Thomas Ackerman, director of photography on Are We There Yet? describes the process of shooting this ambitious production as "a huge challenge and more than a little daunting, because there were weather considerations, a great deal of shooting inside an automobile, staging accidents, horses and even a mechanical deer."
Weather was a major factor. Shooting took place during Vancouver’s rainy season. "This is the wettest movie I have ever worked on,” laughs Levant. “We wet the streets. We spritzed the windows. We work in the rain. We pretend it's not raining when it is raining. We drench people. And it’s cold — there's just no getting away from it."
Ackerman devoted much of his pre-production time figuring out the logistics of shooting three actors confined in a car “for page after page, scene after scene.” Early on, he decided to investigate the feasibility of utilizing rear-projection, a time honored technique. “The reason I wanted to use rear projection is because it allows you to achieve a nice photographic image behind the actors while they’re sitting in the car. It allows them the freedom to concentrate on the acting in the scene and gives me the ability to control the lighting as well as the composition of the background and foreground of each scene.”
Ackerman went beyond the traditional methods of rear projection by utilizing a cutting- edge digital projection system. Levant was impressed by the results, noting that through Ackerman’s ingenuity he was able to shoot scenes from a variety of angles within the car "and I didn’t have to do it on a road while being towed up and back continuously throughout the day for each new take.”
For the digital rear projection, plates were shot from various points of view by the second unit crew, providing the backgrounds for each sequence. For the middle ground of each shot a 30-foot track moved real objects like trees through the frame, while in the foreground the three actors sat inside the car which was on a pneumatic-hydraulic computerized motion base.
“We basically took the shell of a 6,000 pound Lincoln Navigator and placed it on a rig that made all kinds of movements,” explains Levant. “We tried to give the actors a good ride but not shake them up too bad. It’s essentially the same technology that is used in the most advanced entertainment rides in theme parks.”
That Navigator shell was but one of many Navigators used in the movie, observes production designer Stephen Lineweaver. "They started out thinking they would need 8 Navigators but by the end that number climbed to 14. The Navigator functioned prominently as a comical metaphor for Nick's ever-changing life condition. At the outset, the Navigator proudly rolls out of a showroom all shiny and new. By the end, it's a destroyed low-rider riding on impossibly small tires.”
Levant points out that the Navigator journeys from "being new and pristine and out in the world for the first time turning heads to a burnt husk of its former self. It’s dropped off mountains, run through forests, thrown around freeways, smashed into guardrails. The doors are thrown into posts and parking lots. It takes a great deal of punishment and finally succumbs."
Movie Database
In Theaters
