Insider of the Month | Ramesh Raskar

Posted: January 9, 2012

A prominent M.I.T. technologist behind
a new camera imaging system capable
of a trillion frames per second takes a
long, hard look at the J.J. Abrams -
Steven Spielberg retro thriller Super 8.
Interview conducted and condensed By CRAIGH BARBOZA

This month’s column covers writer-director J.J. Abrams’ hit movie Super 8, which tracks a group of adolescent filmmakers whose small town is terrorized by an extraterrestrial. The PG-13 film, out on Blu-ray and DVD, is a throwback to the early Steven Spielberg classics Abrams devoured growing up.

The director of M.I.T.’s Camera Culture research group and noted technologist Ramesh Raskar is not impervious to the Spielbergian spell either. As a boy, he cried for two days straight just to persuade his father to take him to see Jaws (he got his wish). Years later, he decided to study computer graphics after watching Spielberg’s CGI blockbuster Jurassic Park. Today, Raskar, who holds over 40 U.S. patents as well as numerous awards and honors, is widely considered one of the world’s preeminent experts in an emerging field known as computational photography. Along with his team of researchers, he has been working on the next generation of cameras and corresponding display systems. He’s already developed a technique to produce 6-D images, which he explains are basically “hyper-realistic 3-D images that respond to ambient light.” His latest project, unveiled last month, is an ultraslow-motion camera system powerful enough to capture photons of light traveling through space at roughly a million times the speed of a bullet.

Does he have a soft spot for vintage Super 8 cameras? “I’m not the kind of person who is nostalgic for old technology,” says Raskar, who also co-heads M.I.T.’s Center for Future Storytelling. “When people start talking about the history of any technology I get pretty bored very quickly. I want to know the lessons learned but I’m not interested in all the ‘who said what/did what.’ I’m always looking ahead.”

Still, Raskar says he enjoyed the Spielberg-produced predigital age monster flick Super 8: “It was intriguing. I liked how the filmmakers hung this sophisticated story of an escaped Area 51 experiment on this simple children’s camera. The movie starts out well but the last hour quickly transitions into a typical blockbuster.” Raskar thought the disaster flick Cloverfield, which Abrams produced in 2008, worked better. “That was just brilliant. I thought this film would take more of that approach, where the Super 8 camera keeps playing a role, even if it’s a minor one.” Here, Raskar shares his thoughts on Super 8.

DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT ___1 “I love when storytellers begin in reverse. Super 8 opens with a beautiful shot of a factory accident sign being reset. The notion the director is trying to get across in the four-months-prior prologue is that this is a small closely-knit steel town where everybody matters. They’re all interconnected, and in the wake of this tragedy an external entity is going to change their world.

“The next scene is the funeral, where we’re introduced to the young hero Joel (Joe Lamb), who’s just lost his mother and is sitting on a swing by the side of the house, grieving. A guest says she’s worried for the boy. Joel’s emotionally-absent father, the town’s sheriff (Kyle Chandler), has never understood him. So right away you feel for this poor kid. What I really like about this sequence is you never see a picture of Joel’s mom. We don’t see her until much later — the same with the alien, who is somewhat of a ‘mother’ figure. And we don’t even know what’s in the locket that Joel has in his hand. That was kind of a teaser for the audience.”

FLASHBACK TO THE ’90s, ER, ’70s “The setting of Super 8 is 1979, back when kids communicated using walkie-talkies, not smartphones. That summer I had just finished 4th grade and unlike the movie-obsessed main characters I wasn’t allowed to watch movies, per my family’s culture. I grew up in India, in a very small town about 200 kilometers from Bombay. Going to the movies was a big deal. All my friends got to see the latest Bollywood flicks but I couldn’t. I went to the movie theater maybe twice a year so I would talk about the same movie for many, many months. I remember I used to get confused if the main character died. I would say, wow, this guy’s finished. No more movies from him.”

“What’s funny is how quickly I caught up. After coming to the U.S. to attend the University of North Carolina, I watched 30 movies in the first month alone.

The Terminator movies and all the ’70s and ’80s stuff, I saw that on TV reruns during the ’90s. So even with its soundtrack of great pops songs from Blondie and the Cars, for me, Super 8 actually reminds of me of the ’90s.” [laughs]

PRODUCTION VALUE “When we pick up the story again, Joel and his misfit friends are shooting an 8mm zombie short that stars Alice (Elle Fanning), a troubled teenage girl that Joel has a crush on. The film’s director, Charles (Riley Griffiths), is always talking about ‘production value,’ which is why he drags his cast and crew in the middle of the night to a local train station. That’s where the kids stumble upon — at least from their point of view — a goldmine after a pickup truck slams into a passing train, derailing it. Freight cars and parts go flying. There are all kinds of explosions. Things get smashed. And the kids are running for their lives. Then when it’s over, something — we don’t know what until later— escapes from a boxcar. What a fantastic set piece.”

“The kids are warned not to speak of the accident (“your parents will die”) before being chased off. But the next day they’re drawn back to it. Charles wants to use the crash site as a backdrop for a new scene. Actually, one of my favorite shots from Super 8 is when the kids are filming on top of a hill that overlooks the crash site. While the camera is set up, Joel looks through its viewfinder at the clean up in progress and realizes that the trains all belong to the Air Force. Military troops are everywhere.

“Let’s take a step back from the movie for a second. When I was watching Super 8 the other night I stopped the DVD and said, ‘Isn’t this moment amazing?’ Think about what you’re looking at onscreen. We’re watching a movie in HD in which a kid is looking through a Super 8 camera at a train wreck that’s pure special effect — all three types and eras of cinematography in a single shot. It was like an out-of-body experience for a technologist. You’re looking at your own technology through the lens of time and also through the lens of what could come in the future: special effects.”

CAMERA JUNKIE “Growing up, I never made home movies but one of the things I had in common with the kid filmmakers is that I was fascinated with cameras. When I was 10, I got my first camera. It was not a Super 8 because I came from an
extremely poor family; I’m youngest of four so I was lucky to actually get a camera in my hand. My parents gave it to me for some school picnic or something and, of course, every photo was precious. I spent a lot of time thinking about composing the shot and reading photography books. I am a visual person.

“Even now, I’m very aware of what’s happening in the background of the shot or how the camera moves through the scene, if the cinematographer used a crane or was filming handheld. When I watch movies, my family and my colleagues always get annoyed because I tend to appreciate the camera angle, focus and composition of the shot more than what’s happening story-wise.

“I think about cameras all the time. In Super 8, I was very aware of the director’s lens flare effects; they are one of Abrams’ visual signatures. I thought the lens flares were handled very well in many shots. I mean I get it within the context of this movie. Typically, when you think of a flare, it’s a very bright sun or some other light source that’s creating this internal reflection in the lens. What Abrams wanted to convey is that, you know, there is something among us, an external power (whether it’s the military in the earlier scenes or an alien in the later shots), that’s much bigger than what we understand. It’s almost like a halo around a God-like figure, right?

“At the same time, I thought the lens flares were overdone in some shots, especially the last scene where there’s a blue flare that kind of stays on the horizontal line onscreen until the lights dim. That was just unnecessary.” [laughs]

SPIELBERG’S SHADOW “Although it’s much darker than movies like E.T., there are many similarities between early Spielberg films and Super 8. You see it in the way the story is told [from the kids’ perspective] down to the dolly shots of kids riding around town on dirt bikes. And like in Jaws, Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster, there’s a local law enforcement figure trying to protect the citizens of their small town from an elusive monster that doesn’t show itself for a while.

“I’m always a little disappointed when movies reveal the face of the alien. Remember M. Nigh Shyamalan’s Signs. The whole story centered on this mystery: who is this unknown character (played by Mel Gibson) and what’s happening in those cornfields? The moment they showed that poor alien surrounded by glasses of water in the house I thought that completely destroyed the tension and thrill in the movie.

“You have to protect the mystery, no matter what. Besides, who knows what aliens will look like anyway. Once you take away that abstraction and show its face, with flaring nostrils, that just becomes very conventional Hollywood.”

OLDIE, NO GOODIE “Following the train crash in Super 8, strange things start to happen around Lillian, Ohio: the town’s power goes off and on, car parts and electronics are stolen, dogs disappear. Along the way are some good scares outside a convenience store and near some power lines with a utility worker in a hydraulic lift. One of my pet peeves is how grown ups are treated in Hollywood films. Maybe it’s because I come from a culture in which elders are respected but I don’t like when movies focus on the pets and the kids and everyone else can die. [laughs]

[SPOILER ALERT!] “If you see the Pierce Brosnan movie Dante’s Peak, all the developed characters gets saved, except for the grandmother. Even the dog is saved. And in Super 8, the sheriff gets killed and a couple of military guys. It bothers me when that happens. I wish filmmakers would show that the lives of adults are just as important.” [END SPOILER ALERT!]

ADOLESCENT LOVE “The budding romance between Joel and Alice is the heart of the movie. There’s an innocence and tenderness to their relationship when Joel is applying her zombie makeup. Later, in another touching scene, they watch a home movie together that shows Joel’s deceased mom. That footage, which connects back to a moment in history when Joel is much younger, is the thing that allows the kids to bond, and that bond is what compels Joel to go back and rescue Alice afterwards. The fact that another Super 8 movie bonds them is a nice touch.”

RELIVE THE MEMORIES “You have to credit the storytellers for not only adding such rich period detail, but also for putting that era’s technology in the appropriate cultural context. For my generation, the Walkman that the convenience store clerk listens to was stylish and revolutionary; it was today’s iPod. And Super 8 cameras were contemporary technology, too. They were considered the thing to have, especially for young people.

“There’s a funny scene that takes place in a camera shop which teases today’s kids who are accustomed to instant playback. Charles brings in his film to be developed and asks the pothead camera clerk if they can have it done overnight. He’s told: “No one can develop overnight!” I don’t know how this movie was viewed by young people but I can imagine them thinking, what do you mean it takes three days for the film to come back? Didn’t you upload it to YouTube right away?

“We have a Calumet store near M.I.T. and going there is very much like going to that camera store in Super 8 today. It’s a photography store geared toward professionals and everyone in there is serious about their cameras and their accessories: tripods and umbrellas or whatever. They’re there learning about the latest cool stuff.

“When you think about it, it’s amazing how little cameras have changed. [laughs] Which is disappointing. Fundamentally, the Super 8s seen in the movie and today’s digital cameras are not that different; we just have slightly better quality now, and the files are easier to store and transmit. At the same time, if you ask some kids the same age as the ones in the movie, they’ll say, ‘What’s Super 8?’ Kids today shoot their movies with Flips or on their phones. Of course, in another 30 years the next generation is going to say, ‘What’s a phone?’ or ‘What’s a Flip? Aren’t you supposed to just press a button next to your temple and record what you see with a sensor planted inside your eye at birth?’

“I don’t know what the future will look like, but there’s one thing we can be sure of. The kids of tomorrow will not appreciate the way movies are made today. Who knows, in another 30 years we might see a movie called The Flip.” ⏏
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Craigh Barboza, also a lifelong fan of Spielberg movies, is the Editor of My DVD Insider.