Filled with virtuoso stunts and exciting escapes, Raiders of the Lost Ark presented very special challenges to the special-effects team at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic facility in Marin County, California. Effects supervisor Richard Edlund admitted that Steven Spielberg's enormously exciting action epic was a hard act to follow. "It was Steven at his virtuoso best " says Edlund admiringly, "but it made our job that much more difficult. Most of our work consisted of optical effects for the last reel of the film and included one of the most difficult subjects to portray - ghosts, eerie, scary, believable ghosts.

What does a real ghost look like? What would look believable and scary? Obviously no one has ever photographed a ghost, so the visual concept pretty much depends on legend and the imaginations of the artists at ILM.

Much of the conceptual work for Raiders was discussed in STARLOG #49 ("Story-boarding Special Effects"). Richard Edlund and his team at ILM were responsible for translating these storyboards into film. ILM's resources and personnel had to be carefully divided between Raiders and Dragonslayer which was also in post-production at the time.

At first, it was thought that the ghosts could be created with cel animation, but early tests soon proved unsatisfactory. Edlund was searching for something with a different look. Eventually, the old cloud tank from Close Encounters was refurbished and tests were shot with small ghosts in water. Several elements were shot using the tank to achieve the flow and feel of ghosts as insubstantial spectres floating and swimming through the atmosphere. Although there are four shots in the finished film that make use of cel animation to achieve ghosts and ghost effects, the bulk of the material was shot using other techniques including miniatures in the tank and full-scale puppets and actors. Special optical techniques were developed to combine the ghosts with live action footage with a transparent "look" that would not look like a simple double exposure or "burn-in."

Cloud tanks were developed by Doug Trumbull for Spielberg's CE3K and later seen in the De Laurentiis Flash Gordon. For Raiders, Edlund's team also generated cloud effects in the tank, but found other uses as with the ghosts.

"Steven likes to call it the Encounters tank," smiles Edlund. "And it is the same tank that was used for CE3K, though we rebuilt it and esigned our own filtering and support equipment for it. The principal is fairly well-known, now," explains Edlund. "You create an inversion layer in the tank using different temperatures and densities of solutions, for example a layer of salt water on the bottom of the tank with a layer of fresh water above it. you can float various pigments and dyes in the plane where the two layers meet thereby generating different types of cloud effects. We use what we call an 'atomic arm' (a remote-controlled hand, such as is used for moving isotopes in nuclear laboratories) to squirt pigment into the tank at the appropriate level. It is designed so you can control the insertion of the pigment from back near the camera, so you can see pretty much what the camera sees as you make a shot. The cloud tank has now become part of our repertoire."

While one part of the Raiders effects team was busying themselves creating elements for the film's breathtaking conclusion, others began with the comparatively few effects shots that occur elsewhere in the film. One of the earliest in the film (though it was actually shot near the end of the post-production schedule) is the shot of the China Clipper that Harrison Ford boards for the flight to Nepal.

"As luck would have it, we found an old flying boat that was in a ship yard a few miles from lLM," remembers Edlund. "It wasn't a real China Clipper, but it was close enough - a four- engine passenger seaplane. One of the engines still worked, but it was parked in a junkyard and would require more than a little matte artistry to place it at dockside in the water.

"We built a ramp next to the plane to suggest a dock and placed pans of water on the ground to reflect a moving water effect un-derneath the wings. Actors were dressed in appropriate 30s costume and filmed boarding the plane.

"Then l took a helicopter trip around the bay to find a pier that would look right for the foreground of the shot . I found such a pier on Treasure Island and made a deal with the Navy to film there. It was ideal; the sun was at the right angle, there was water in front of the pier and we could photograph the pier from a camera position on another pier.

"Actually the completed shot is made up of two separately photographed plates and a matte painting of the seaplane base, taxicabs, etc. tying the elements together. There was the plate of the pier, the plate of the seaplane and the matte painting by Alan Maley." Alan Maley worked with the Disney studios for ten years after leaving England. He is well-known for developing the front-projection system for combining a painting with live-action plates.

One of the most popular shots in the film was the shot at the end of the truck chase sequence with the Nazi car flying off the cliff. It was a cooperative interdepartmental effort. The cliff was a matte painting by Alan Maley, photographed by Neil Krepela. The animation of the Nazis and the car was handled by stop-motion artist Tom St. Amand with Him Veilleux as cameraman.

Richard Edlund outlines the basic steps necessary to complete this complicated shot. First a test pan on the painting had to be shot. The live-action plate was rear projected into a corner of the painting as the matte camera recorded the plate and painting with a slight pan of the matte camera to suggest the effect of tracking with the falling Nazis. This test footage was taken over to the miniatures stage and used as a guide to shoot the miniature car and Nazis. The match-up of the matte painting and the stop-motion miniatures was done by eye. The stop-motion miniatures were shot against our standard blue screen backing. Later, Bruce Nicholson's optical department went through the necessary steps to produce an anamorphic hold-out matte of the car and Nazis.

"This black and white travelling matte film element went back to the matte department just about the time Alan Maley was putting the finishing touches on the cliff painting. Then the matte department shot the final take of the matte painting with the live action rear- projected into the corner window, but this time the black and white travelling matte is running in bi-pack in the camera. This matte leaves a perfect 'window' of unexposed emulsion for the car and falling Nazi.

"Finally, the optical department took this 'held take' and exposed the miniature car and falling Nazi into the hold created by the travelling matte in the matte camera then the film gets developed."

Though Edlund confesses he would have liked a bit more time with the shot to 'tweak' the color balance a bit, still it gets consistent applause in the theater. Much of that applause, Edlund believes, is because the shot works so Well as a "pay-off" to the truck chase sequence.

By David Hutchison
Excerpts from:
Starlog Magazine
1982