Transitions with Massive Size Discrepancies: LEGENDS OF TOMORROW

"The Final Frame" takes us from ultra-wide to super-close

One of Mel’s particular fascinations with Legends is how it makes a big-ensemble time-traveling show with stunts and magical setpieces and special effects and homages and period costumes and aliens and puppets and animation and [etc] on a TV budget.

In Season 6, COVID protocols split the cast and crew into smaller ‘pods,’ with writers finding reasons to keep characters apart, production utilising more Canadian forests, and crew finding lots of clever workarounds. You can see all those limitations at play in this transition, but none of them limit it.

Now, the earth is very large, a bowling ball is very small, people are people-sized, and a sheer Grand-Canyon-sized cliff is somewhere between all of them.

Let’s look at how “The Final Frame” (directed by Jes Macallan — who also plays Ava Sharpe — in her TV directing debut) transitions from the universe inside a bowling ball, into a bowling alley.

Setup

It starts with Zari 1.0’s reaction shot, which primes us for “something bad.”

Next is a cut to a still [well, just barely moving] ultra-wide; this is easier to CGI, but also has got an oomph to it and contrasts with the moving shots on either side.

The bright jackets of the four characters are just barely visible, the better to sell us on the scale and scope of the cliff drop.

The scene then returns to the foursome, where it takes the camera from a standing start with all four characters in frame, and swoops uuuuuuuup and away.

Big Moves

This camera move isn’t continuous with the opening shot; perhaps it was always going to be two setups. It does take a lot of actor blocking + timing (and potentially work and setup(s) and screentime) to get that flow to work in one move, so TV limitations may have played a part in the decision.

Or perhaps the shot was planned to be one and it didn’t work for whatever reason. The stillness of the actors at the start of the big move (0:13) certainly makes it seem it was made as two shots.

Or perhaps the logistics did work, but they made a creative decision the sheer size didn’t “read” so they wanted a wide, and inserted it between their best crane moves from different takes.

As the crane move gets real wide, real quick, post VFX can ‘clone and paste’ to create the woods and cavernous drop. Then as it goes higher, the CGI clouds help cover the ‘stitch’ between this shot and the next, which is also the next scene.

Actual Scene Transition

From ultra-wide to an ultra-closeup of the Earth-cum-bowling-ball, which lines up the black finger-hole approximately where the cliff edge was.

As the camera continues its movement up and out, another bowling ball rolls in to take us to the climactic . . . commercial break!

Takeaways

It’s a fun and clever gag to write “we transition from a wiiiiide shot of four people on a cliff, to an ultra-close of the entire world.” But it’s a whole other thing to make it happen on a budget and time constraints. Transitioning between scenes involving such wildly discrepant elements as ‘the world’ and ‘a bowling alley’ could be intimidating . . . on the other hand, you could let it free you to go WILD!

This is a great blend of practical shots, using established elements (such as the bright coats and the bowling ball rack) to ‘ground’ the audience, camera movements, and VFX, to bring the concept to life.