Shooting Horses on Courses

In-Camera Techniques on Seabiscuit

Under the guidance of director Gary Ross and DP John Schwartzman, ASC, the Seabiscuit crew uses in-camera techniques to capture gritty horseracing footage at California’s Santa Anita racetrack.

Production of Seabiscuit, a period piece based on Laura
Hillenbrand's novel about the rise of the legendary and unlikely 1930s
horseracing champion, illustrates the clever lengths to which some
modern filmmakers will go to acquire complicated images in-camera. The
collaboration among director Gary Ross, DP John Schwartzman, ASC, and
their crew to produce what Schwartzman says are "probably the most
realistic horse-racing sequences ever placed on celluloid" illustrates
an entirely different filmmaking approach from the typical summer
blockbuster.

Designing the Shoot

Certainly, the Universal film has a digital touch, but not a digital
foundation—this was old-fashioned, gritty, location filmmaking.
It's true that a few effects shops (primarily Sony Pictures Imageworks,
The Orphanage, and Cinesite Hollywood) contributed a total of 180
digital shots to the project, but almost all of them were of the
invisible variety, designed to delete modern buildings and add
1930s-era set extensions.

"I wanted classic composition, not being intrusive, not using a lot
of modern techniques to yank the viewer out of the period," says Ross.
"But at the same time that we show what horseracing was like in that
era, we're not trying to replicate movie-making of that era. That's why
we played it wider than you would normally do for a movie of this
scope. To get it done, John and I pre-designed cutting patterns,
planning about 450 scenes and how they would link together
visually."

The basic problem the team had to solve in presenting the
horseracing sequences, according to Schwartzman, was "how to get our
cameras into the middle of a horse race, and how to do it safely, since
horseracing is such a dangerous sport." The solution was to build
sophisticated camera insert cars and to use the most complex camera
cranes and remote heads available. Schwartzman's experience shooting
action for Michael Bay came in handy here, and he turned to his key
grip, Les Tomita, and Hollywood vehicle engineer Allan Padelford to
build and configure the tools he would need to film at racetracks,
including California's Pomona and Santa Anita, New York's Saratoga, and
Kentucky's Keeneland.

Equine Cinematography

But first Schwartzman had to push past his aversion to shooting
Super 35, rather than his preferred anamorphic approach. The DP
explains that the widescreen nature of horseracing imagery made Super
35 attractive, but he had concerns about getting an adequate blowup out
of the smaller negative space. After several tests prior to production,
Schwartzman finally became convinced that the rapid evolution of the
digital intermediate process would mitigate the problems he experienced
the last time he shot Super 35—on Bay's The Rock
(1995-96)—when he struggled through an optical blowup.

"[At several facilities around L.A.], we tested doing both digital
and optical blowups of Super 35 footage last summer, and I concluded
the digital blowup exceeded the optical blowup this time," says
Schwartzman. "I really felt super, focal-length lenses would help tell
this story better and would let me better demonstrate, and enhance, the
speed of the horses. Also, since we'd be hanging the cameras off
Technocranes at the racetracks, it made sense to have as little
wear-and-tear as possible on the lenses.

"I eventually concluded I could shoot Super 35 and get a great
digital blowup without the problems I had on The Rock. We took
this movie to Technique primarily because some of the same guys Gary
worked with when he helped pioneer digital intermediates a few years
ago on Pleasantville [at Cinesite, Hollywood] are now over
there."

Schwartzman turned to Tomita to figure out what kind of cranes he
would need, and he hired Padelford to build two camera vehicles to help
the crew keep pace with the horses used in the movie, including six
horses to represent Seabiscuit at different ages, situations, and
POVs.

"Allan built the cars Tony Scott used to get that amazing
auto-racing footage on Days of Thunder, so we were pretty
confident we could get what we needed with him helping us," says
Schwartzman. "He built us a 28ft.-long, 13-ton truck we could run down
the side of the track at 40-plus miles-per-hour, safely putting cranes
on the noses of the horses. The vehicle had two crane arms on it: one
off the back was a 30ft. Technocrane arm, and one off the front was a
fixed crane arm that could move up and down. That one had the new
Wescam XR remote head on it—a new device with a rock-solid
[three-axis] gyro platform that we were actually beta testing at the
time we shot this movie. The Technocrane arm used a Libra head with a
wide Panavision 4:1 zoom lens on it, and the camera on the Wescam XR
had a [Panavision] 11:1 zoom lens with a doubler.

"The movie has about 450 scenes, and we viewed them as individual sentences that, together, make up a paragraph," says director Gary Ross.

"This was the only way to get detail on the eyes of the jockeys and
the horses, showing the horse's nose flaring, and so on. This
technology was also crucial because we did not have unlimited use of
the horses, and each race sequence, we had limited takes to get it
right. We were allowed to run each horse only twice a day, and then
that same horse could not work again for two days."

Schwartzman adds that Padelford also built the production a second
vehicle, dubbed the "S.S. Seabiscuit," a flatbed vehicle about 12in.
off the ground carrying two animatronic horses that slid up and down a
short track on the flatbed. The purpose of that vehicle was to get
moving footage of the jockeys in the heat of a race, as they bump and
slide into each other.

"We had handheld cameras around them, which was the reason they were
so close to the ground," says Schwartzman. "We could move that thing
about 70mph around the track, while getting closeup footage of the
actors."

To read more on Seabiscuit check out
these Millimeter stories:
Shooting Horses on Courses