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  Cinefex#1 Article
 From: Webmaster | Posted: 6/12/2005 10:47:48 AM |

Cinefex#1 Article



Arguably the most popular feature in Batman's arsenal, the batmobile presented the filmmakers with their biggest challenge. The batmobile worried us a lot, " Burton admitted. "Early on, it seemed that everything Anton and I came up with just looked like we were putting fins on cars. Cars can so easily become a joke - people don't realize how difficult it is to make a new kind of car. After a long period of time in which Anton reworked and refined and adjusted the design, we finally hit on something that looked good. Even after the drawing was done, though, we still were not sure how it woud go over in the film. It wasn't until we saw it in rushes that we knew it was right."
Envisioning the batmobile as a kind of shining armor for the Dark Knight, Furst designed the vehicle as an extension of Batman himself, "I never really saw the batmobile as just a car." Furst said. "I always thought of it as an appendage to Batman's exterior -- just like his cape or his suit. I was really scared of the idea of it becoming a sort of pimpmobile - you see so many of those low-level concept cars in films. To me, the batmobile was a pure piece of expressionism. I tried to give it that 'knight in armor' look, taking elements of the speed machines from the Utah salt flats of the '40s, the Corvette stingrays of the '50s and combining those elements with jet aircraft components to create one cohesive machine."

Because the batmobile would have to perform in the film as more than just a good-looking prop, Furst had to confer with Evans to ensure that the design was not just visually exciting, but practical as well. "The cars had to function not only as performance cars - with machine guns and afterburners and all that sort of thing laid into them - but also as driving machine." Furst commented. "It takes ten years for General Motors to produce a new car and we had to do this in five months. So I had to design it relatively quickly so that it could get off the drawing board and into the workshops and be ready to shoot. In a way, the batmobile was a more hairy project than building those huge sets. It certainly worried me the most, because it was such an important element of the film.
It would have been terrible to come up with a batmobile that was weak."

Though Furst worked furiously to complete the design as quickly as possible, time constraints forced John Evans to begin constructing the batmobile without a finished concept. "We had only twelve weeks to build two batmobiles - one for stunt work and one for principal photography," Evans noted. "But Anton still was not quite happy with the design at that point. So he gave us an outline and we had to go from there. I just could not afford to wait. Because we were so short on time, I felt that I had rather than experiment with to get a chassis that was proven, our own. So I went out and found two 1974 V-8 Chevrolet Impala chassis at a junkyard. They were solid and had nice suspension, We then modified the chassis to fit our specific needs - we lengthened them by two feet, packed the wheels out four inches and dropped the engine about twelve inches.We also put a new suspension in and fitted the chassis with twenty-four-inch-width Mickey Thompson drag racing tires.
Then we started from there.It was a tricky period, because we had to go ahead and build it even though we did not have the final measurements and we still did not know exactly what gadgets were going to be included in the car."


While Evans and his crew worked on modifying the Impala chassis, Furst completed the cosmetic aspects of the design. Having found it difficult to render the three-dimensional concept in drawings, the production designer had moved quickly into maquette form.
Fashioned out of clay, the maquette was two feet long and six inches high. Set modeler Eddie Butler sculpted the approved rendering up to full-scale - twenty-three feet long and almost nine feet wide - working in high-density polystyrene. The full-scale polystyrene pieces then went to a company that specializes in building Le Mans racing cars to be prepared for molding.
"The batmobile was built in kevlar," Furst noted, "which is a polycarbonate that is extremely light and yet very strong. It is the same material used to make racing cars.
We then had a custom paint job done on it. There were about six different layers of colors to give the car the finish of a beetle - a lot of colors coming through the blackness so that it had a three-dimensional quality to it rather than being just a flat black.
We did not go to a full gloss on it - we left it with a slight matte finish to make it look more like a war machine."

Fitted with interior components from fighter aircraft and an array of military-strength guns and explosives, the batmobile did more than just look like a war machine. "We had two 9mm Browning machine guns which came out of either side on air rams and fired out dummy bullets," Evans explained. "AII of the controls for the guns were actually inside the car. We had speed regulators on them so that they could go at whatever speed the director wanted at the time. The flaps of the car were on compressed air so that they could into the air. There was also a fly up and off about twenty feet grappling hook which fired out of the side which was powered by compressed air and rams. The most difficult thing about all of this was just finding room for all the air cylinders and reservoirs and everything. The inside of the batmobile was very small and it was quite a tight fit just to get everything we needed in there."

Adding to the batmobile's visual allure were rocket engine flames shooting out the back of the car. "That was a tricky situation."
Evans noted. "To make it look effective on film, we had to have a lot of flame - which, of course, generated a tremendous amount of heat. We insulated the back of the car and also case we had and we also put Co2 extinguishers in a ring around it, just in case of an accident with the fire. The extinguishers were on a panic button which we put both inside and outside of the car. That way, if the artist got caught inside, he had the capability of employing the extinguishers.
The flames were generated with a mixture of gas and air and pyrothane." The only nonfunctional part of the batmobile were the armor shields that open and close at Batman's verbal command. Although the shields were physically incorporated into the vehicle, the opening and closing effect was generated animation.

Depending on the level of danger in a particular shot, the bat- mobile was driven either by Bob Marlais - a member of the Evans effects crew - or a stuntman.
"Bob drove it when there were gadgets involved or there was a timing problem for special effects, " explained Evans, "but if it got too dangerous, a stunt- man took over. In some instances where it was crucial that we hit a certain mark at a certain speed, we had to have one of our guys drive it just so the timing was right. One of our first takes - where the batmobile is racing towards the doors of the chemical plant and there are bullet hits going across the door just as the batmobile gets there - was also one of the most difficult.
There was only an inch to spare under the bullet hits and the batmobile had to go through there just perfectly. So I had my man drive the car for that sequence and we got it on the first take. That started us off well with the director."

Difficulties notwithstanding, Evans is understandably proud of his automotive achievement. "We managed to deliver two bat mobiles for only about 151,000 pounds - which is not bad. And they were sound automobiles. There were no mechanical break- downs on either car during the entire project. Although the batmobile never went faster than sixty mites per hour in the film, after the picture was finished we took it out on a test track and had it up to 94.7 mites per hour - pretty impressive for a car that was made in our workshop."




 From: Webmaster | Posted: 6/12/2005 10:48:48 AM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

Sorry, wrong icon!




 From: Kevin | Posted: 6/12/2005 2:31:03 PM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

Great article thanks for sharing.


 From: Webmaster | Posted: 6/16/2005 12:22:37 PM |

More from Returns Cinefex article

only got one page. Stupid OCR program won't read the text correctly....


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 visual effects realm. A sophisticated, computer generated shielding 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 prototype 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 Retums, Chuck Gaspar and his crew would have to retool the original 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 car 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 production from the first and second unit. Somebody might change the color of a wire and that would throw us off."

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 badland scorched the batmobile. To prevent that, we put a heat deducting 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 powerful enough to do what we wanted. We needed something with a lot of meat to it."

When the Red Triangle Gang, costumed like freaks from a a Halloween nightmare, descend on the Christmas shoppers of Gotham Plaza, the combat-ready batmobile answers the call to action. 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 following 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 overdue 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."




 From: Kevin | Posted: 6/16/2005 5:57:03 PM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

Great article; I would like to see them all, very informative.
Thanks



 From: Webmaster | Posted: 6/16/2005 7:38:30 PM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

article cotinued...(CG related to the cocoon shield)

Although the Dark Knight successfully metes out his two-fisted brand of street justice during his encounters with the Red Triangle Gang, the psycho criminals get a little revenge when they discover the parked batmobile, seemingly secure in its protective cocoon shielding, and manage to uncloak and gremlinize it. 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 vehicle. 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 software 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 automotive 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 fiberglass 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 much as we can,” said Goldstone. "We spent basically two nights shooting 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 designated 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 back tips of the fins. On a printed take, we'd attach tiny lights to those reference 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 form the environment, the scanned-in-imagery. Other times the environment just wasn't strong enough and we'd have to paint in special reflection maps. We used the Symbolics 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 represented the final steps in completing the ten shots.

When the Red Triangle Gang manages to sabotage the batmobile, it is at an inopportune time for the Caped Crusader who, a victim of a Penguin frame-up is suspected of murder and is being pursued by the Gotham police. As Batman drives off in his batmobile with the police on this tail, he discovers the Penguin is controlling the movement of his car, thanks to an override device planted by the gang. With the Penguin effectively at the wheel, the batmobile becomes lethal weapon on the streets of Gotham, crashing into cars and sending them flying. "All the cars were cabled to pull them back,” noted Mike Fin, "and so on the set there was a forest of cables coming down which Pacific Data Images removed digitally. Luckily, we had a lot of things going for us--the scene was darkly lit and the background behind the wires was kind of amorphous.




 From: Kevin | Posted: 6/16/2005 7:46:26 PM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

So just how much are you holding out on us? Keep all this great stuff comming


 From: Webmaster | Posted: 6/16/2005 8:23:56 PM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

I'm not holding out. Thoese magazines I got have tons of articles on cast and the movie but nothing on batmobile.


 From: Jack | Posted: 6/17/2005 1:06:55 AM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

Sure your not holding out.... I would Ban you if I had a clue how?


 From: Webmaster | Posted: 6/17/2005 1:27:52 PM |

RE: Cinefex#1 Article

cont'd (nothing but batmissile sequence here)

By the time Batman regains control, the car is roaring toward a narrow alley, seemingly on course for an inevitable collision. 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 created the missile metamorphosis. The sequence would be accomplished in four-perf using quarter-scale batmobile sections for the filming of the specific shots. Required for the transformation 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 close up 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 t 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 speed rail out rig. 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 over cranking—so it had to be done quickly and all the cues had to hit their marks.”

For successive shots in the sequence, 4-Ward would develop in-camera means to maximize set space while 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 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 arrangement. We operated from behind the wheels as they were being rotated by the treadmill, and we’d pull the wheels into their position by pulling levers while the miniature was in motion. In this particular case, we actually under cranked 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 miniature 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 large treadmill was considered – again to create a sense of speed and travel in a limited space. The treadmill idea was quickly dismissed, however, 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 commented, “Bob created artwork of a Gotham street as seen from directly overhead. We photographed it and stripped it together to form a long transparency 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 artwork. Mounting the vehicle vertically allowed the fenders and pieces of the car to fall of 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 power lines 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 between 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 splitting 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 cash shadows on the screen which provided a feeling of interaction with the projected image. Since we were doing this all in-camera, we could also impart the helicopter POV shaking. Although 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. “Model makers 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 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—missile was shaped almost like a hot dog and you can hardly tell if a hot dog is leaning! The miniature also weight 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 original designed to end with Batman speeding through 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 recalled, “It was a pretty wide vista that showed a somewhat 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 Gotham 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’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 maximize 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 projecting 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 Steinder, 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 zooming back and tilting up as it rocketed away.”



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