GoKawiilUpon arriving, the oval Mondoshawan craft hovers on energy beams above a bizarre rock temple. The production crew painted a doorway on a gigantic rock rising from a dry lake bed, transforming it into the temple exterior. Most of the plates were shot by Besson and Fifth Element cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, AFC, with Digital Domain's visual effects director of photography, Bill Neil, acting as an advisor.
After a decade working as a camera assistant and camera operator, Neil began his effects career at the then-fledgling Industrial Light & Magic as an equipment designer and camera assistant on The Empire Strikes Back and then became a camera operator on Return of the Jedi. Neil subsequently went to work at Boss Film, where he first met Mark Stetson in 1983, before joining Digital Domain a decade later.
Neil had worked with demanding directors in the past, but Besson insisted that all of his creative options be left open — a caveat which could have spelled trouble for visual effects work. "We shot a number of alternate background plates — different angles — and it was only in the editing phase that we saw what was going to work," Neil recalled during a recent phone conversation from London, where he was about to begin work as visual effects supervisor on the upcoming James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. "I didn't have a camera crew, so Luc and Thierry photographed all the plates, and I helped them technically with post issues."
Besson had a very symmetrical, center-weighted cinematographic style in mind for The Fifth Element. While the director had shot his previous films in 2.35:1 anamorphic, The Fifth Element would be shot in Super 35, partly to accommodate the intense visual effects demands. This decision meant that the production didn't have to shoot VistaVision background plates or use duplicate camera packages. The main unit used Arriflex cameras, and Stetson, Neil and company reluctantly agreed to use the Arris for their effects work. "We were skeptical," Neil admits. "We tried to push toward Panavision because we felt we had a better chance of having a steady plate camera, but the Arris were pretty good. The production was using the Arri 535B, and most of our plates were shot with a production camera. We also used a prototype of the new 435 high-speed camera. About halfway through production, Arriflex replaced our prototype with one of their first production 435 cameras. I was amazed at the performance of this camera in terms of its steadiness at all speeds. In fact, it was rock steady, good enough for matte work from two frames to 150 frames a second — in both forward and reverse. I've never seen any camera made anyplace in the world that could do that."
While the Arris proved their worth, the effects team was concerned about stories of cameramen who refused to shoot Kodak's European-finished stocks because of steadiness issues, and convinced the production to import Rochester-finished emulsions for anything that was to involve visual effects, as well as the surrounding footage. Ultimately, Arbogast used Kodak 5293 for non-effects sequences, and shot the picture's considerable amount of greenscreen work on the slower 5248 stock. While most effects plate interiors were shot on 5293, Neil shot some plates of the "vertical hunk of rock" that served as the temple on 5245 at "quasi-magic hour.
Though the Mauritania plates were filmed prior to a formal design of the effects shots, Stetson says that the series yielded "a nice sequence of six spaceship shots." The 8’ Mondoshawan spaceship miniature was shot by Neil's visual effects co-cinematographer, Paul Gentry, who matched the model lighting to the plate's rosy sunset look as the Mondoshawan visit the temple and then lift off again.
According to the film's storyline, the Earth finds itself in crisis in the year 2259 A.D. The Mondoshawan are on a mission to bring all five elements to Earth when their mothership is shot down over an alien planet by the dreaded Mangalores (realized with excellent alien designs by Nick Dudman). As envisioned by Besson and Stetson, their tiny ZFX 200 fighters make a dynamic dive on the massive Mondoshawan craft, raking its surface with fiery missiles. "We shot the move on the Mondoshawan ship first, then did different moves on the little ZFX 200 fighters," Stetson remembers. "We had two scales for the miniature attackers: a cleaned-up design maquette measuring about 16" long was used for long shots, and a 4' miniature for close-ups.
The camera follows directly behind the devastated craft as it crashes into the planet's surface. Flames erupt through its shell, which crumples on impact, recalling the destruction of the Hindenburg. "I think Mark patterned it after an actual crash he saw on film where a pretty sizable jet plane crashed into the ground at an airshow," Neil says. "It went in at high speed and disintegrated little by little from the nose to the tail. That was the guiding principle: this thing was boring in and breaking up beyond the diameter of the ship, whose width covers the impact point."
The "destruction" of the Mondoshawan ship was shot on a soundstage. "We turned the whole environment 90 degrees, so we were looking across the stage at the tail of the ship and pulling our motion-control camera back," Neil says. "We created interactive lighting effects, like firelight, as a sweetener to help join the model to the pyrotechnic plate."
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