Goldfarb Production
National Treasure: Behind the Scenes
The movie National Treasure is about a group of treasurers that are looking for the City of Gold. It becomes a race to find the treasure when they realize that others are trying to find the City of Gold and use it for themselves instead of respecting it.
In National Treasure, there was a lot of effects that had to be done. In the beginning, they had to blow up a ship. They used a lot of gasoline in order to do this. Since they did not know know exactly how big the explosion was going to be, they had to be ready. They made sure to have everything set up and a lot of cameras going so that they would not miss the action, and would have many different shots to choose from. They also did this because it was an explosion, a shot that would be hard to redo if needed.
In the movie, Nicholas Cage and his colleagues are forced with the task to steal the Declaration of independence so that the "bad guys" do not have the ability to. When doing this, the directors asked people who work at the National Archives how they would go about stealing the Declaration of Independence if they had to. They did this on order to get more information about the topic so how they would steal the Declaration of Independence would be more real and believable.
In the movie, they went to many real, important places within the US in order to show the reality and history of the country. They shot at the Library of Congress, National Archives, Lincoln memorial, Independence Hall, and many other historic places. They used cranes to get higher up shots and to show depth.
They had to make the catacombs that were found under Washington. They also used green screens and visual effects to make the treasure rooms bigger and the "elevator shaft" deeper.
The directors had many people sketch these catacombs and The City of Gold over a couple years as to make sure every detail was spot on. They made these sets out of styrofoam, every detail being so precise. They were able to build the entire City of Gold within 8 weeks. Their sound station took up about half of their set. They had hoses going through the set in order to show the river and waterfalls in the movie. They made the set very realistic.
As part of their preproduction, they scoped out many filming spots. They went to Mount. Rushmore and looked around there to make sure that what they would be doing in the movie would logically and historically make sense.
Aquamarine:
I chose to watch behind the scenes of Aquamarine. I chose this movie because my sister Jayna, and I watched it many times as younger children. We came to love the movie and it was one that we could always agree on. This movie was released in North America on March 3, 2006; it was filmed both in the United States as well as Queensland, Australia. The film was loosely based on a young adult novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman, and was directed by American director Elizabeth Allen.
I had not watched Aquamarine in a very long time. When I began watching behind the scenes videos, I realized it was actually not the best movie out there. However “cringe-worthy” this movie is, their problem-solving and ideas to get through the hardships the cast and crew experienced, was impressive.
In order for Sara Paxton to become Aquamarine, they had her take swimming lessons. She practiced for many hours months before they had to film. One thing I did not know was that there were actually four different tails used during the film, all having different uses. One of the tails was not flexible, but had mechanics in it to make it flip-flop up and down. Another tail had to have a better fit for close up shots, each tail taking two hours to put on and get ready to shoot. Sara had to go through two hours of makeup before putting on the tail.
Green screen was used multiple different times throughout the movie as well. The kissing scene used green screen to portray them being far out in the ocean when they were actually in a pool with a green screen behind. Aquamarine does a backflip out of the pool water when the two girls (Hailey and Claire) first see/meet her: she did not do an actual backflip, green screen and machinery was used for this scene. They used two different shots to create this backflip. In the first shot, she was connected to wires and hoisted straight into air, the tail was on for this shot. For the second shot, she did not wear the tail and was strapped into a machine which moved in the motion of a backflip. After combining the two shots, and using green screen, they made the final shot look (kind of) real. They also used green screen to show the storm coming in from the ocean, waiting to hit land.
When choosing actors and actresses, they made sure that there was a positive relationship between the actors. This made the film feel more real and helped create a better movie with drama.