Reprinted with Permission

How Moviemakers
Film Summer in March

By Josh Odell
Staff Writer

ROCKPORT - Using Rockport as a traditional New England backdrop for the Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear film “Stuck On You” has required months of planning, dozens of workers and truckloads of equipment.
But when movie crews move to their Miami filming location in the coming weeks, all it will take to bring the beauty of Rockport with them is the work of Gloucester photographer David Stotzer.

With the help of his bulky “4-by-5” camera, Stotzer has spent the past several days capturing scenes of Old Harbor on a four-inch by five-inch “chromes,” similar in appearance to oversized slides.

Soon those sheets of film will be taken to Miami and blown up to vinyl background scenes measuring 18 feet tall and 110 feet wide. Those scenic mats will be propped up outside the windows of film sets, providing all the outdoor beauty of a Cape Ann harbor scene - minus the unpredictable weather.

“One of the scenes takes place in a restaurant, so I kind of did a panoramic view for it,” said Stotzer. The view will be on the outside of movie's “Quickie Burger.”

The outdoor version of the Quickie Burger is now set up at Old Harbor - complete with a small garden out front - and ready for this week's filming schedule.

Stotzer said that accounting for tide and horizon lines in his shots made for a tricky process - one that led to a few re-shoots and had him working closely with Jay Vetter, the film's art director.

“They wanted a lot of different angles,” said Stotzer. “I had to shoot very specific things in very specific ways.”

That's because the filmmakers, said Stotzer, have a very specific vision for the movie's look - so specific that water scenes from Stotzer's initial pictures will be digitally inserted into his most recent shots.

“They really liked the way that water looked,” Stotzer said. “It's pretty amazing, actually.”

David Stotzer was photographing the view from the building at Old Harbor off Bearskin Neck in Rockport Friday. Stotzer was shooting large format slides that will be used to make a 18-foot by 100-foot backdrop for the new Farrelly Brothers movie “Stuck On You.” The backdrop will be used to recreate the view from the building on a movie set in Florida. The building at Old Harbor will become a fast food restaurant for the film.

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Movie crews were paying attention to detail before he started his photographic work.

Using butane-fueled flamethrowers and a little gravel, workers recently gave Rockport a summer make-over, covering and melting away piles of snow left over from the Presidents Day storm and giving Stotzer's images a warmer feel.

Thanks to some digital tricks, Stotzer said, his pictures will have some light-reversing alternations and used night scenes. The evening backgrounds will be put on the backs of the daytime versions, meaning that movie-makers will only need to rotate the screens to go from night to day.

“I guess they're going to use that for a lot of scenes down in Florida,” Stotzer said.

Movie representatives found Stotzer - a Gloucester photographer for 15 years - in a regional search.

“They were looking for local photographers, and they got my name,” he said. “They also went to my website, and I guess that's all they needed.”

Still, with more than 30 years of experience in the photography business, Stotzer found his latest project for “Stuck On You” unique.

“I've done some big aerial shots, but I've never done anything like this,” he said. “It was pretty interesting.”