Amid the Apollo missions, space became a new frontier for cinematic exploration, raising the question of how to film its boundlessness with greater gravity than had been apparent in the goggle-eyed B-movies of the 1950s. Logan’s fieldwork began at the age of nineteen, after he was hired to assist emergent effects master Douglas Trumbull in making 2001.
“2001 was my film school,” Logan recalled in 2014. “I was hired as an animation artist, but when they found out I could also shoot animation, I became doubly useful. I shot and designed most of the readouts. I designed some and shot much of the Jupiter sequence. I shot the opening title sequence for the movie and then shot it seven more times for all the foreign versions.”
Set to Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, the latter established the extraordinary rigour with which Kubrick’s film would traverse the cosmos: “The shot was 1,440 frames long and it was five passes — the sun, the stars, the moon, the earth, and the title. It took me a day for each shot and was a fitting end to my work on the movie… Stanley gave me my first credit and the rest is history.”
A decade later, Logan would prove similarly crucial to the internal physics of the markedly different Star Wars. Director George Lucas had initially conceived shooting the climactic dogfight using black-clad techies moving models around on rods. Drawing on his experience in effects photography, Logan suggested the crew instead deploy the camera itself as a spacecraft, shooting point-of-view and immersing the viewer in the swoops and near-misses of aerial combat.
Enlisting pyrotechnics whizz Joe Viskocil, he also determined to capture the Death Star’s eventual destruction from below using high-speed cameras: “When you shoot an explosion conventionally, with the camera straight and level… what you get is a mushroom cloud which doesn’t look like it’s exploding in outer space. By having the bomb explode directly overhead, it gives the illusion that there are no forces of gravity acting on the fireball, i.e. it’s in outer space!”
In an era before computer visualisation and stringent health-and-safety provision, however, the aftereffects of such an explosion were harder to predict. “I do remember wiping some burning napalm off one arm after one of the explosions while walking away,” Logan later recollected. “Simpler days.”
Bruce Logan was born on May 15, 1946 in Bushey Heath, the son of BBC drama director Campbell Logan (“He told me how to do my first special effect – a split screen”) and his wife Louisa (née Rogers), who’d driven ambulances during WW2. He started making animated films while attending Merchant Taylor’s School, entering work as a rostrum cameraman before Trumbull called.
After completing work on 2001, Logan moved to Los Angeles, assisting Trumbull on test footage for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1968) and the unfinished Gram Parsons project Saturation70. He worked as a commercials director before falling in with low-budget producer Roger Corman, providing cinematography for drive-in favourites Big Bad Mama (1974) and Jackson County Jail (1976).
Following Star Wars, Logan gained studio traction, overseeing the effects for Airplane! (1980) and the Lily Tomlin vehicle The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), before shooting Disney’s Tron (1982), the first Hollywood film made with computer technology: “We knew that we were working on something pretty unusual, but for it to be that groundbreaking… I don’t think we really did expect that.”
In 1984, he produced Madonna’s “Borderline” video (“I didn’t know who she was at the time, but she did. And then we all did”). He began directing with the Corman-produced prison movie Vendetta (1986) and thereafter moved between disciplines, shooting VFX for Batman Forever (1995) and starting his own production company Seventh Ray Entertainment. His final directorial outing was the indie thriller Lost Fare (2018); his final cinematography credit was on Letters at Christmas (2024).
Off set, Logan built and raced cars and was a licensed pilot, and was surprised as successive generations of film fans discovered his work: “It just seemed that I was looking for work and moved from one picture to another. But the great part about working on a hit movie is that your resume builds itself. In retrospect, it’s only when I started to lecture and attend conventions that I realised how blessed I have been.”
He is survived by his wife Mariana Campos-Logan, and two children, Mary Grace and Andrew Campbell Logan.
Bruce Logan, born May 15, 1946, died April 10, 2025.
No comments:
Post a Comment