In a first for me, I’m happy to announce footage I filmed made its way into Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. This is definitely a high point in my filming career and an eye-opening experience.
Along with Pete (by business partner in the driving plate footage world) I spent over 40 hours scouting, renting equipment, traveling, getting LA Film permits, hiring assistants (thank you Caleb and Richard!), coordinating, learning an IMAX-capable camera and so much more in order to capture what ended up being about 12 frames, or 1/2 a second, of screen time.
How It Started
Earlier this year my business partner and I got an email asking if we could film static backing plates of LA and San Francisco for an unknown client (thank you, Jodi!!). Backing plates of this manner are boring, but profitable, footage where the camera doesn’t move and the scene in front is static. Thank of establishing shots when a show returns from commercial and they show a city or building.
We Zoomed with the director, director of photography, editor and too many other people to remember. It’s astounding how much effort is put into such a small clip. They wanted static images of downtown Los Angeles from above the Hollywood Sign and San Francisco with the Golden Gate Bridge in the foreground. Very few details were given other than lighting angle requirements.
Now mind you, movies are made with a project name that is not related to the feature itself. We see these signs up on light posts around LA when a production is filming and they lead the cast and crew to often a neighborhood home where filming is happening. They had no intent on letting us know which production we were working for, but some luck and brains gave us a clue or two.
Following that, I jetted up to San Francisco for just a day of scouting to literally hold my phone out during a FaceTime with the director so he could see angles. Same went for the Hollywood Sign but that was a hike up to the top of Mount Lee, the area just above the sign, and a number of quick photos that were emailed for approval.
Renting the camera was interesting and a challenge. Same went for getting permits from Film LA and that whole process is bewildering the first time through. It’s actually pretty slick, but foreign to me. It resulted in us getting our permit both from the city and the parks department which also required four monitors to watch over us and make sure we didn’t do anything we shouldn’t.
Not wanting to trust $125,000 of camera gear to the airlines, even though we had insurance to cover it all, I opted to drive up to San Francisco for filming day. This was in February and we got pretty dang lucky with perfect skies and no fog hiding the city. As is the case in Hollywood, we’ll never know why they cut that footage, but it sure was a nice day to be filming outside with fun people.
I won’t get into all the nuts and bolts of how we did what we did, but in the end the short clip that they used ended up being a backing plate where they filmed other foreground elements in a studio (likely in the UK but who knows) and then added in CGI elements.
For those that might have seen the film, our clip is abut 20-30 minutes into the film when Ethan is in the coffin contraption conversing with the Entity and it is showing him what might happen. It’s VERY quick blip when LA blows up. 🙂
I’d love to do it again because the amount of logistics was right up my alley. I like figuring out problems like that and producing footage clients use (and hopefully appreciate).
If we are supposed to have 15 minutes of fame, I have 14 minutes, 59.5 seconds left.
Congratulations that is a cool project to be able to shoot! I’ll keep an eye out for that bit when I watch the movie.
So honored to be a part of the project. My girls geeked out when they saw the scene on screen.