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Shooting Horses on Courses

Jul 1, 2003 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman

In-Camera for an In-Post Age

When director Gary Ross insists, “I'm not hung up on saying Seabiscuit is my vision — it was a total collaboration in every sense of the word,” his DP on the film, John Schwartzman, ASC, immediately contradicts him.

“It is your vision,” Schwartzman says, reminding Ross that he is both the director and the writer of the piece. “My success on this movie came from getting inside your head.”

“He's being humble,” Ross retorts, giving no ground. “We spent months discussing this movie, planning shots in intimate detail. The results you see on film can't be the vision of any single person.”

Their friendly argument aside, production of the true-life drama — a period piece based on Laura Hillenbrand's novel about the rise of the legendary and unlikely 1930s horseracing champion, Seabiscuit — clearly illustrates the clever lengths to which some modern filmmakers will go these days to acquire complicated images in-camera. Coming in the summer of the digital epic — Matrix Reloaded, The Hulk, Terminator 3, et al — the collaboration among Ross, Schwartzman, and their crew to produce what Schwartzman insists are “probably the most realistic horse-racing sequences ever placed on celluloid” illustrates an entirely different filmmaking approach from those blockbusters.

Designing the Shoot

Certainly, the Universal film has a digital touch, but not a digital foundation — this was old-fashioned, gritty, location filmmaking. It's true that a few effects shops (primarily Sony Pictures Imageworks, The Orphanage, and Cinesite Hollywood) contributed a total of 180 digital shots to the project, but almost all of them were of the invisible variety, designed to delete modern buildings and add 1930s-era set extensions.

Also, at press time, the filmmakers were just beginning the digital-intermediate process at Technique, Burbank. Ross, however, insists that they weren't planning any fancy tricks with the footage that they captured at racetracks around the country over a span of 78 days earlier this year. Instead, the director says, filmgoers will get an up-close experience of what Schwartzman's camera team captured at those racetracks during the shoot — images painstakingly designed, ordered, and structured by Ross, Schwartzman, and their collaborators over three months prior to the start of production.

“I wanted classic composition, not being intrusive, not using a lot of modern techniques to yank the viewer out of the period,” says Ross. “But at the same time that we show what horseracing was like in that era, we're not trying to replicate movie-making of that era. That's why we played it wider than you would normally do for a movie of this scope. To get it done, John and I pre-designed cutting patterns, planning about 450 scenes and how they would link together visually.”

The consistent thread in that visual link was the autumnal and restrained color palette designed for the film, according to Ross, meant to reflect the story's Depression-era timeframe.

“The jockey silks were the only really colorful element,” says Ross. “Other than that, we were pretty restrained — not as much as Road to Perdition, but pretty close. Lots of red, brick, beige, brown, olive stuff in it. This was a difficult time in American history, and the color scheme was purposely designed to reflect that. The horse-racing stuff is a bit more colorful to be — as it really was back then — a bit of a break from the daily worries of the Depression.”

The basic problem the team had to solve in presenting the horse-racing sequences, according to Schwartzman, was “how to get our cameras into the middle of a horse race, and how to do it safely, since horse-racing is such a dangerous sport.” The solution was to build sophisticated camera insert cars and to use the most complex camera cranes and remote heads available. Schwartzman's experience shooting action for Michael Bay came in handy here, and he turned to his key grip, Les Tomita, and Hollywood vehicle engineer Allan Padelford to build and configure the tools he would need to film at tracks, including California's Pomona and Santa Anita, New York's Saratoga, and Kentucky's Keeneland.

Equine Cinematography

But first Schwartzman had to push past his aversion to shooting Super 35, rather than his preferred anamorphic approach. The DP explains that the widescreen nature of horseracing imagery made Super 35 attractive, but he had concerns about getting an adequate blowup out of the smaller negative space. After several tests prior to production, Schwartzman finally became convinced that the rapid evolution of the digital-intermediate process would mitigate the problems he experienced the last time he shot Super 35 — on Bay's The Rock (1995-96) — when he struggled through an optical blowup.

“[At several facilities around L.A.], we tested doing both digital and optical blowups of Super 35 footage last summer, and I concluded the digital blowup exceeded the optical blowup this time,” says Schwartzman. “I really felt super, focal-length lenses would help tell this story better, and would let me better demonstrate, and enhance, the speed of the horses. Also, since we'd be hanging the cameras off Technocranes at the racetracks, it made sense to have as little wear-and-tear as possible on the lenses. Since spherical lenses have fewer moving parts than anamorphic lenses, I felt Super 35 would be an advantage there, as well. For a while, I considered shooting the rest of the movie anamorphic and the horseracing in Super 35, but that was just too much work, money, and gear to drag around. Therefore, I eventually concluded I could shoot Super 35 and get a great digital blowup without the problems I had on The Rock. We took this movie to Technique primarily because some of the same guys Gary worked with when he helped pioneer digital intermediates a few years ago on Pleasantville (at Cinesite, Hollywood) are now over there. It helped quite a bit that I was working with Gary Ross, because I consider him the Jonas Salk of digital intermediates, among directors anyway. [At press time], we were just starting the [digital-intermediate] process, but I think the approach was definitely the correct one.”

Schwartzman turned to Tomita to figure out what kind of cranes he would need, and he hired Padelford to build two camera vehicles to help the crew keep pace with the horses used in the movie, including six horses to represent Seabiscuit at different ages, situations, and POVs.

“Allan built the cars Tony Scott used to get that amazing auto-racing footage on Days of Thunder, so we were pretty confident we could get what we needed with him helping us,” says Schwartzman. “He built us a 28ft.-long, 13-ton truck we could run down the side of the track at 40-plus miles-per-hour, safely putting cranes on the noses of the horses. The vehicle had two crane arms on it — one off the back was a 30ft. Technocrane arm, and one off the front was a fixed crane arm that could move up and down. That one had the new Wescam XR remote head on it — a new device with a rock-solid [three-axis] gyro platform that we were actually beta testing at the time we shot this movie. The Technocrane arm used a [Wescam] Libra head with a wide Panavision 4:1 zoom lens on it, and the camera on the Wescam XR had a [Panavision] 11:1 zoom lens with a doubler. This was the only way to get detail on the eyes of the jockeys and the horses, showing the horse's nose flaring, and so on. This technology was also crucial because we did not have unlimited use of the horses, and each race sequence, we had limited takes to get it right. We were allowed to run each horse only twice a day, and then that same horse could not work again for two days. So all this was designed to make sure we maximized the amount of usable footage we could get out of each take.”

Schwartzman adds that Padelford also built the production a second vehicle, dubbed the “S.S. Seabiscuit,” a flatbed vehicle about 12in. off the ground carrying two animatronic horses that slid up and down a short track on the flatbed. The purpose of that vehicle was to get moving, closeup footage of the jockeys in the heat of a race, as they bump and slide into each other.

“We had handheld cameras around them, which was the reason they were so close to the ground,” adds the DP. “We could move that thing about 70mph around the track, while getting closeup footage of the actors.”

Shooting real horses in action, though, even with the insert car, required careful planning and practice because horses can accelerate faster than vehicles.

“We had to figure out how much of a head start to give the car because it took a quarter-mile for the camera car to get up to full speed, while the horses could accelerate to full speed much quicker — they can generally go from zero to forty in three or four strides,” says Ross. “If we held the horses back, it makes them mad, and they would swing around and sometimes slam their heads around because they want to run full speed. It was a lot like a football team, with lots of people doing lots of little jobs to create a single physical entity moving at the same speed — in our case, around 45mph. That required months of planning, but it paid off. Eventually, we would hit that magic moment at the six-furlong pole where the camera would be in exactly the right position and the horse just sort of materialized right under it.”

Wireless Assist

Schwartzman adds that because the production filmed these sequences at racetracks, various crew members were often a mile or more apart. As a result, the crew made extensive use of wireless communication and control equipment. Even the jockeys wore wireless earpieces to hear instructions from Ross or Schwartzman during filming. The DP credits the world of television for making such technology available, and he suggests the use of those tools on feature films is becoming more widespread, creating what he calls “an interesting synergy” between TV and feature films.

“We did both wireless and microwave control of the camera heads, sometimes to decrease weight of the vehicle on sharp turns, sometimes just for safety or simplicity,” says Schwartzman. “And we were all communicating with wireless headsets — far more useful than the walkie-talkies we have traditionally used. Gary and I realized the ability to see our video playback live at the racetrack, and then communicate our needs immediately to people spread out over a mile, was essential for the efficiency of the production, and also to be more creative. To drive back to video village in the main grandstand each time and then try to pass the word around would be tough. We hired Aerial Video Systems (AVS, Burbank), and they created aerial microwave transmitters for our vehicles and cameras all over the racetrack, and they built me handheld monitors so I could scroll through the shots and contact everyone instantly across the racetrack. The whole thing worked fabulously and really helped us out.

“This kind of equipment is far more user-friendly than it used to be because of the innovations they are developing for television. In the feature film world, it seems like we always agonize over it. Will it work? Can we afford it? And yet, they use this stuff all the time at major golf tournaments to televise them live. So it's nice to see that technology working its way into the film business. We are not the ones driving that train, but it is nice to get the benefit of it.”

Technical Bits

Schwartzman's team also created pieces of black-and-white newsreel footage to mix with newsreel footage from the era. “We shot our own stuff with a 144-degree shutter to match the older film cameras,” the DP explains, “and then took it into online sessions to give it a similar look as the old footage, in terms of gamma and scratchiness. We combined the old and new elements onto a high-def, D5 master at 24fps, and played it back on two, stacked digital projectors in a regular movie theater, while filming the actors watching it.”

Visual-effects shots, meanwhile, permitted Ross to film whatever he wanted at modern racetracks without worrying what might creep into the shot's background. As Ross puts it, “CG is mainly used in this movie as a backplate, and it worked very effectively.

“Any time you deal with a period piece, you want a broad canvas, and digital effects have advanced so far that I can just erase or change anything from the modern shot to transform it into a period shot,” says Ross. “CG is a useful tool, though it doesn't have the same, obvious impact as it does in a modern sci-fi movie. For instance, we did extensive set extensions. We shot at the racetrack in Pomona, for example, and turned it into 1930s Tijuana because the foreground stuff worked well and CG elements were used as the backplate. As the director, this is also important because it makes the whole thing more affordable.”

In the end, Ross returns to the collaboration theme, insisting that common stylistic tastes among the key players on his crew are most responsible for giving the movie unique shots that fit his story, audience, timeframe, and budget.

“It all goes back to the work we did pre-designing the shots and developing cutting patterns for the sequences, developing context for each shot,” Ross says. “The movie has about 450 scenes, and we viewed them as individual sentences that, together, make up a paragraph. So, rather than saying three consecutive pages of our script were ‘a scene,’ we linked the visual design to the themes in the movie. By that, I mean we designed the shot list by connecting the way things looked in one scene to other scenes that may have been shot on a different day in a different place. When we have a jockey flying past the camera and then do a crane move to an actor talking about how riding a horse is like flying, we considered this the same scene, even if the actor was talking three months later in a different location.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.