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BEHIND THE BLUE SCREEN

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In the romantic thriller Ghost, Patrick Swayze is Sam Wheat, a novice dead person desperate to communicate with his earth-bound girlfriend. To do that, he must track down a surly specter (Vincent Schiavelli) who stalks the subways and can help him master his new and still puzzling spiritual skills. In this scene, Swayze stands on a subway platform and leans his head into an oncoming train, scanning the inside of the cars as they appear to roar straight through his face. "To the audience Sam looks like a normal human being, but in fact he's an apparition," says ILM's Nicholson, who spent seven and a half months working on 50 of these "pass-through" shots for the film. "In order to show that, we make this solid character move through solid surfaces." On the blue-screen shot of Swayze, the actor's physical talents were an asset. "Having a dance background, Swayze has a really good sense of where to put his body in space and how to put it in a position necessary for the camera," Nicholson says. "It was pretty remarkable." In New York City, two months earlier, Nicholson and his three-person crew assembled footage of a speeding subway car and a stand- in leaning into the open door of a stopped train (not shown). That created the position to be filled by Swayze's blue-screen shot. Intricate measurements of the camera position were also taken at that time so that the correct perspective could be duplicated exactly when photographing Swayze. & To create a realistic effect, the crew had to solve the problem of the train's windows. There had to be a now-you-see-his-face-now-you-don't effect, as the transparent surfaces and solid doors passed alternately through him-a difficulty that "we didn't get into until we started to composite and saw that something was wrong," says Nicholson. This first matte (3), created by blocking out the blue background, will indicate Swayze looking through a window while the subway rushes by. The second matte (4) indicates Swayze minus the part of his face that would be obscured when he passed through solid metal. "We developed the strategy so that it would be dropped or used depending on what was passing him," explains Nicholson. On the completed composite, Nicholson says, the alternating surfaces were "an additional enhancement to make the entire effect a bit more believable. It's sort of a subliminal thing that when somebody sees the film they don't say, 'Hey, that's neat.' It just kind of works psychologically to make it a more convincing shot, so someone won't say, 'Oh, that's fake.'"