred twenty foot tunnel, that thing would just tear through and the shot would be over."

With the model weighing nearly eighty pounds and reaching five feet in length, it was a formidable object to be propelled, particularly when hurtling straight at the camera. "We had an opening long shot of the boat coming past us, going left to right, that was all in-camera, photographed with a fourteen millimeter lens," Skotak recalled. "This meant getting in extremely close to the boat. Our cameraman, Jim Belkin, had to pull back, pan and get out of the way in a fraction of a second to avoid getting hit. He did an amazing job." The parallel tracks required exact- ing construction for the paths the batskiboat would travel in specific shots. "Because of the speeds involved, the track had to be built and leveled with a laser beam and maintained very care- fully throughout the whole shoot."

As with the carriage sequence, the tunnel could be accessed in a variety of ways, depending on the specific angle of the shot. For the shot of the craft zooming past from left to right, the crew had only to cut into the side of the tunnel, film the boat, and then patch the tunnel up for the next shot or reconfiguration required.

The biggest challenge in the entire sequence involveda track configuration the crew dubbed the 'corkscrew.' In the shot, two blackfoot penguins suddenly rise up from the murky waters to launch missiles at the on-coming batskiboat. Just be- fore impact, Batman employs the craft's jet-ski capabilities to swerve up the curved side of the tunnel and back down, avoiding the explosion. Two cable-operated penguins-with missiles strapped to their backs, launched via remote control-were custom-made by Jim Towler for the shots. For the craft's evasive maneuver, the two sets of track had to be built up into the wall of the tunnel and laid perfectly parallel to each other. Like a rollercoaster ride, the corkscrew configuration of the tracks would have to handle the high-speed, gravity-challenging move of the heavy miniature. "If any of the wheels were impeded or slowed at that speed, it would have just ripped the whole track apart," Skotak noted. "There was a need for perfection and pre- cision in those tracks. It was tricky since they had to follow the contours of the tunnel, which meant a wide-wheel-based craft had to negotiate a circular path, then make an abrupt transition to the flat surface of the tunnel bottom."

As Batman jets through the sewer tunnels, two penguin warriors suddenly rise from the murky waters and launch missiles toward the speeding batskiboat. At the last moment, Batman avoids the rocket impact by swerving up the side of the tunnel in a corkscrew trajectory. 4-Ward produced two cable-operated penguin puppets for the shot, equipped with small rockets launched by remote control. / The corkscrew maneuver was an engineering feat requiring parallel tracks laid perfectly into the walls of the tunnel miniature. The rails were concealed with black tissue paper which was sliced open as the batskiboat model moved through via razor blades attached to the front wheels. / To enhance the sense of atmosphere within the tunnel, a billowing fog was introduced through exterior openings./While Batman hunts down the Penguin, the confused penguin army releases its missile payload into the old zoo grounds. The pyrotechnic display was orchestrated by principals from Stetson Visual Services and The Chandler Group, and by miniature pyro expert Joseph Viskocil.

To put the corkscrew challenge in perspective, an outside con- tractor specializing in aerospace work had failed to come up with a workable track. "The company that was supposed to de- liver this to us didn't make it in the delivery time they had prom- ised," Skotak noted. "They really couldn't make it work. They must have thought, 'Oh, so it gets delayed a month or two. Well, maybe that's the status quo for the aerospace industry; but in a motion picture schedule a day can be fatal. So our crew had to solve a lot of problems that weren't initially on our plate. Joel Steiner, Steve Brien, Lee Stone, Bruce Hayes and Ricc Ruskuski were all involved in piecing together this double-helix cork- screw effect. This entailed a lot of weight being pulled very fast with a wide range of changing fields of stress along the track, the weight of the boat shifting dynamically as it was going up the wall. The crew had to design the track and wheel mechanism so as pressure was being transferred from the upper wheels to the lower ones, the shift in distribution wouldn't tear the model loose - and that was a major problem."

The 4-Ward team faced the additional problem of having to remove or conceal the corkscrew track itself. The crew initially considered digitally or optically removing the tracks, but Bob Skotak devised an in-camera method. "I came up with the idea of just taking tissue paper and painting it black, putting spray adhesive on it, and dressing it over the track. Then we put razor blades on the leading edge of the wheels. As the boat passed, the blades would make thin slices through the tissue paper cre- ating very fine slits that would not photograph on film."

The entire sequence required a myriad of details and subtle effects to be readied before filming. The batskiboat was given a scaled rocket engine look with a flame ribbon in the model that would be lit by the crew before each take, while a nine-volt bat- tery powered a small fan inside the model to push the flame out. Other effects that had to be prepared moments before the cam- eras could roll included actually 'dressing' the sewer water and introducing a ghostlike mist into the tunnel. "Every shot would have these transient water and smoke effects going which would take forever to get just right," Skotak explained. "Then it would be: 'Let's shoot it!' And we'd have to ignite the flame on the boat and hope we hadn't lost these delicate atmospheric effects in the interim. One of the challenges came in getting a specific look to the water and the atmosphere in the tunnel. When you're shooting water, it can look very miniature-ish. You usually have to break it up with a lot of air movement to create waves and ripples. In this case, however, the water was stagnant; so in order to create a sense of scale, we used a lacquer spray paint and sprayed it over the water from one end of the tunnel to the other to create a mottled, disgusting surface scum. We'd carefully spray this detail onto the water's surface, back out of the set, and hope everything would stay in place long enough for us to get behind the camera. Then we'd add fog through four location points where we had holes poked in the tunnel. The fog would come into the tunnel billowy, but because the water at the bot- tom was cold and the lighting units heated the upper part of the tunnel, we had created a natural inversion layer that allowed the fog to settle out in cloudlike, stratified patterns along the entire length of the tunnel. It was extremely effective."

The sequence was completed largely in-camera because the number of interactive elements seemed to naturally dictate that approach. "We had initially thought about shooting the missiles bluescreen, but there was a question of how well it would matte in. There were also many interactive elements, such as the re- flection of the fire in the water, the slight ripple of water as the missiles launched, smoke and the perspective of smoke, that we found ourselves doing it all in-camera. The production sched- ule was also pretty tight; so by doing it that way, the director could see the finished shot without having to guess what it would ultimately look like."

At the end of the sequence, the batskiboat flies through the roof of the Arctic World pavilion. "The original storyboard for the batskiboat bursting out of Arctic World illustrated a wide- angle shot looking up at the boat," Fink recalled. "I asked the Skotaks to put a second camera on that to give us another, tighter angle. Ultimately, both angles wound up in the film and that really helped the sequence. By adding the second camera, changing the position of the first camera and altering the way the support arm dropped the boat, the batskiboat came closer to the camera lens, more overhead." The batskiboat model was mounted on an armature pylon - at an angle hidden from cam- era- and thrust through a breakaway plaster miniature of the Arctic World facade. "The facade was made of sections that were broken up and precut and pieced back together with balsa wood backing and detailing on the backside, then spackled over," Bob Skotak explained. "We rammed through it while filming with our two cameras that were overcranked at sixty to seventy frames per second."

Braced for a final confrontation with the Penguin, Batman powers up his batskiboat for a high- speed run through the sewer tunnels leading to the Arctic World lair. The sequence, which required an extensive tunnel miniature, was realized by 4-Ward Productions. 4-Ward director of photography Jim Belkin mans his plastic-wrapped camera while effects supervisor Robert Skotak lays last-minute dressing into the quarter-scale set. / The sewer tunnel exterior. Underwater track was laid into the set as a means of directing the batskiboat. One section of the one-hundred- twenty-foot tunnel was angled upward to effect a shot of the batskiboat bursting through the Arctic World facade. The five-foot- long model was propelled by air pressure at speeds up to thirty-five miles per hour. Skotak directs an air stream toward the model to create scale-enhancing waves on the water surface.

Batsignal

wayne manor batsignal

The establishing shot of Wayne Manor, with the batsignal strik- ing the clouds above, would mark another creative departure from the 1989 film. Wayne Manor had been the only location shoot of the first film, with the historic Knebworth House out- side London conveying the comforts of Old World wealth. In Bat- man Returns, however, the new manor would look more like a haunted house.

For a shot of the batsignal against moving clouds - as seen by the Penguin from
his sewer haunt - Matte World employed yet another multiplane effect. Sculpted dacron clouds were adhered
to glass and fitted to a motion control mover, then photographed in conjunction with a skyscraper painting and projected batsignal. Effects cameraman Wade Childress and matte artist Brian Flora check the lighting on the setup./Answering the call, Bruce Wayne descends into the batcave. As conceived by Tim Burton and 
Bo Welch,
the batcave was a magnificent expanse of shale walls and harrowing precipices. Wide shots of the batcave interior were realized through stage sets composited into matte paintings that extended the cave to its full dimensions./ Specific live-action scenes within the cave were shot on full-size set pieces built on 
stage at Warner Brothers.

For shots that had to be duped, such as the matte shot of the batsignal turning on with Bruce Wayne sitting in his mansion, we shot Vistavision plates, keeping it on a larger format to help us with the quality of the grain structure."

Originally, Matte World had been commissioned to render a painting for the establishing shot of Wayne Manor and the bat- signal. However, when it was decided that an additional shot of Wayne Manor, from a slightly different perspective, would be needed for a later sequence in the film, Matte World opted to create the establishing shot as a multilayered in-camera effect combining a four-by-four-foot mansion miniature-built by Renegade Effects-with a painted background. Creating the iconic batsignal shots themselves, which were in Matte World's charge throughout the film, was a simple process. "We just stuck a slide of the batsignal-which had been shot from artwork- into a slide projector," recalled Matte World effects cosupervisor Michael Pangrazio, "and projected it onto a fiberfill cloud mate- rial that was adhered to a lexan sheet. We exposed it for three to four frames per second because it wasn't that bright and re- quired a long exposure time."

There were, however, a few major technical problems to over- come before the batsignal could call Batman to action. Matte World discovered that while it was easy to project and film the batsignal as two separate elements - the projected beam and the bat symbol itself—it was a challenge to combine the two on the same piece of film. "To get an exposure on the symbol," said Pangrazio, "we just put the slide in the projector, filled the room with smoke, and shot it. But when we rewound and tried to put the beam in, the symbol itself was always much brighter than the beam. If we shot the beam at its ideal exposure, then the symbol would be totally overexposed. It had to do with the differences between the light hitting a solid surface - in this case the fiberfill clouds - and the light going through the par- ticles of smoke that were illuminating the beam itself. There was too great an exposure gap there. We ended up first exposing the symbol on the sky. Then we just rewound that unprocessed film, brought it to a new camera and rotoscoped out the pro- jected symbol, making sure that it was in the proper place on the new surface. Next we painted in the beam by hand and re- exposed that painted beam onto the original negative—just burning it in, exposing it to the degree that looked right. When- ever you can isolate things on film and work with separate ele- ments, you can control their exposure and their relationships much better."

An added visual wrinkle was playing the beacon against a mov- ing cloud surface-a dynamic enhancement of the batsignal effect recommended by Mike Fink. "One of the things we wanted to bring to the film that the original didn't was to have the sym- bol projected against moving clouds so that its shape would change subtly," Craig Barron explained. "The crew adhered fi- berfill clouds to twenty-foot-long, ten-foot-high scrims set on motion control tracks. With three different layers of scrims, and backlighting on the fine material, the result was a big diorama that existed in the eye of the camera. You can make dark clouds look good by just sculpting the fiberfill-taking an edge off here, making it a little thicker there-basically art directing the sky to make it look realistic, and then moving it on motion control tracks."

"It's very subtle," Pangrazio added, "but there's a life to the shot that wouldn't be there if the clouds weren't moving. Our three layers of cloud movement consisted of a static layer, a cloud section moving slowly one-third of the way up, and then the top part moving faster in relation, which provided overall dimension and perspective. We also adhered some clouds onto bridal tulle, a translucent material that works like an artificial smoke to help provide atmosphere and depth. So basically we created an artificial world with materials you can get at the fab- ric or department store." The grounds of Wayne Manor were similarly fashioned from everyday materials. "The whole hillside was just a base upon which to put the mansion model," Pangrazio said. "We used card- board boxes with king-size bedsheets thrown over them and stapled down to create a broad twenty-by-twenty-foot area with a soft, rolling hill effect. We covered it with baking soda and went around the neighborhood making a raid for twigs that would serve as miniature trees. To get the scale just right, we wrapped the twigs with different gauge wires to continue the branches up to a fine taper."

In an almost Victorian-era touch, Wayne is alerted to the bat- signal's call by way of a mirrored rooftop reflector which would collect the sky light, swivel and redirect the beacon to a garden reflector which, in turn, would shine the signal light into the darkened library where Bruce Wayne awaits the call. The reflec- tors not only recalled the exotically designed mechanical con- traptions of classic H.G. Wells and Jules Verne science fiction tales, but were also required to function. "The drawings by Marty Kline from the production had the look of an old-fashioned den- tal tool or a Jules Verne-era type contraption using belts and gears and all kinds of crazy contrivances to make it move," re- called Howie Weed. "As I understand it, the production artist who drew it just came up with the idea in his head. We had to decide whether we could make it move as it had been drawn, or do some kind of cheat using monofilament lines. We finally de- cided to try to fabricate it the way it was drawn. We brought in a machinist named Bryan Dewe to work on the mirror. We left this drawing in his hands to interpret and make it work in a mechan- ical way. Bryan did some drawings and actually machined the whole thing out of solid aluminum. It was so impressive we didn't want to paint it. The final mirror was controlled by two little rods that ran down the backside to stepper motors with two tiny worm gears at the top. As it rotated, a big cog on its side turned, making it appear as though it was turning the whole thing. The mirror could also tilt up and down and pan left and right. It was amazing that a production artist drew this thing out, not knowing whether it would work, and Bryan was able to interpret that and actually make it function."

The shot of the reflected signal light streaming through the library window and hitting the back wall was shot live-action with a bat image projected on set with actor Michael Keaton. However, the first unit faced the same problem of exposing both symbol and beam together that Matte World faced in its minia- ture work. To solve the problem, Matte World would not only add the beam to the shot, but do some repair work on the pro- jected bat symbol. "The bat symbol was projected onto the wall so that Michael Keaton could react to it," said Barron. "When the signal came on, Michael could stand up into the beam. Un- fortunately, the heat from the projector caused one of the bat- signal's wings to crack during the shot. We traced out where the wing should have been and then Brian Flora made a matte to repair that area. For the beam itself, he made a separate painting that was double-exposed to come in through the aperture of the window and line up with the bat shape projected on the wall. The beam light was a plus exposure, a burn-in that added expo- sure to the shards of existing light. Michael Keaton's face was being lit up by the existing projection of the symbol on the far wall, and our matte painting was just adding more exposure be- cause the beam from the projected symbol wasn't bright enough to expose on the set. Of course, the symbol and shard had to switch on together; so we composited the elements optically, which was more straightforward than trying to work out the tim- ing cues for each take as a latent image composite."

Penguin POV

Batman Returns featured a Penguin POV of the batsignal shining in the night sky beyond the sewer bars gilding his subterranean home. The shot, another multilayered Matte World effect, was assigned to Brian Flora and required a painting of some buildings, the sky beyond created with sculpted dacron clouds on glass fitted to a motion control mover, and the addition of the batsignal symbol and beam. "It was an interesting shot to work on," Flora commented. "It gave me a chance to work in a three-dimensional domain. I painted the buildings, created the clouds, and working with effects cameraman Wade Childress-supervised the lighting. On the painting itself, there are spotlights that light up the buildings. We took inkies and focused them on little areas of the painting to make them brighter, punch them up a little bit. Then there was lighting on the clouds, which were difficult to light because there had to be a very subtle increment of haze to make them look real. The clouds had to be a little brighter than the build- ings, because if the sky tone was too close to the tones of the buildings you wouldn't be able to resolve the edges of the build- ings. The sky was backlit to simulate moonlight; the clouds in front of the sky were darker, and it all had to be flashed. We had scrims between the glass painting and the clouds, as well as a scrim in front of the entire scene, so we could flash them all independently. It was subtle, but in dailies we could see differ- ences down to even a tenth of a stop."

Flying umbrella

With Batman on the run, the Penguin and Catwoman form a brief, shaky alliance. As a counterpoint to the Catwoman's lithe, acrobatic athleticism is the Penguin's feral cunning-and a penchant for nasty trick umbrellas, his weapon of choice ever since the character's first comic book clash with Batman back in 1941. Burton's Penguin incarnation, while more misanthropic and psychotic than the waddling, Shakespeare-spouting comics character, still carried with him those trademark trick umbrel- las. One scene featured a whirling-blade umbrella airlifting the Penguin from the ground, helicopter-style. The gores fly off and the umbrella begins spinning, lifting him into the air. DeVito himself was trussed up for the effect by Chuck Gaspar and his crew. "We had an apparatus hooked up behind the set which actually picked him up through a metal strap that was around his waist," Gaspar explained. "It was like a levitation system, with a forty foot aluminum track on wheels. An arm would come out through the wall and pick him up. The camera had to follow him up at just the right angle so as not to see the mechanical arm coming from the wall to his body. We got the umbrella itself to spin by vacuforming some pieces to hide a tiny, gear-driven motor. Once the umbrella started spinning, we manually tripped an apparatus which ran from the ceiling to these little pins. Once they were tripped, the gores flew off in all directions."

On the first flying umbrella take, the effect did not go as planned. The counterweight of the backside of the arm was not balanced with DeVito's weight, and the actor was left suspended forty feet above the stage while Gaspar's crew worked to add the necessary weight. Much to the surprise- and relief- of the ef- fects crew, the actor took the small gaffe in stride. "DeVito was joking the whole time we were fixing the problem," said Gaspar, "He was telling jokes up there for about twenty minutes. Then we fixed it, he came back down and said, "Thank you very much -see you down the road."""

The brief team-up between the Catwoman and the Penguin ends when a leering pass from Cobblepot meets with snarling feline rejection. The wounded Penguin responds by hooking his umbrella-copter around the Catwoman's neck, lifting her into the night sky. To provide the feeling of scale, the shot had Cat- woman flying behind the sheer Gotham Plaza skyscrapers and then out and away, moving into the horizon through a tunnel of city lights before the umbrella releases her to what would be a fatal fall for anyone not blessed with cat lives to spare. The scene, created at Boss Film, would be one of the visual centerpieces of the film and one of only a few wide shots of the Gotham metropolis. The shot required a bluescreen element of a stunt Catwoman composited optically against a multiplane Gotham skyline that combined a miniature model foreground and a matte painting background. "For the Gotham flyover," John Bruno explained, "I wanted to do a three-dimensional shot - a pan and truck across this full-sized model with a multiplane painting in the background. Multiple layers of miniature build- ings were added in an attempt to open up the whole city. For this particular shot, Neil Krepela used a 65mm camera to shoot Michelle Pfeiffer's stunt double in front of a bluescreen so that we could use the ZAP (zoom aerial printer) to reduce her as she drifted off in perspective across the city."

A computer generated flying umbrella was also produced by Boss and composited into the shot. The real umbrella which the stuntwoman had held onto during the live-action-which had been intended from the beginning only to be used as reference for its computer generated counterpart - was rotoscoped out by Nina Solerno. "The umbrella was rebuilt in the computer," stated Bruno, "and match-moved with Catwoman. The umbrella and Catwoman element was then scanned onto 65mm film for eventual compositing with the matte painting."

In setting up the painting that would be part of the multi- plane effect, art director Brent Boates and matte artist Michele Moen had to incorporate director of photography Garry Waller's motion control camera moves on the foreground plaza building miniatures. "We actually ended up tracking, frame by frame, to match the painting with that miniature move," stated Moen. "Alan Harding shot a latent of the miniature, panned their move, and then we bipacked it to see if the painting would work with the camera move."

The matte painting itself was a brooding vision of the dark, doomed city, with a tunnel of city lights and white drifts of steam and smoke that moved along Catwoman's aerial path. Two paintings were required: an outline of distant skyscrapers be- yond the rotating rooftop Shreck cat head, and a wide shot fea- turing the tunnel of light effect to the right of a miniature building which served as the foreground structure. In addition to the two matte paintings of the distant city, a separate smoke element and a foreground glass painting were required to ac- complish the multiplane effect. "The way the shot works," said Moen, "the camera is following Catwoman, so it pans and pushes in. The one foreground multiplane painting moved at a different rate on the camera stand to get the right perspective shift in relation to the background painting."

Guiding the flying Catwoman- and the audience-toward the distant, unreachable horizon was a stream of smoke and city lights. "Catwoman was the focal point," stated Moen, "and we led that point down with a path of twinkling, blinking lights she could follow. For the lights, I just poked holes in black glass. That was a separate pass that we composited before we gave the shot to optical. There was also a separate smokestack smoke element that we rear-projected and then burned in. I think the most difficult part of the painting was getting the scale right, working with the camera. At first we started with smaller paint- ings, which got bigger until we were almost running out of room on the easel - they were both about six-by-three-feet. The two paintings were divided by a miniature building in the center. Roto made a split-matte through that miniature to tie in the paintings, because they were both shot separately." Thinking he has effectively declawed the Catwoman, the Pen- guin brings chaos to the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Gotham Plaza. The key action scene features a shot of the Pen- guin as he watches the holiday observance and the plaza full of shoppers. Similar to an earlier shot of the Penguin's sewer-level POV of the batsignal, this shot would require a Matte World fore- ground Vistavision bluescreen element of the Penguin's webbed hands gripping the bars. The foreground element would then be optically composited by Video Concept Engineering with a live- action background and a latent image matte painting that ex- tended the plaza buildings skyward.

Briefly united against Batman, the Penguin and Catwoman break their alliance when the Penguin
makes an ill-advised advance. Angered by her rejection, the Penguin hangs Catwoman from one of his flying trick umbrellas, sending her up over the Gotham skyline and through a tunnel of city lights. To achieve the sequence, Boss photographed a bluescreen element of a stuntwoman which was composited with a multiplane 
shot featuring both foreground miniature buildings and a matte painting background rendered by Michele Moen./ A separate smoke element was composited into the shot to add atmospheric haze, while city lights were effected by backlit holes in
black glass. Boss' zoom aerial printer was used to reduce the Catwoman's image in the shot as she drifted off in perspective across the sky.

Not assigned yet

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*Video animatics were instrumental in planning the effects shots. With a miniature video camera, Boss effects supervisor John Bruno shoots a foamcore mockup of the plaza while cosupervisor Brent Boates and conceptual artist Steve Burg view the results on a monitor.
*Modelmaker Scott Alexander details the ground floor of the Shreck department store. Preparing for the miniatureportion of the verticaltracking shot, assistantcameraman Bret Hardingmounts a camera onto the elevator rig.

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Bo Welch and Brent Boates examine a pair of Shreck company cats- prominent features on both the soundstage and miniature sets. The production designer's influence extended well beyond the full-size sets to include virtually every visual aspect of the film. When the scheming Max Shreck discovers his mousy assistant, 
Selina Kyle, snooping in the files of his penthouse office, the mogul promptly pushes her out the window. Selina's fall was storyboarded to follow Michelle Pfeiffer as she drops through a series of awnings to the alley below. / To impart the impression of the camera moving down the building and through the awnings, 
a twelfth-scale model of the Shreck Building was placed on its side and filmed via motion control with a snorkel lens. As the camera advanced, prescored miniature awnings were ripped open in sequence by invisible wires. Garry Waller studies the setup just prior to beginning the shot.

A bluescreen element of Michelle Pfeiffer was later composited into the background model plate. The actress was positioned on a stool in front of a
bluescreen and photographed performing her actions in slow motion to synchronize with the miniature plate photography. Miraculously surviving the fall, timid Selina is transformed into the predatory Catwoman./ With not only the Penguin,
ut now the Catwoman on the loose, the Gotham police summon Batman by way of the traditional batsignal in the sky. Matte World realized the establishing shot of Wayne Manor and the batsignal beyond as a multilayered in-camera effect combining a miniature mansion with a painted background and batsignal artwork 
projected onto fiberfill clouds.

The Wayne Manor setting was a forced perspective miniature dressed with baking soda snow and ordinary twigs finished with tapering wire to simulate dormant trees. Matte World effects supervisor Michael Pangrazio and grip Todd
Smith add last-minute touches to the set. / In the manor garden is a mirror relay programmed to capture the batsignal beam and redirect it into the library where Bruce Wayne awaits the call for help. Originally slated to be done as a matte painting, the bat reflector was ultimately constructed as a functional model 
to provide panning and tilting movements. Camera
assistant Drummond Stone and motion control cameraman Joel Hladecek position the reflector on the forced perspective set.

A full Gotham Plaza
miniature - with buildings up to sixteen feet tall - was erected on stage at Boss. / One of the challenges faced by the modelmakers was matching their work to the stage set which had been built in forced perspective. Because similar perspective cheats would have been evident in the wider scope of the model shots,the
miniature set had to be 'stretched' back out to look correct from all angles. A member of the modelmaking team attends to last-minute detailing of the plaza miniature. / Incorporated into the
Gotham Plaza set were such
Burton-esque touches as the
grinning cat logo atop the
Shreck Building, designed to reflect the benevolent face belying the evil corporate world./Aided by members of his crew, Boss director of photography Garry Waller prepares for a shot on the plaza miniature.

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Batman Returns was full of such herculean efforts. Despite the potential pitfalls and nightmares, the final result was a seam- less vision. "I feel very good about the work of all the effects houses," Tim Burton stated. "I look at their shots and there's real thought and artistry involved, which I love. Often I look at effects shots and there's a coldness or a sameness to them. But on this movie, the effects houses went the extra mile to really capture the feeling of what we were trying to create. Maybe it's because Mike Fink did a good job of keeping it together, but there's been a consistency that's the best I've ever experienced." Burton's triumphant return to Gotham was aided by his ability to avoid being sucked into the media and merchandising mael- strom of Bat Biz. "Part of my problem on the first movie was that thrusting me into a big-budget, action world was a little bit like putting oil with water. I think what I learned is that it's best just to make a movie and not get caught up in the scale of it. I tried not to get swept up in what happened before, but instead just treat it like it was a completely new movie. The only prob- lem was that we had an extremely accelerated schedule. I showed the studio the movie four weeks after we stopped shoot- ing, which is unheard of for me."

Even as Burton was deep into postproduction and the effects houses were helping to bring the effects-intensive production to life, the business forces behind the Batman phenomenon were gearing up for a second run at the Zeitgeist. At Boss, even as the Batman flying puppet was being encased in glass and presented as a gift to producer Larry Franco, effects artists were creating a winged batsuitcase to fly through the Gotham Plaza miniatures for a Choice Hotels International television campaign. At the Warner Brothers lot, a heroic statue face from old Gotham si- lently looked on as the inner city rooftop set, which included Selina Kyle's apartment, was being dismantled. Meanwhile, around the corner at Stage 16, Gotham Plaza was still standing, but a plaza shop had been redressed as a Gotham McDonald's for another promotional tie-in campaign. Weeks before the film's release, bus stop signs and billboards glistening with the dark shapes of Batman, Penguin and Catwoman were heralding the Dark Knight's return, while the back covers of DC comics had glossy ads showing the sleet-slicked bat emblem. And as the June release week dawned with its premieres and press pre- views, visions of record boxoffice grosses danced in the execu- tive heads at Warner Brothers.

But the publicity and merchandising machines that had tried to stoke interest in even such well-crafted comics adaptations as Dick Tracy and The Rocketeer had failed to grip the public imagination. Other movies based on such classic comics char- acters as Captain America were either being shelved or given a one-way ticket to video release land. Batman, however, has not only outlasted the countless other superheroic characters that sprang to life back in the so-called Golden Age of Comics a half century ago, but has periodically rocked the pop culture land- scape with volcanic force. The strange tale of the haunted crime- fighter has held an undeniable and lasting popular appeal. "For whatever reason," Burton mused, "Batman taps into something that has not been fully verbalized, explored or intellectualized. It taps into the subconscious the same way that fairy tales or myths do. And that's the attraction, I think."

Batman Returns photographs courtesy of Warner Brothers. TMs and 1992 DC Comics, Inc. All rights reserved. Produc- tion unit still photography by Zade Rosenthal, Dean Williams and Jane O'Neal. Special art by Jack Pedota. Boss Film Studios still photography by Virgil Mirano. The Chandler Group still photography by John Scheele. Additional photographs and frameclips courtesy of Stan Winston Studio, 4-Ward Produc- tions, Video Image Associates and Matte World. Special thanks to Jeff Walker, Michael Singer, Claire Wilson, Tara Croccito, Holly Borradaile and Jess Garcia.

Because it was to be the site of major pyrotechnics, the zoo model was fashioned out of a special fire-retardant urethane spray foam. On a Chandler stage, the set was blown up in sections, over a period of days, with the cameras positioned mostly at ground level. In a cutaway bunker, the Chandler film crew waits for 
the smoke to clear between setups. / Rigorous tests were conducted to orchestrate the fireworks. Model crew chief lan Hunter readies a portion of his zoo model for a miniature explosion. Rockets mounted on invisible guide wires triggered the pyrotechnic charges.