Indiana Jones Stuff - Digital Versions

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
RS said:
Have to participate in this thread with what little I've got!

We'll, it's more than most!:D

Stoo said:
JJ, you are insane and I love it! How the heck you're able to find this stuff is beyond me. No doubt about it, you are a real trooper.

Gosh! I'm blushing! So, back to regular service...

Here's one for all you completist who think they have it all...something you don't see everyday...

IndianaJones17a.jpg


IndianaJones18A.jpg


Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom novelisation in Mandarin...

close.jpg


It never ends...ever! Happy hunting!! (Before anyone asks - NFS!!)
 

Sakis

TR.N Staff Member
JuniorJones said:
If your desperate for the Baz Norman review I can have a dig around in the boxes.
Desperate no but I'd like to see it. Anyway, if it's much of a trouble don't bother I'll live. You have helped many times already. By the way happy new year to you and all other members.
 

Sakis

TR.N Staff Member
american_cinematographer1984_zpsd9f230ea.jpg


JuniorJones, I found this American Cinematographer at an online auction and it says it has an article on Temple. Do you have this copy? If yes how many pages is it?
 

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
Sakis said:
american_cinematographer1984_zpsd9f230ea.jpg


JuniorJones, I found this American Cinematographer at an online auction and it says it has an article on Temple. Do you have this copy? If yes how many pages is it?

If I remember it's not up to much - just part of the Academy special.
 

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
Follow the excitement of American Cinematographer I have decided to go all Rocko on youall and post the July 1984 Speilberg Interview - bit by tiny bit in text!

So everytime Rocko posts a section of the Lucas interview. I will follow...

Steven Spielberg on INDIANA JONES and the TEMPLE OF DOOM

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a fast-paced, finger-licking' good feast of chases and rollercoaster rides, bad guys and good, cliff-hangers and wild stunts, special effects and extravagant lighting. Watching it is a class in film-making, a study in how to piece together every conceivable element of imagination into one wide-screen dream.

It's a "popcorn" adventure with a lot of butter. A movie about a kind of life that is totally unattainable, where you wake up at one o'clock in the morning after seeing it and say, 'That's impossible. I don't buy it.' But you bought it when you were watching it, and that's all that's important."

Not the words of a critic, but of Indiana's director Steven Spielberg, who discussed the making of the film in an exclusive interview with American Cinematographer. The following remarks are taken from that interview, tracing the development of the visual style for the film from storyboard to cutting room.

"A lot of directors like to store things away in their heads, becoming the secret force of their own battle plans. They leave the crew high and dry, wondering what they're up to, and then they don't get that involved. I've always felt that the people who make direct contributions to what goes on the screen need to have, at least in my movies, a firm idea of what we're collaborating towards, and storyboarding is a way to communicate, before one frame of footage is exposed, what the director is thinking about. It's a way to draw the play on the chalkboard before the ball is snapped."

"Rather than bringing a script with me when I shoot a particular sequence, I work from storyboards. For Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I developed about 4,000 individual frames which were drawn by Ed Verreaux, Joe Johnston, and even Elliot Scott, our production designer out of England, who did some thumbnails and creative paintings himself."

"They were drawn like the Sunday funnies, from left to right, and I cut them up and put them in loose-leaf books. Often under each sketch, whether it was color or black and white, I'd have a description of action and all the dialogue, so each sketch was totally informational."

"I start with generic illustrations -of principal master shots, which gives me a geographical floor plan of how to pace the sequences and break them down into cuts. I use that master shot to pick my angles. I had about ten master shots for Indiana Jones, and then Elliot Scott caught up with me by building these elaborate miniatures of all the sets. So rather than having to work from a flat piece of paper one-dimensionally, I could take my Nikon with a 50-millimeter macro lens and get right down into a 10-inch cardboard set with half-inch cardboard characters and photograph angles."

I planned every shot that took place in the crusher room that way, in the quarry cavern, the shots in Indiana's and Willy's suite during the love tease, and a lot of the mine train chase that way. It was all there as sort of a banquet, a visual feast."
 
Last edited:
JuniorJones said:
Follow the excitement of American Cinematographer I have decided to go all Rocko on youall and post the July 1984 Speilberg Interview - bit by tiny bit in text!

So everytime Rocko posts a section of the Lucas interview. I will follow...
You certainly keep things interesting, but I don't negotiate with terrorists...hostages or not!

Alright, I give.

Your turn.
 

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
Rocket Surgeon said:
You certainly keep things interesting, but I don't negotiate with terrorists...hostages or not!

Alright, I give.

Your turn.

Okie! Dokie!

"The best example of this is in the spike chamber where I drew several renderings of insects crawling all over Kate Capshaw. I had all sorts of shots planned showing the migration of bugs up and around the actress, and I was going to do a study of that. But once I got on the set and saw how she was reacting to being around the bugs, I felt the best thing to do was throw the storyboards out and take one camera and hold Kate wide, and a second camera panning from the bugs up to her face. I shot most of her footage that way, with two cameras operating at the same time, reacting as she would react. We were being as spontaneous as she was. The situation for her was very real, as it would have been for anybody having a thousand creepy insects crawling all over her body.”

"There are a lot of things you can wing if you're making a film like Terms of Endearment, because it's very hard to get actors in a highly charged emotional sequence to follow your pre-concepts and oblige every one of your paint-by-the-number directions. I wouldn't ask an actor to do that if I made a relationship movie. ET was a relationship movie, and I didn't storyboard it except for the 40-odd special effects shots which I had to Storyboard for budgetary reasons. I didn't want to impose a kind of visual rhetoric on the kids because I knew they'd lose their spontaneity if 1 forced them to follow cartoon drawings. I wouldn't do that in a love story. But Indiana Jones is not a 'personal film.' It's an audience entertainment. It's fun for everybody. And all the actors learned to act in a different way. They learned to paint their emotions by the number. Kate Capshaw, Harrison Ford, and even the young boy, Ke Huy Quan who had never acted before, fell into step with the Storyboards. They were able to give credible performances when the light was hitting them at a certain time or when they hit the mark which put them into exact alignment with the blue screen. Indiana Jones is a very technical movie, and the actors had to be technical without losing their own believability as characters in order to pull it off.”

"Storyboarding also performs another service which I find fundamental. It exhausts me. It makes me tired and a little bored with the sequence. In a way, I've already shot that sequence by sketching it; then, by reviewing the sketches I'm able to look at the sequence and say, this has no imagination. This is not interesting. It forces me to rethink each scene. Often I'll sketch something in a safe manner, in a way that if worst came to worst, if it stormed and we lost a day I'd have something to fall back on.”

Your turn!
 

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
Rocket Surgeon said:
Now Junior, you call yourself...what do you call yourself?

Effervescent?

Rocket Surgeon said:
Well, we're waiting.

well-we-re-waiting-o.gif

The lady is not for turning...

11129644_9554.jpg


No wait...hang on...she is...

"I did this for four months on Indiana Jones. I mapped out everything. I knew exactly what the different pitfalls and cliff-hangers were going to be, and how they were going to be lit. Those four months also involved scouting locations and watching the sets go up. Standing in a basic plywood structure that hasn't yet been plastered can be inspirational. It showed me how high the sets were and how much breadth and depth they had. There were times I re-drew whole sequences because of the sets."

"We shot for 85 days in Macau, Sri Lanka, London, and in San Francisco. We shot all the blue screens at ILM. The jungles and elephants were in Sri Lanka, but all the exteriors of the palace were paintings and miniatures.
"The movie was shot principally 80 percent on sound stages in London and 20 percent outdoors. For me, this was a pleasure. I love location shooting, but the older I get, the more I'm getting the homing instinct to build it and shoot it indoors. I don't like to wait. When it rains on me, and I want sun, or when it's sunny and I want it to be overcast; I feel beter when I can create the environment."

"We had a budget of $28 million, and we delivered Paramount a $28 million movie. I went over budget in some sequences, and came in under budget in others. I went over schedule with certain scenes, and came way under in others. It was almost all a wash. We actually came in five days under schedule."

"Sometimes I consciously cut days out of the schedule knowing I needed five more elsewhere. It was like robbing Peter to pay Paul. I needed extra days in the quarry room, so I took days out of the banquet scene. I needed more days on the mine train set, so I took a day out of the spike chamber. It's really a matter of how much time you give the crew to finish a shot."

"When I needed to cut a day out of a sequence, I went to Dougie (Slocombe, the director of photography), and said I needed him to help me buy a day or two that I had to have two weeks later when we would get to the quarry set. Could we go a little faster? And Dougie would go faster, the whole crew would get on our side, and I'd get 30 shots in that single day as opposed to 19 the day before. It's just a way of cooperating to buy time later. Of course you can't make deals with the crew to work faster all the time. I only needed to rob Peter to Paul perhaps four or five times. Maybe the lighting could have been better for Bougie's taste, but we both agree the audience doesn't notice. The overall impression is a beautifully photographed movie. I'm that way directorially. There are certain sequences where I'm really proud of the shots, and others that just state the events of the story. There are those scenes where I want to selfishly say, 'Look what I did,' and Dougie has his moments where he can say that, too."

"Movies are unharnessed dreams, but if they become too costly, or if danger is a factor, or it will take ten years to get there, you have to pull back on the tack and compromise your dream. The mine train chase, for example, seemed impossible before we started shooting it, but with the help of Dennis Muren and all the creative geniuses at Industrial Light and Magic, we made the impossible, possible. In other instances there were things I visualized but couldn't do because of time and money. I wanted the quarry fight to be even more complicated than what's on the screen right now. One of the reasons I enjoy making Indiana Jones movies is because I'm a firm believer that in an adventure saga every sequence needs to have two or more activities happening simultaneously. Where Indiana is accusing the Maharajah and the palace authorities of stealing the Shankara stone from the ancient village, on the other side of the table in this four-star palace restaurant, unspeakable entrees are being served to Willy Scott and Short Round. With the sequence inside the crusher room as Indiana and Short Round are about to be crushed or skewered, whichever comes first, Willy is having her own problem with tens of thousands of insects. But when we finally arrive at the quarry scene where Indiana fights the giant temple guard on the moving belt heading to the stone crusher, I was interested in creating a third and fourth series of occurrences. No major sequences were eliminated due to production considerations because we had underwritten the action as opposed to overwriting it. I felt everything was lean. All the action sequences in the script were in short form. We talked about the most amazing mine train chase, the most amazing crusher room scene, and the most amazing cliffhanger over a looo-foot gorge. But it all didn't make it on paper, and I found it was a lot easier in my storyboard to extend these sequences even beyond what we had written."

"The crusher room scene with the fight on the conveyor belt was particularly hard to pull off because by the time we got to the end of the take, we'd be too close to the crusher. I'd look down at the crusher and say, 'Hey, we aren't supposed to be anywhere near the crusher for another two pages. Get back.' The continuity was a very hard. The sequence starts 70 yards away and by the end of the sequence, they are actually at the crusher going into it. But I had to cheat all over the place. I cheated it by 20 feet a shot. Sometimes were 10 feet closer to it, and four cuts later, 20 feet further away from it. But what makes this film and movies like this believable, is that we never defy gravity. No one goes off a cliff, stands in midair, looks down and waves bye-bye. Yet we come very close to that, and its my job to walk the thin line between the incredulous and the impossible. To keep it entertaining without tipping one way or the other. And to keep it so fast, the audience doesn't have time to question what works and what doesn't."
 
Can't say thanks enough, :)hat:), especially when I stumble over a few lurkers poking around this thread and the Rare Photos thread who claim to have rarities but don't share. Parasites.

(n)

Too bad its not a different finger...
 

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
Rocket Surgeon said:
Can't say thanks enough, :)hat:), especially when I stumble over a few lurkers poking around this thread and the Rare Photos thread who claim to have rarities but don't share. Parasites.

(n)

Too bad its not a different finger...

I see them too as they wait like vultures to feed their own nests or stroke their own ego's.(n)
 

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
JuniorJones said:
We'll, it's more than most!:D



Gosh! I'm blushing! So, back to regular service...

Here's one for all you completist who think they have it all...something you don't see everyday...

IndianaJones17a.jpg


IndianaJones18A.jpg


Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom novelisation in Mandarin...

close.jpg


It never ends...ever! Happy hunting!! (Before anyone asks - NFS!!)

Anyone got a copy of this other than myself?
 

Raven7dp

New member
Per Rocket Surgeon's request, I wanted to post in here what I posted in the American Cinematographer thread.

Junior,
in appreciation of your devotion and generous spirit of showing us all things Indy, I want to show you something you may or may not know of. Being a member of the International Cinematographers Guild, I receive a magazine every month dedicated to the craft of which I am a part. This is the May 2008 issue for KOCS. Enjoy.

Jonathan

Convoy_21.jpeg


ICG_1.jpeg


ICG_2.jpeg


ICG_3.jpeg


ICG_4.jpeg


ICG_5.jpeg
 

JuniorJones

TR.N Staff Member
Raven7dp said:
Junior,
in appreciation of your devotion and generous spirit of showing us all things Indy, I want to show you something you may or may not know of. Being a member of the International Cinematographers Guild, I receive a magazine every month dedicated to the craft of which I am a part. This is the May 2008 issue for KOCS. Enjoy.

Thanks for the contribution and the comment. I try to foster the evironment of sharing and apprechiate your effort.

Much is left to be uncovered as I feel we may only be scratching the surface, somewhere, in the bottom of someone boxes that will enlighted us all. As with the study of archaeology there still surprises left.;)
 
Last edited:
Top