All The World’s A Stage: Animal Attraction
Exclusive on-set reports from the latest episodes
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 01
Xena: Warrior Princess
Animal Attraction
Wide shot of Xena (Lucy Lawless) relaxing back on a chair. Dramatic pause. Healer (Ric Chan) announces earth-shattering news. Zoom to close up on Xena as her face registers shock and disbelief. Cut to commercial.
The Director of Photography for Animal Attraction, this particular episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, is Donny Duncan, who explains the “shock value” camera effect used to capture Xena’s incredulous expression at the dramatic announcement. “The set up is called a vertigo zoom, which is an old Hollywood term for a tracking [shot] where you zoom out for a shock effect [while pushing the camera in on a face], so that the scene around the character falls off in a spectacular way.” Duncan notes that this type of shot is far from easy, as the camera must move in and be “zooming out at the same time.” However, this particular scene has not required many takes at all, and the end result is a very effective shot. “The effect is that Xena’s image stays the same size, but the whole background kind of unfolds and unwraps.” Duncan is most enthusiastic when describing it all. “It’s quite a spectacular effort.”
On to the next shot - a continuation of the last scene - where Xena has the hapless healer up against the wall. It’s a very short piece, yet still requires big set adjustments. Between takes, Duncan describes the reasons why the shot is one of the classic film set situations, and how certain tricks of the trade can make it easier to get away with cutting corners in shooting. “You’ve got a three-walled set and you need to shoot against a fourth wall, which isn’t there for reasons of convenience and speed. Earlier this morning we shot at one part of a wall, and now we’re shooting at the other side of the wall, now that we have Lucy with us playing Xena.” The inference is that earlier, the crew have filmed the Healer, over the shoulder of a Xena stand-in. Now they reverse the shot and shoot against the same wall, with some minor alterations. “Basically we’ve turned the whole situation around 180 degrees and used a slightly different part of the wall. It’s difficult to get your head around…”
According to Duncan, this particular scene is about eight minutes into Animal Attraction. However, this is not to say that the first seven minutes have necessarily already been filmed. “We always shoot totally out of sequence. It’s part of the logic of the shooting, to do with scheduling. Storywise and scriptwise, it’s all to do with the logistics of shooting locations and other things at similar times, in a similar place. Often they’ll be shooting the ends of scenes before they even shoot the beginning. So things like wounds that occur early on in the script have to be pre-made, and we have to work out all the sequences of how they develop and heal during the script. It can be a real head trip for actors and crew alike.
For Animal Attraction, Duncan and the team have been filming for three days on exterior sets and have scheduled four days for interiors. In terms of what finally ends up on the screen, it works out to just over one third of the episode taking place outside. It makes sense, Duncan says, to get all the exterior filming done first. “We try to do a schedule with the outside days first and we decide in the afternoon whether to go inside the following day, depending on the weather. We rarely get caught out with bad weather because we’re always planning ahead - 16 to 18 hours in advance.”
Exactly how much screen time does all this planning yield? Duncan comments on the previous day where the crew was behind schedule and had to film more than usual in order to catch up. “Yesterday we had a particularly tough day - we were running behind, and we got a little under ten minutes in the studio.”