Denys N. Coop

“[On Superman] In order to achieve the completely natural movement, as if he literally were a bird, it became necessary to create a piece of front projection machinery which is completely mobile. Mobile in every sense-with tracks and cranes, panning, tilting, zooming, every single movement-because we have been faced with having a virtually stationary person and we have had to make him travel. So we have had to be thinking in reverse all the time-moving the camera, creating the illusion that you are following, in fact, a person who is doing the movement. The aim right from the very beginning was to build something very, very small and lightweight, and Jan Jacobsen produced a projector with Wally Veevers which is a very small, normal 35mm format unit with a 320-watt light source which has a very complicated reflector and lens system in order to get the maximum light out of a small source-and it has proved to be very efficient.”