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Soylent Green (1. Art of the Title. Main title designer CHUCK BRAVERMAN revisits his work on the opening title montage and discusses its creation. Can you talk a little about where you were in your career when you were asked to do the Soylent Green titles? When I graduated from USC film school, I was in the Air Force reserve for a while. Then when I got out, my mother actually met Tommy Smothers in a restaurant bar ! At the time, in 1. Smothers. They literally made the Comedy Hour just upstairs. I called, made a meeting, and Tommy looked at my other work and we discussed doing a film on the history of the United States . I made it and it aired on the weekend before the November . It catapulted me into a career. ![]() Soylent Green NetflixNot only did it appear on the Smothers. So I got a reputation right away for being the king of the fast- cut montage. I ended up doing dozens of commercials and lots of title sequences. How old were you in . So in 1. 97. 3 I had done a bunch of montage title sequences for John Milius. I ended up doing all of the montages in the sequence in Same Time Next Year. I did an award- winning commercial for Xerox about their new color Xerox machines. I was being hired by a lot of different companies to do this . American Time Capsule was made with a couple of friends in a garage with a horizontal, homemade 1. ![]() Beaulieu camera, one frame at a time, manually. But then we moved onto the Oxberry animation stand which I had learned to use at USC to make precise, calculated moves in stills. If you look at American Time Capsule carefully you will see I took the soundtrack to that and literally synced my cuts up to it . I did those fast- cut montages for many years. I loved doing it. How did you get involved with Richard Fleischer and the folks on Soylent Green? Soylent Green is a 1973 American science fiction thriller film directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, and, in his final film, Edward G. The film combines the police procedural. Taken from a 70's film. Soylent Green is a supposedly soy and lentil based nutrition source which later turns out to be made out of harvested humans hence the quote 'Soylent green is people'. ![]() I think I was actually called by Walter Seltzer, who was a producer. I was pretty well known by then; New York ad agencies were calling fast- cut montages the . When I got the call from Walter Seltzer I went in and met with him and Richard Fleischer. They wanted to do an opening that was a history of the world. I went and did all the research, got the stills, and we talked about what it was gonna be. I brought in Betty Green who was a filmmaker friend of mine, the wife of a schoolmate, Bruce Green. As I recall, Betty and I worked on the animation. I did most of the research to get the stills, hired a stock agency, and then I don't remember who did the music.. I like to cut to the music . What I liked to do in those days . Then, I would take a piece of blank leader in the K. E. M. Watching this again right now, you can see that it speeds up when the music speeds up, and slows down the when the music slows down. How did you approach the research and finding all of the photos? When you're working for an esteemed, experienced producer like Walter Seltzer and a very experienced director like Richard Fleischer, you go over and have meetings at the studio, which was then MGM, now Sony, and you sit around talking about what exactly it is that they want. Then I went out and got a bunch of stills before I put anything on camera, and I came in and showed them all the stills so there weren't going to be any surprises for them. They paid for whatever the stills cost. Then it was shot on an Oxberry animation stand. Just like flying on a trapeze: it's easy for the trapeze artist, but when you're doing it for the first time, you have to know quite a few intricacies. Creating photo montages before the advent of digital technology must have been incredibly laborious work. Could you describe your process? All this now would be done digitally in After Effects, right? The Oxberry is basically a 3. It's like a motion picture camera on a stand pointing down at a table, in essence, and the camera moves vertically on the stand. There are lights on either side. So each photo or still was mounted on a blank cell so you had a spatial reference . If you want to start in the upper left hand corner, then go close up on a building in the background, and pull out to reveal the whole city or crowd or whatever, you literally control the table underneath the camera . You have vertical directions, so you have field number 1. One frame at a time, 2. If you want a move to take one second, you have to do a calculation to know how much you move the camera vertically to get from field one, which is a close- up, to field 1. So you shoot each photograph separately and then edit them together? Well, yes and no. You shoot each frame individually, but if you have calculated and done everything right, you have very little editing to do afterwards. Right. You know where you are in the film so you. Sometimes you have to make adjustments and make something longer or shorter. But you know, with American Time Capsule people would say to me ! It was in- camera, for the most part. There will probably be only four or five cuts in the whole thing, and the Soylent Green title sequence is the same. All of it was pretty much built into the camera, there was little, if any, actual editing after the fact because it was all done when we were laying out the shooting for the Oxberry animation stand. And it. Just like flying on a trapeze: it's easy for the trapeze artist, but when you're doing it for the first time, you have to know quite a few intricacies. It can get complicated; you wouldn. You have to ease in and out of these moves so they. You make these L- frame things, so when you want to see one field, you put your two Ls together. Imagine putting your fingers and your thumbs together to make a small square . And if you make a bigger square, that. You have to figure that out and get a little experience, but yes, once you know how to do it, it's not that difficult. Just like the trapeze. What was the working relationship with Director Richard Fleischer like? What sticks in my mind the most is having become friendly with him and being allowed to go in and watch dailies of what he was shooting. In 1. 97. 3, I had very little experience on a real movie set. I had shot films at USC and I'd graduated from film school, but what you don. I was astonished at just how much film they shot to get one scene, how long it took. I was on the set one or two days, but when I would come in to show him what I had done in the screening room, they would let me come in early and see the dailies. It was an eye- opener for me. In terms of my relationship with Richard, he was very friendly, very open, very giving, very nice but very business- like. I wanted to impress them. I had a production company going; in 1. I probably had eight or nine full- time employees in the office up on Sunset Boulevard. I was about 2. 8 years old. How long did the sequence take to create, all in all? The longest part was the research phase, which probably took me six weeks. Then, putting it into the sequence with Betty probably took a couple of weeks. A little over two months, I suppose. And what attracted you to the Soylent Green project in the first place? It! You know, working with Richard Fleischer, MGM.. It's something I had done a few times already and it was an honor. I was thrilled to be working on this movie. The idea of being able to hang out on the set and see Leigh Taylor Young and Charlton Heston and Edward G. It was film. SUPPLEMENTAL: End credits. View the credits for this sequence. Title Designer: Chuck Braverman. Soylent green trailer - You. Tube. Playlists werden geladen..
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