Neal insisted on shooting background plates of the city before filming the cars in order to create interactive lighting on the vehicles that related to their environment. Although Besson’s center-centered perspective was contrary to Neel’s experience in composition, the cameraman found that it presented some interesting problems to solve – such as creating depth while shooting a limited number of buildings stretching to infinity through digital matte painting.
The challenge also included Besson’s instruction that the sequence take place in daylight. “I was shocked,” admits Neil. “Miniatures often get away with the fact that you don’t see much of them, but this whole sequence happened late in the day, and it had to be put to the test. The roof of the stage was only a few feet above the tops of the buildings, so we tested to see how we could light that expanse of the scene. Luckily, my gaffer, George Ball, and my key hold, Joe Celeste, were able to bring my ideas to life on stage. We had a simple skylight that came from above, and then a golden key light, which was supposed to be the late sun coming through any gaps between the buildings, but instead of having all the key lights coming from roughly the same direction, I took the broken light coming from the buildings, often at steep angles, which gave the city an energy, a modulation of light that was quite wonderful.
“I also created aerial perspective in the scene so that as the distance from the camera increases, the contrast of the scene decreases. Darker things get lighter and lighter things get darker until eventually they become dull. I took this into account in my miniature lighting and implemented it in the matte painting, which gave us a lot of depth in the streets.”
Stetson had laid out some basic specifications for the type of motion-control rig needed to shoot across the valley of buildings toward the floor: “I wanted to fly the cameras down from the roof of the stage in miniature, so we mounted the cameras on a cruciflex motion-control rig, a motion-control crane with a vertical tower for descent and a horizontal crossbeam for forward motion.”
Stetson also planned to thread the camera onto a 20′ extension arm via miniature roads. The four-feet-wide streets were so narrow that Neal’s motion-control camera could not move on a horizontal track between buildings. For the climax of the chase, when Korben’s cab is chased through a girder-walled tunnel beneath an underground railroad beneath the city, Stetson expected Neal to use an extension arm to travel in the 1/6-scale tunnel model. Although the miniature set measured 48′, it was still not long enough for high-speed chases. “We shot it twice to make it appear twice as tall, displacing the camera back 48′ the second time,” says Stetson. “We needed a very long camera track and two sets of mattes to accomplish it, but with Karen’s help the pieces lined up perfectly. The tunnel chase was almost entirely mini. Brian Grill added some CG debris, some 2-D debris, and revived smoke from a previous show to sweeten the scene. The cab is in the foreground, the vanishing point is in the center, and there’s a lot of weaving and bobbing.”
At five minutes and more than 70 shots, the cab-chase sequence represents about a third of the digital domain fifth element Effect. Most of the shots involve CG traffic, and occasionally CG hero cabs and police cars. “We have digitized the 1/6-scale [models of] Korben’s cab and the police car,” says Goulakas. “The hero police car dive after Leeloo’s jump was in CG because we wanted to see all six surfaces; There was no place to hide the armature mount. you’d be surprised. Our CG traffic pipeline enabled us to say, ‘We want a certain percentage of cabs, police cars, red cars, blue cars.’ The artists worked with low-resolution versions of the traffic, and then we would substitute real traffic on the output to the tenderer.’
Sequence supervisor Sean Cunningham coordinated the creation of all the pieces for the cab chase, and shader supervisor Simon O’Connor conceived all the shaders and surfaces for the traffic. But the job of putting all the different elements together fell to compositing supervisor Egstad. “Getting the color balance and contrast range of all the daytime objects right was a big challenge,” says Egstad. “We created hundreds of computer graphics cars that wouldn’t fit unless we blurred them a bit and increased their contrast. Also, matte edges are almost unforgiving, so we used a lot of different atmospheric tricks like adding a nice optical glow from the headlights and adding density fog and using filters in flames to remove the curse from CG objects.”
Amidst the madness of production, Stetson was left to his artistic instincts in terms of directing the development of the cityscape – a potentially dangerous situation. Stetson recalls, “We took Luke on stage while we were shooting, but he was just looking at stuff without reacting, because he was so absorbed in directing his actors.” “If I had really been wrong about what Luke wanted, it would have cost us a lot in terms of time and money.
“Finally, when we were well past the point of no return design-wise, I went to his editing suite in Malibu and showed him a color print of a test shot of one of the city’s first big model setups, which represented hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. Up to that point, it was unknown whether he was going to bless it or not. Luke looked at it and his face completely lit up. He lifted the photo to show his editor, Sylvie Landra, facing him. Pointed. And then pointed with a big smile on my face. It was really a huge relief.”
For more information on this production, from the same issue: Subtle Grandeur: The Fifth Element offers a new science-fiction aesthetic.
Besson later adapted Jean-Claude Mézières’s Valerian: spatio-temporal agent in the movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), photographed by Thierry Arbogast, AFC.
If you enjoy archival and retrospective articles on classic and influential films, you’ll find many more AC historical coverage Here.
<a href