Cinema Canada (Jun 1978)

A man’s home is his...castle? sell as fast as I could make them. So I geared up. I was entirely into a manufacturing operation and they were on the phone every day urging me on to greater production levels, shipping them to Israel and France, Italy and everywhere. Then all of a sudden the orders ceased. I found out later it was because the folks at Lee Electric had decided to manufacture and sell them for themselves. Unfortunately, at the same time my American agents (with whom I had made a similar deal through Lee Electric) also ceased their orders from New York because of course Lee Electric had supplied them with their version of my product. Such is life in the fast lane. So you put together a machine shop but it was basically metalworking in aluminum. What else have you constructed? Well, I’ve built the better part of a copy of an Oxberry Animation for Nelvana here in Toronto. They complain about it but they do run it 18 hours a day with hardly any problems. They didn’t pay me very much money for it so that strikes me as being a good reason why I should ignore their complaints. They use it and it works and they complain and I ignore 8/Cinema Canada them. It seems to be a fairly satisfactory relationship. I also built... guess you'd call it a Vertical Animation Stand... for live action filming for the famous Starship Invasions. It proved to be successful for what it was supposed to do, but it ended up being used in kind of a chaotic fashion. To go Slightly into detail what did this glass arrangement achieve? The idea was that the cameraman sits in a rather large blacked out housing and in front of him is a large picture window, a large piece of glass with a tiny model of a flying saucer. This saucer model is lit in the same fashion as the background and the lighting is bright enough that the whole filming operation can take place at F22 which gives it an infinite depth of field for a wide angle lens. And providing that the live action people in the background are reacting in the correct way, the small model — in this case a flying saucer — (which is in fact close to the lens) appears to be very far away. It moves around and people react to it and that is the essense of the device: The major problem with that was after the thing was designed to be used for three shots, always about two miles from my workshop, it was decided that it should be trucked up and put in small boxes and shipped to Paris, Rome, Hong Kong and Cairo. So after it was chopped up it had all the reliability and complexity of the Canadian postal system. Although it might be resurrected from the ashes, to see it now, it looks like a telephone exchange. I know that you have redesigned a number of lights; minibrutes and softlights, and built them out of aluminum instead of steel as the famous Mole Richardson does, What was your reason in doing that? Well, I spend most of my day carrying lights in and out of trucks, up and down stairs, putting them on and off stands, raising them up and down and spinning them around, and as soon as you make a light out of welded steel — or in some cases even cast steel — then you’re hauling an awful lot of hardware around. Aluminum is nice material to work with. It’s lightweight. With careful design: it can be made as strong as steel, and it disipates the heat much more rapidly, so in a lot of situations your bulb life is longer because your bulbs are in a cold state. The other reason I built them out of aluminum is that aluminum is a much easier metal to work with. If you have a pair of tin snips and a pop riveter you can make a softlight. I have softlights now — 4K softlights that weigh . 22 pounds — that have been on the regular rental basis for 3 years which don’t have any dents and work quite nicely. So with all this arrangement of lights and so on, what features have you lit? Well, the unreleased feature is as Canadian as the War Measures Act. I took great pride in doing lighting for Henry Fiks on a wonderful feature called 125 Rooms of Comfort which means absolutely nothing to anyone who didn’t work on it. It was one of those Canadian Film Development Corp. $125,000 features which was a fine artistic success but which never saw the light of day. It sits on someone’s shelf. I guess I’d better go in a backwards fashion because my life is always like a receding horizon. In 1977, I did the lighting on the Markowitz feature about the Demeter