While Seahaven has the look of an normal, albeit idealized town (occasionally recalling the idyllic suburbs depicted in such television shows as The Brady Bunch), its complete artifice leads to some odd occurrences in the film. One hilarious example is an early scene in which an HMI lamp falls from the sky and crashes to the ground next to Truman, prompting him to search the heavens in utter confusion. Adding to the gag is the fact that the lamp is labeled "SIRIUS" denoting it as Alpha Canis Majoris, the Dog Star, and the brightest in the sky after the sun. Biziou recalls, "It was in the script that some object fell from the sky, and the question of just what it should be was going around the set. Peter Weir took great pleasure in asking people what they thought the object should be, and then took great pleasure in deciding that it should be a movie light. We did two shots the lamp falling, but Peter later decided he wanted a high, aerial view, which Mike McAllister put together on the computer using a high-angle shot of the town."
Another combination of in-camera and digital work occurs during a frantic nighttime search for Truman after he somehow eludes the ubiquitous cameras and disappears. Christof tells his staff to bring up the sun, even though it is still nighttime by the show's internal clock. Reports Biziou, "We actually brought up the sun physically. Our key grip and the chief electrician mounted about 300 Par 36 bulbs into three large banks mounted on a tube frame on a crane hoist. We then jerked these lights up 60' in the air in about four seconds."
The dramatic lighting plan was heightened by the use of a false horizon. Biziou continues, "We had an enormous black flag stretched between two cherry pickers just in front of the lights when we popped them into the air. The shadows of the people and the trees shortened quickly, and the horizon line washed across the buildings. It was quite an effect, and it worked well in combination with Mike McAllister's amazing impressionistic digital sunrise."
While the God's-eye view of the HMI dropping from the sky and the shot of the rapidly rising sun are overt uses of special effects, Biziou believes that many of the film's other postproduction enhancements will sneak past almost everyone. "Mike McAllister digitally added a little fill and diffusion in the last seconds of the shots depicting the effects of the rapid sunrise, just to help the fake sunlight look more like daylight," the cameraman begins. "But a lot of the other digital elements look photographic as well. At times, the weather would change and we'd lose the intense blue skies we felt were so important. Mike would put them back digitally. I love it when digital work is subtle and is used without doing bangs and crashes and explosions." Additional extensive "invisible" effects work was added by Matte World Digital, including the creation of Seahaven's false topography, the extension of various buildings exteriors, and the addiction of scope to the surrounding artificial sea and sky (see photos).
The ruse of Truman's life in Seahaven, of course, eventually fails. When our hero finally realizes that something is terribly wrong and that he is unable to leave the town by any land routes, he confronts his aversion to the water by heading out to sea on a sailboat. Biziou recalls, "[After finishing in Florida,] we rushed back to Los Angeles and set up at the Universal Studios tank, where Peter Chesney had built special water dumps, wave-makers and hydraulic lifts so we could put the boat on its side or turn it completely over."
All of the sailing action takes place over a short period of time in the story, so Biziou needed to have consistent lighting throughout the two-week tank shoot. Toward this end, he explains, "Chris Centrella built a 100' by 60' diffusion scrim and got the largest mobile crane possible, which could go 250' up. Chris would literally boom this flag over the tank to keep Truman's boat in shadow. As the sun moved from east to west, he would move the flag so we always stayed in shadow. It was a real bonus which gave us immediate lighting consistency."
However, Biziou cautions that this bold approach was not without considerable risks. "Chris had to compute and work out his stresses and strains and really know what he was dealing with, because any wind over 15 miles an hour could have tipped the crane over. You could lift an airplane with that kind of span. Fortunately, we had no such problems.
"The big scrim gave me the soft light of an overcast day, so I then armed in a Musco from the background to add a strong backlight source to all of the various waterworks, such as the rain and waves. Water spurts just have no life without some backlight. The diffused sunlight and the Musco backlight comprised the only lighting we used in the scene."
In an attempt to get the water-shy Truman to turn the boat back toward shore, Christof orders up some nasty weather, escalating the tumult as the undaunted star soldiers forward. Finally, horrendous hurricane-force winds are dialed up from the Truman Show control room. To create the tempest, Biziou explains, "we had two jet engines on trucks, as is common these days, which screamed across the water and just took the tops of the waves off and gave them a nice cresting. These engines are extremely noisy and smelly, but I'd recommend them any time; they're wonderful machines. It was a joy to see a proper thrusting wind. That, coupled with the blasting of fire hoses into the jet engine stream, which would just get energetically strewn across the whole scene, gave us some wonderful storm footage."
The defiant Truman eventually ties himself to the boat's mast, willing to die in his attempt to discover what is beyond the manmade confines of Seahaven. Picking up on that classical element, Weir notes, "The story of The Truman Show is not new; it is a love story about a man trying to reach freedom and find the truth.
"What is new is the state that we find ourselves in during the late 20th Century. With the colonization of the airwaves, with empires being formed by satellites beaming programs down and by the Internet, there are now more people with enormous power and influence in our lives people who are not elected to these positions. And while they're not necessarily malevolent people, we know how power corrupts. It will be interesting to see how people respond to a story that deals with someone who is misusing that power, someone who is not in the guise of a conventional villain."
