"Ghostbusters"

Special Effects Feature

"Ghostbusters" director Ivan Reitman has said that if his

film is going to succeed, it must do so with or without special

effects--that first and foremost, it must succeed as a comedy.

Nevertheless, "Ghostbusters" has earned the distinction of being

the first major comedy to employ the large-scale special effect,$

usually reserved for space or horror films.

"From the very beginning, we felt it was important to make

this film in a first-class manner," says Reitman. "We didn't

want this to be 'Abbott and Costello Meet Some Ghosts,' where you know ghosts are present because you see picture frames move. I felt that 'Ghostbusters' should have the kind of large-scale effects that one would associate with a 'Star Wars' type of film, so the logical step was to try to get the people who indeed had created those effects.

Columbia Pictures presents "Ghostbusters," starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis and Rick Moranis. Ivan Reitman produced and directed from an original screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

"Ghostbusters" is the first film taken on by Entertainment Effects Group (in conjunction with Boss Film Corporation), the

new special effects house set up by Academy Award-winner Richard Edlund. Established to handle the effects on "Ghostbusters" and "2010," E.E.G's Marina del Rey headquarters are staffed by many of the best effects people in the business. "It's really a who's who," says Edlund. "We've got people here that have worked on every important special effects picture in the last 10 years or more. Some of the guys go back 40 years."

Edlund, along with his visual effect art director, John Bruno, and staff, had their work cut out for them due to the short production schedule and the nearly 200 effects required for "Ghostbusters." "Our approach was 'give us ghosts like we've never seen before,'" recalls associate producer Michael Gross. And so the people at E.E.G. set up their shop, including a rubber department, a shooting department, a shooting stage, an optical department, an animation department and an editorial department. The actual work, however, began in the machine shop, where Gene Whiteman designed and built the cameras.

"Our field is so rarified that almost everything has to be hot-rodded to some degree," comments Edlund. "That is, a lot of the equipment we need is not available off the shelf. We have to find something close and then modify it to fit our needs. One example is our 65mm camera which we built ourselves."

The visual effects themselves (or "gags") were created by various means. Edlund and his crew animated creatures and ghosts with stop-motion, rotoscoping and cell animation. Using miniatures, they re-created the Central Park West apartment where so many of the paranormal disturbances take place. By injecting dyes and

pigment into the water of a cloud tank, they were able to generate rolling skies and assorted atmospheric conditions. Forty artists and technicians, under the direction of Stuart Ziff. created the various fantasy creatures, including the "terror dogs," which are stone manifestations of ancient apparitions at the Central Park West apartment building. Randall William Cook designed, constructed and animated the stop-motion and miniature "terror dog" puppets, each with different capabilities.

"Technically, it take as many as 10 people to operate a single 'terror dog,'" explains Michael Gross. "There's a tremendous amount of mechanics involved--hydraulics, electronics, wires, as well as very skilled puppeteers sitting inside and operating. This whole animal has to be literally made from scratch, has to be designed, sculpted out of clay and cast in various types of foam, plastic and other materials that are flexible and workable, so the people can actually get inside."

Because "Ghostbusters" was shot both in New York and Burbank, a number of matte shots were needed to re-create New York 'in the studio and to enhance the buildings and skyline with the elements of fantasy necessary to create the temple set, which really comes to life during the film's climax. There are about SO mattes in the film, the majority being architectural mattes. In order to match the temple-top created by production designer John De Cuir on Stage 16, matte painter Matthew Yuricich added nearly 30 stories onto the building that was actually used in New York. Conversely, there were cone buildings in New York that were made shorter through matte painting so that the temple building will be the one the audience sees on the skyline.

Mark Stetson, supervisor at E.E.G.'s model shop, was responsible for making the model of Sigourney Weaver's apartment building with the temple on top. The miniature he built was 20 feet tall and was destroyed by a pyrotechnical "gag" during the film's climax.

"We had nearly as many people working on the special effects for 'Ghostbusters' as we had on our crew during the height of production," recalls associate producer Joe Medjuck. "Richard Edlund and his team were on an incredibly tight schedule. They had nearly 200 special shots to put into the film, and the majority of that work could only be done after we finished shooting,in February. That's when the hard work really began."

Columbia Pictures presents an Ivan Reitman Film, "Ghostbusters," starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis and Rick Moranis, produced and directed by Ivan Reitman from a screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

Movie search