American Cinematographer 2013 11

NOVEMBER 2013

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 The smallest smal lest camera makes the biggest images.

 This still frame was pulled from 5k RED EPIC® motion motion footage from Elysium © 2013 CTMG. All rights reserved.

 www.red.com © 2012 Red.com, Inc. All rights reserved.

 The Red One was like getting our hands on the future for “  District 9 . The Epic is a fantastic evolutionary leap forward. Its compact form, image quality and resolution were a perfect  fit for both the grittiness gri ttiness of future Los Angeles Angel es and the pristine offworld landscapes of Elysium. ”  – Trent Trent Opaloch

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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

On Our Cover: An accident during a space mission strands NASA scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) in Gravity, shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC. (Frame grab courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.)

FEATURES

36

Facing the Void Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC launches groundbreaking strategies on Gravity 

50

on Water 50  Taking Frank DeMarco and Peter Zuccarini imperil lone sailor on  All Is Lost 

64 78

Seized at Sea Barry Ackroyd, BSC films harrowing hostage drama Captain Phillips 

64

Hard-Rock Apocalypse Gyula Pados, HSC coordinates headbangers’ ball for  Metallica Through the Never 

92  Television Triumphs  AC 

applauds this year’s Emmy-nominated cinematographers 78

DEPARTMENTS 12 14 16 22 96 100 106 107 108 110 112

Editor’s Note President’s Desk  Short Takes: London Grammar’s “Strong” Production Slate: The Fifth Estate  Filmmaker’s Forum:  John Bailey, ASC New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads  Ad Index Clubhouse News  ASC Close-Up: Seamus McGarvey 

— VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM —

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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

SEE AND HEAR MORE CINEMATOGRAPHY COVERAGE AT WWW.THEASC.COM

The eponymous, spacefaring antihero (Vin Diesel, left) steels himself for a fight in Riddick , shot by David Eggby, ACS (right).

In an exclusive podcast, David Eggby, ACS discusses the strategies he employed on the sci-fi thriller Riddick, a sequel to Pitch Black (2000), which Eggby also shot. This time around, escaped convict Riddick (Vin Diesel) must survive a race of alien predators after being left for dead on a sun-blasted planet.

 THIS MONTH’S ONLINE QUESTION:  What are the best books you’ve read on the topic of cinematog raphy?

Bryan Land: “The Light on Her Face by Joseph Walker, ASC. What a history. A brilliant guy.”

Ruairi O’Brien: “Masters of Light  by Schaefer and Salvato. I would kill for an updated version with some newer cameramen, but the interviews are long enough and thoughtBrannigan Carter: “The Master Shots series, ful enough to [still] be of real value.” while geared toward newer filmmakers, is an excellent ‘tips and tricks’ type of book that Tobias Dodt: “Image Control by Gerald gives budding cinematographers a little Hirschfeld, ASC, and Reflections by Benjamin insight into how to get big Hollywood-style Bergery. Both are absolutely brilliant!” shots on an independent budget — and not Mic Pistol: “The Five C’s of Cinematography  only get the shot, but make it work for the style of the film.” by Joseph V. Mascelli. An oldie but goodie.” Alex R. Hall: “Film Lighting by Kris Malkiewicz. The interviews with some of the industry’s best cinematographers and gaffers are an invaluable resource. It’s the book I always go to for lighting advice.”

Juan Namnun: “La luz en el cine (Le lumiere au cinema) by Fabrice Revault D’Allon. Himself a master storyteller, he puts the reader on a journey of discovery from Billy Bitzer to the New Wave inheritors.”

Edward Ybarbo: “Blain Brown’s Cinematog- Ignacio Aguilar: “Masters of Light  is a great raphy: Theory and Practice keeps me sharp.” classic. I still like to watch the pictures mentioned in the book and then reread what the Matthew A. MacDonald: “Writing with cinematographers said about [that] particular film. Also, Principal Photography  by Vincent Light, Volume One: The Light by Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC.” LoBrutto.” Juan Sebastian Vasquez: “Without a doubt, Set Lighting Technician’s Handbook  by Harry C. Box.”

Jules A. Bowie: “Shoot! by Luigi Pirandello offers a deep and philosophical treatment of cinematography that other practical books can’t touch. It is an art, after all.”

Filip Stankovic: “Painting with Light  by John Alton, ASC. A great book which teaches you the fundamentals [of] cinematography and allows you to take a step back and learn how the groundwork was set for cinematographers today by masters like Alton.” Paulo Martins: “The American Cinematographer Manual.” Chris Carr: “Painting with Light  by John Alton, ASC, and Magic Hour by Jack Cardiff, BSC.” Von Lucke Philipp: “Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye. It taught me so many things about using photography to tell a story, and also why one makes films.” Ian Campbell: “ A Man with a Camera by Néstor Almendros, ASC.” John Brune: “Every Frame a Rembrandt by Andrew Laszlo, ASC.” David Gregan: “Reflections: 21 Cinematographers at Work  is hands-down the finest book on cinematography I have read. Indepth interviews with great American and European directors of photography, and it has lighting diagrams!”

To read more replies, visit our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/AmericanCinematographer

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EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITOR  SENIOR EDITOR 

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard,  John Calhoun, Michael Goldman, Simon Gray, David Heuring, Jay Holben, Noah Kadner,  Jean Oppenheimer, Iain Stasukevich, Patricia Thomson ————————————————————————————————————

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———————————————————————————————————— American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 93rd year of publication, is published monthly in Hollywood by ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A., (800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344. Subscriptions: U.S. $50; Canada/Mexico $70; all other foreign countries $95 a year (remit international Money Order or other exchange payable in U.S. $). Advertising: Rate card upon request from Hollywood office. Article Reprints: Requests for high-quality article reprints (or electronic reprints) should be made to Sheridan Reprints at (800) 635-7181 ext. 8065 or by e-mail [email protected]. Copyright 2013 ASC Holding Corp. (All rights reserved.) Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CA and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. POSTMASTER: Send address change to American Cinematographer , P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078.

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DIE IN NEW ORLEANS � A music video  Artist: Richard Julian Director/Cinematographer: Rick Kaplan

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GO WHEREVER THE STORY TAKES YOU. Cinematographer Rick Kaplan used the EOS C300 to shoot Die in New Orleans  on location. You can watch the full music video and see how he shot it on our website. Made for easy mobility, the EOS C300 delivers outstanding cinema quality with multiple recording formats, a 50 Mbps 4:2:2 codec and full compatibility with either EF or PL-mount lenses. Designed to meet the demands of any production, the EOS C300 is ideal for everything from short movies to TV commercials. With it, the world truly is your stage. CONTACT US: 1.855.CINE.EOS � CINEMAEOS.USA.CANON.COM/C300

© 2013 Canon U.S.A., Inc. All rights reserved. Canon and EOS are registered trademarks of Canon Inc. in the United States and may also be registered trademarks or trademarks in other countries.

American Society of Cinematographers The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but  an educational, cultural and pro fessional or ganization. Membership is by invitation to those who are actively en gaged as directors of photography and have demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC membership has become one of the highest  honors that can be bestowed upon a  pro fessional cinematogra pher — a mark of prestige and excellence. OFFICERS - 2012/2013

Richard Crudo President

Owen Roizman Vice President

Kees van Oostrum Vice President

Lowell Peterson Vice President

Victor J. Kemper  Treasurer

Frederic Goodich Secretary 

Isidore Mankofsky  Sergeant At Arms

MEMBERS OF THE BOARD

Curtis Clark  Richard Crudo Dean Cundey  George Spiro Dibie Richard Edlund Fred Elmes Victor J. Kemper Francis Kenny  Matthew Leonetti Stephen Lighthill Michael O’Shea Lowell Peterson Owen Roizman Rodney Taylor Haskell Wexler  ALTERNATES

Isidore Mankofsky  Kenneth Zunder Steven Fierberg Karl Walter Lindenlaub Sol Negrin MUSEUM CURATOR 

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Editor’s Note As motion-imaging technology moves forward, the cinematographer’s role is changing in both clear and subtle ways, and our coverage of Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi drama Gravity  details how the shoot’s high-tech requirements impacted the work of Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC. In an overview of this groundbreaking production (“Facing the Void,” page 36), European correspondent Benjamin B notes, “Gravity provides a new paradigm for the expanding role of the cinematographer on films with significant virtual components. In addition to conceiving virtual camera moves with Cuarón, [Lubezki] created virtual lighting with digital technicians, lit and shot live action that matched the CG footage, fine-tuned the final rendered image, supervised the picture’s conversion from 2-D to 3-D, and finalized the look of 2-D, 3-D and Imax versions.” Lubezki reflects, “In the process, I had to learn to use some new tools that are part of what cinematography is becoming. I found it very exciting.” Our coverage of the show’s unique workflow includes a detailed sidebar that underscores the significance of these evolving responsibilities, and the cinematographer’s importance in seeing them through to completion. Shooting on water is notoriously tricky, but two of this month’s movies managed the feat exceptionally well. On J.C. Chandor’s  All Is Lost , cinematographer Frank DeMarco and underwater cinematographer Peter Zuccarini created memorable images above and below the surface, enhancing the nearly dialogue-free story of a lone sailor (Robert Redford) struggling to survive on the open ocean. “It was very interesting to work on a script that was only 32 pages long,” DeMarco tells AC scribe Jay Holben (“Taking on Water,” page 50). “The trick for me was to figure out what emotion or story point we should find in each scene.” Barry Ackroyd, BSC and director Paul Greengrass faced a related set of complexities on Captain Phillips, which dramatizes the 2009 hijacking of the U.S. cargo ship MV Maersk   Alabama by Somali pirates. As Patricia Thomson points out in her article (“Seized at Sea,” page 64), only 10 of the shoot’s 60 production days took place on dry land, requiring the filmmakers to spend most of their time working on the high seas or in a Malta water tank. “You can imagine how difficult this was for Barry and his crew,” Greengrass says. “There’s motion through every single plane: up and down, side to side and everything in between. You’re at the mercy of the weather and trying to create stability where there is none.” “Bigger” and “louder” were the primary mandates on Metallica Through the Never , an eye-popping, ear-blasting concert movie that represented a new big-screen challenge for director Nimród Antal and cinematographer Gyula Pados, HSC. “The concert film cranked up to 11,” is how New York correspondent Iain Stasukevich describes this ambitious 3-D production (“Heavy-Metal Apocalypse,” page 78), which combines intensely kinetic performance footage of Metallica — shot on one of the largest and most versatile stages ever constructed — with phantasmagorical narrative passages. Antal, Pados and several key collaborators break down their approach to the lighting and staging of the onscreen mayhem. Rounding out our features is a tribute to this year’s Emmy-nominated cinematographers (“Television Triumphs,” page 92), who further enhanced the pleasures of home viewing with their stylish work.

Stephen Pizzello Executive Editor 12

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President’s Desk By the time you read this, we will be well around the home stretch and sprinting for the finish line of the year 2013. The requisite cliché applies: I’m sure it has flown by as quickly for you as it has for me. But where there once rested a sense that time moved with the speed of a kitchen renovation, there now exists for many of us something of a dull ache, constantly reminding us that everything about our lives has sped up to a ridiculous degree. I used to think this was just another cost of getting older, but to prove how out of control things are, even the young people I know are aware of it. When I was a kid, I recall my father making what seemed like a spacy reference: “Once you hit the Fourth of July, the next stop is Christmas.” Back then, I thought he was crazy. Now I see him as a visionary. Some of the contributors to this accelerated condition — and could there be anything more mundane? — are the shelf displays at my local supermarket. It’s an undistinguished link in a nationwide chain, but management anticipates the next selling season as early as possible. Easter decorations abound in February ... summer gear appears in March ... Thanksgiving displays blindside shoppers in September. While standing at the checkout this past July, I noticed the Halloween DVD display set up next to the gossip rags. And, wouldn’t you know it, I came upon a gem. I’ll make a statement that some of you will instantly dismiss, but that I will defend to the finish: Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed and photographed by George Romero, is far and away the scariest, most unsettling film ever made. (Those are the original reasons why we went to the movies in the first place, aren’t they?) And, without question, it is also the worst-looking film of all time. This might seem a bit out of line coming from a cinematographer, as I count myself among those who are unfailingly deferential to other cinematographers. But only a fellow practitioner will recognize that sentiment for the wonderful compliment it implies. For the past decade or so, it seems everything in our industry has been hijacked by a mentality concerned only with new technology and its effect on what we do. Most cameras, workflows and post processes have been shaped, without our consent, to create a flawless product, one infinitely reproducible in a form as absent of human handprints as human beings can imagine. Night  of the Living Dead exists at the opposite end of that spectrum. It’s raw in a way that only 16mm black-and-white film of its era could be, filled with crude camerawork and harsh lighting that’s often mismatched and inconsistent. Then there are the compositions that reach for something arty but only come across as weird and self-conscious. Continuity mistakes abound, and the rules of screen direction are dutifully ignored. In a word, it’s amateurish (in what I hope was an intentional way). That is precisely why it remains so compelling 45 years after its release. I first saw it at a midnight screening in the 1970s; at the time, I thought of it as just another notch on the lens barrel — cheap, gory and on to the next. Watching it again recently, I thought it was a masterpiece. Everything that was technically wrong was exactly what made it so chilling and disturbing. None of us can imagine anyone but Gordon Willis, ASC creating the look of The Godfather . The same must be said for Romero and Night  of the Living Dead. His achievement in serving the story photographically is on par with virtually any movie you can name. And isn’t that really the crux of what we try to do? Too often, we’re fooled into equating surface perfection with inner value. We would do well to keep the lesson of Night of the Living Dead in mind, especially as awards season will be upon us shortly. How shortly? It’s early September as I write this, and magazines are already touting their Oscar issues. Hang on tight. It’ll be summer again before we know it.  .    d   n   a    l    k   r    i    K   s   a    l   g   u   o    D   y    b   o   t   o    h    P

Richard P. Crudo ASC President

14

November 2013

American Cinematographer

Short Takes

Cinematographer Autumn Durald captured this climactic fireworks display for London Grammar’s music video for “Strong.”

I

Fatherly Fireworks By Peter Tonguette

A handheld camera, shakily positioned low to the ground, captures a rickety white car driving toward a seemingly abandoned industrial area. Late-afternoon sun flares the lens and backlights the dust turned up by the car’s tires. In successive shots, a 30-something man with a three-day beard and a ratty T-shirt gets out and peers into the backseat, where his young daughter is fast asleep. He throws open the trunk, pulls out several bags and empties the contents on a blanket laid out hastily on the arid ground. The action is swift and the images seem to ask as many questions as they answer. The music of British band London Grammar provides some clues to the curious viewer, but ultimately it is the work of cinematographer Autumn Durald and director Sam Brown that tells the tale in the music video for the song “Strong.” The man has come to this vacant area — surrounded by tall barbed-wire fences and rows of squatty buildings — to don an armor-like “fireworks suit” that looks like something out of RoboCop, and light up the night sky with a dance of pyrotechnics for his daughter. “This is a music video,” Durald comments, “but it’s also like a short film. You want to know what their life is before they get there, and what happens after.” This speculative feeling is supported by the inquisitive, handheld camerawork. “Sam wanted the camera to have that energy,” the cinematographer notes. 16

November 2013

From the start, Durald — who studied art history at Loyola Marymount University before receiving her MFA in cinematography from the American Film Institute in 2009 — found herself on the same page as Brown. The director had prepared very specific storyboards, and he wanted to fill the video with small details, such as the moment when the daughter clutches her father’s shirt as he carries her beneath a viaduct to the site where the fireworks show will take place. “The boards were brilliant,” Durald enthuses. “Sam has an amazing sense of visual style, and those shots tell the story so well.” The filmmakers decided to shoot with two cameras, a Red Epic and a Vision Research Phantom Flex. The Epic was the main camera throughout the three-day production, which was primarily shot on and around Los Angeles’ Fourth Street Bridge, and for the climactic fireworks display, it was operated between 96-120 fps while the Phantom Flex captured images from 560-1,000 fps. Based in part on her admiration for Brown’s previous work, Durald suggested they shoot “Strong” with anamorphic lenses. “Sam did a BMW spot that I’m just in love with, and it was shot anamorphic,” the cinematographer explains. “He was obviously familiar with the format, and when I mentioned it to him, he was already thinking the same thing.” Durald turned to Panavision Hollywood for the production’s optics, which included de-tuned C Series and Ultra Speed Golden Panatar lenses. Both types of lenses, Durald notes, “are lower contrast and have more falloff from top to bottom and side to side. ➣

American Cinematographer

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Top: A young girl (Savannah Young) sleeps in the back seat of her father’s car in this frame grab from the video. Middle: The father (Nash Edgerton) carries his daughter to a vacant area, firework supplies in tow. Bottom: London Grammar lead singer Hannah Reid crosses a bridge at dusk.

“I love Panavision anamorphic glass,” she continues. “There’s an emotional quality to the lenses, and they can really help when shooting day exteriors; the lenses smooth out harsh sunlight and give it a kind of creamy quality.” Because of the inherent characteristics of the lenses, no additional filtration was required, although 18

November 2013

Durald notes, “I used a horizontal, softedged grad just to take down the sky for two wide shots.” The video incorporates three distinct times of day, each of which required a different approach: late afternoon, when the father and daughter arrive and prepare for the evening’s festivities; dusk, when American Cinematographer

non-narrative shots of London Grammar’s lead singer, Hannah Reid, were shot along the bridge; and night, when the man suits up in the L.A. River basin and fireworks fly off his body. For smaller setups within the first time period, the crew took pains to maintain the late-afternoon feel over the course of an all-day shoot. Accordingly, Durald says, they “diffused the harsh sunlight with a 12-by Half Soft Frost overhead and backlit the scene with two M40 HMIs through ¼ Straw.” For the close-ups of Reid — who seems to be clandestinely trailing the video’s protagonists — Brown and Durald were initially hoping for a bright, intense sunset, but an overcast day turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the cinematographer explains: “We ended up with a beautiful, soft pink and purple sunset, which looked amazing on the lead singer.” Shot in shallow focus, Reid’s light blond hair is complemented by out-of-focus splotches of pastel colors that frame her from the background. The video reaches its climax when darkness falls and the man, having put on his armored suit, reveals himself as a living, breathing fireworks display. (For the fireworks sequences, lead actor Nash Edgerton was replaced onscreen by Wally Glenn, a.k.a. Pyro Boy, the inventor of the fireworks suit.) “It was so unique to be shooting down there [in the basin] with approval to have someone wearing a fireworks suit,” says Durald. The cinematographer adds that she

Top: Under the Fourth Street Bridge, crewmembers prepare for the scene in which the daughter lights the fuse to her father’s fireworks suit. Bottom: Durald readies a Red Epic for the fireworks scene.

sought to underscore the event by adding “a unique touch to the fireworks sequence.” Inspired in part by the recipe that Panavision optical engineer Dan Sasaki implemented for Greig Fraser, ACS on Killing Them Softly   (AC  Oct. ’12), Durald asked Rik DeLisle and Guy McVicker at Panavision Hollywood to provide a modified HS50 lens. The cinematographer explains, “Using part of Dan’s recipe, Guy gave the lens an intentional anamorphic twist, misaligning the elements and giving it higher-order spherical aberrations, which affect the out-of-focus bokeh and cause the highlights to bleed.” In the resultant images from the music video, the fireworks emanating from Glenn pop in stunning fashion, with each burst creating its own 20

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unique flare. Durald operated the Epic during the shoot, and she captured spontaneous moments in Glenn’s performance, which he performed a total of seven times over two nights. “There’s about a 30 to 45 minute reset in between [Glenn’s performances], because he has to remove everything, hydrate and take a break,” she says. The Phantom Flex, operated by Jeff Bierman, was fitted with a modified Cooke 10:1 rearanamorphic zoom lens to get close-up detail from a safe distance, where the camera was kept on a dolly. “Sam really wanted those little bursts and beautiful little moments within the big explosion,” says Durald. Particular attention had to be paid to American Cinematographer

exposure during Glenn’s performance. “We didn’t want to expose the hottest point of the blast at key and then allow the smaller, surrounding explosions to get lost in darkness,” the cinematographer explains. “I chose to balance the two exposures, letting the hottest points overexpose by around 5 stops, and allowing the surrounding pops to be exposed closer to key to maintain detail and color. The smaller blasts were so poetic, and Sam wanted to make sure we were getting all of that texture.” Color correction was done at The Mill in London with colorist Seamus O’Kane, who worked with transcoded 2K files on a Pandora Revolution using YoYo Data I/O, for final HD delivery in Rec 709. Live grading was also available on location in a DIT tent, where a feed from the camera was viewable on a 17" OLED monitor. “I worked with my DITs, Mike and Tom Kowalczyk, over the headset so I could dial in the look without leaving the set,” Durald says. “At the end of the day, we tweaked the LUT we established on set for our dailies, which we output through [Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci] Resolve.” Durald proudly notes that “Strong” represented the first time Glenn’s performance had been captured professionally, rather than with an iPhone or similar device. “We were doing it with expensive cameras and lenses, so Wally was obviously really happy.” And so was Durald. The modified HS50 lens was hand delivered in the nick of time, just before it was needed on location, and since “Strong,” the cinematographer says, “it’s gone out on three other jobs, and it’s out right now. People are really interested in using it.” She tips her hat to DeLisle and McVicker for their enthusiasm in helping to lend the video’s finale such a striking look, commenting, “Rik and Guy are great to work with, especially on a project like this, where I’ve got a unique vision of what I want to create. It’s always an inspiring project when you can tailor the optics to make your ideas come to life.” ●

Production Slate Text dances across the face of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) as he taps out a private message in The Fifth Estate.

I

Internet Whistleblowers By Mark Dillon

The Fifth Estate chronicles the rise of WikiLeaks, the website that has leaked millions of anonymously sourced documents and gained notoriety as one of the world’s most polarizing organizations. The feature dramatizes the first meeting in Berlin between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who becomes the site’s spokesman. They and their colleagues proceed to post revelations about banks, churches and, most notably, U.S. government war logs from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Written by Josh Singer from Domscheit-Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy  by The Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, the movie opened the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The project reunited director of photography Tobias Schliessler, ASC, and director Bill Condon, who had previously collaborated on the Academy Award-winning musical Dreamgirls  (AC Dec. ’06) and the 2010 pilot for the HBO drama The Big C. Schliessler knew that their latest feature called for a different approach. “On Dreamgirls we spent a lot of time storyboarding; it was a much more controlled and stylized movie,” he says. “ The Fifth Estate is a depar22

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ture because it’s a true story that’s still happening right now. It had to feel realistic.” The 53-year-old Schliessler was born in Baden-Baden, Germany, and schooled at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. His cinematography career began in Canada on documentaries and low-budget features. Condon says he wanted Schliessler to shoot The Fifth Estate because of the cinematographer’s experience with unconventional features such as Friday Night Lights, which shunned the traditional approaches of coverage: masters, two-shots and close-ups. “We blocked The Fifth Estate naturally to create the sense of ‘you-are-there’ reality in this look at events that are just a few years old, with well-known characters,” says Condon. “Tobias lit for all possibilities, and [then we let] up to three operators roam through a scene — sometimes through each other’s shots — to tell the movie in a kinetic way.” Another whistleblower film provided inspiration: The Insider, directed by Michael Mann and shot by Dante Spinotti, ASC, AIC  (AC , June '00). “We said, ‘That’s it — that’s our bible,’” says Schliessler, who adds, “Not necessarily lightingwise, but [in terms of] the feel of it. The movie has a stylized sense even though it always feels real.” Also useful were YouTube clips of the film’s subjects, including footage of Assange on TV, at conferences and even dancing beneath strobe lights at Reykjavík’s Glaumbar nightclub. The film-

American Cinematographer

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makers went to great lengths to re-create this footage, even shooting at the same club. “We tried to duplicate everything as closely as possible, right down to the camera angles, so viewers could later search those things out [on the Internet] if they were interested,” Condon says. “That is the fun, interactive nature of the movie.” Preproduction began with a couple weeks of work before and after Christmas 2012. The crew then embarked on a 50-day shoot, from mid-January 2013 to the end of March, spanning 70 locations — mostly in Belgium, but also in Berlin, Iceland and Nairobi. Schliessler says he and Belgian gaffer Wim Temmerman could visit certain locations only once before shooting. “I shared my thoughts with Wim in rough terms,” the cinematographer recalls. “Then, on the day of the shoot, I would wonder, ‘Is everything here that I asked for five weeks ago?’ But everything was always there! We had a hard-working Belgian crew that made my life easy.” One of the most involved locations was Berlin’s century-old Kunsthaus Tacheles, an abandoned building that had served as an arts center for several decades. In the movie, the structure stands in for the Berlin branch of the Chaos Computer Club. Assange goes there with Domscheit-Berg, who holds a membership along with other computer experts, visual artists and electronic musicians. Schliessler and Temmerman referenced YouTube videos and pictures that displayed the colorful, moving lights and strobes that illuminated the building in its rave-era heyday. “It was completely shut down,” Schliessler recalls. “There weren’t any practicals or light sockets that worked, so we had to start from scratch. The art department [headed by Denis Schnegg] supplied us with hundreds of practicals, and we hid Chinese lanterns or small LED panels wherever possible. To create the interactive lighting, we used flickering Par cans, [Martin] Atomic strobes and MAC 2000 moving heads, and RGB LED washes.” Temmerman also had a custom portable lantern made with tungsten and daylight LEDs; this unit served as a fill light on tracking shots in the hallways and staircases. More than 300 fixtures were used to

Top: Assange and his WikiLeaks recruit, Daniel DomscheitBerg (Daniel Brühl), discuss the site’s potential in the Berlin branch of the Computer Chaos Club, a set built in Berlin’s Kunsthaus Tacheles. Middle: Crewmembers capture the characters as they exchange messages on their laptops. Bottom: DomscheitBerg departs the vibrantly lit building.

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Top left: Assange and Domscheit-Berg confer in a parking lot. Bottom and top right: The crew works on the sequence.

revive the location so that every floor of the building would look occupied in exterior wide shots. Scenes involving Assange and Domscheit-Berg are considerably more colorful than those involving fictitious U.S. government officials Sarah Shaw (Laura Linney) and James Boswell (Stanley Tucci), who trace WikiLeaks’ actions, or sequences set in Switzerland’s Julius Baer bank, the target of a WikiLeaks release. Condon notes, “We were excited by the contrast between the monochromatic, glass-andsteel environments of the powerful institutions WikiLeaks was taking on and the 28

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world in which [our protagonists] live, which is filled with vibrant, saturated colors. Tobias played with [that contrast] throughout his lighting, [making] very bold use of primary colors.” The Fifth Estate transpires largely at computer stations, on computer screens and in cyberspace, and to convey these environments in a compelling way, the filmmakers sometimes had to step beyond realism. For a sequence in which Assange illustrates to Domscheit-Berg how wikileaks.org’s submission platform works — accepting a document while keeping the source hidden — Condon and production American Cinematographer

designer Mark Tildesley devised an imaginary office on a beach beneath open skies. “The notion was Julian’s idealized vision of what journalism could be,” says Condon. “It’s The Front Page and All the President’s Men — these great big working areas.” To imbue the desired surrealism, the team also looked at 2001: A Space Odyssey  — specifically David Bowman’s death chamber, which is furnished in a realistic, Baroque style but with an oddly futuristic, glowing paneled floor. For the WikiLeaks floor, Tildesley suggested sand to tie into a flashback of Assange on the beach, where he spent much of his childhood. Condon comments, “It felt important to distinguish ourselves from documentaries about Assange. This is a more immersive, subjective, dramatic portrayal, so the stylization of the submission platform early on sends a signal that this is an interpretation of events, and not a docudrama.” The scene begins with Assange and Domscheit-Berg talking at their laptops in the Computer Club. As the action segues to the fantasy office, the words they type are video-projected onto their faces and in space, and the viewer is taken on a trip through cyberspace. Schliessler explains,

Top left: Domscheit-Berg pursues a lead provided by anonymous whistleblowers. Bottom left: Crewmembers capture Brühl on the move. Top right: Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler, ASC surveys an office setting.

“We shot through a 50/50 mirror that reflected the text from the computer screen and gave the feeling of being inside the computer looking back through the screen. Additionally, we also projected the same content on our actors’ faces and their surroundings using two video projectors simultaneously, one focused on their faces and one for the background set. In the scene, the text is eventually supplanted by CGI [provided by Prologue] that shows how the submitted information is hidden by layers of fake data, keeping the identity of sources safe.” The sequence then lands back in the 30

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beach office, which was shot on a Brussels soundstage. Cumberbatch and the steel desks, lit by overhead practical fluorescents, were shot in front of a greenscreen, and the sky was added by New York’s Phosphene, which also provided set extensions. The scene was additionally lit with more than 200 of Temmerman’s custom-made flat fluorescent “Easyliter” fixtures, which were rigged in 36 12'x12' soft boxes with Light Grid Cloth, creating the feeling of a soft night sky. The sequence is revisited throughout the film with an increasingly darker sky that mirrors the film’s dramatic arc. Temmerman’s Easyliters were used in American Cinematographer

nearly every scene. “We used them on stands as our key light or bounced them into foam core as fill light,” Schliessler explains. “We hung them off booms for backlight or toplight in small locations where it was not possible to rig off the ceilings. Wim made them in various sizes — from singles to eight banks, from 6 inches to 4 feet. The best part was the stepless dimming system. I could control the remote dimmer from my DIT tent off the lighting console or even off an iPad.” The picture was shot in the 2.40:1 aspect ratio, and the main-unit camera package included two Arri Alexa Studios as the show’s A and B cameras, and an Arri Alexa Plus as the C camera. DIT Sean Leonard explains that for the Studio cameras, the crew shot in ArriRaw to Codex S Plus Recorders with 512GB data packs, while for the Alexa Plus they used the M Recorder. They also recorded ProRes 4:4:4:4 to SxS cards for backup. Although Schliessler had shot only one other digital feature — the forthcoming war drama Lone Survivor — he had worked with the Alexa on commercials. “It  just felt like the right camera for this movie in terms of contrast and what it does in the highlights,” he says. “I look at digital

Top: U.S. government officials Sarah Shaw (Laura Linney) and James Boswell (Stanley Tucci) attempt to contain the damage after U.S. Army soldier Bradley Manning provides WikiLeaks with the largest collection of restricted documents ever leaked to the public. Bottom: Schliessler sheds some light on a setup.

cameras like another film stock. They can look like film. It’s a combination of camera movement and how you light. I’m quite comfortable with the look of the Alexa.” Schliessler estimates that 80 percent of the film was shot handheld, with some use of Steadicam and a couple of shots accomplished with Technocranes. Jacques Jouffret operated the production’s A camera and Steadicam, with Didier Frateur as his first assistant. The B-camera operator was Des Whelan and his first assistant was Franz Xaver-Kringer. Dino Parks served as second-unit director of photography. The filmmakers were reframing 32

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constantly within shots and found a workhorse lens in the lightweight Fujinon Premier 19-90mm Cabrio. For longer-lens requirements, they used the Fujinon Premier 75-400mm zoom, which they would place on a sandbag. The kit also included Angenieux Optimo 15-40mm T2.6, 45-120mm T2.8 and 24-290mm T2.8 zooms. Additionally, Schliessler carried a set of Arri Master Primes (ranging from 16mm to 150mm) for low-light shooting. Given the preponderance of practicals, the crew usually shot in the T2.8-T4 range, and around T5.6 in exteriors to maintain shallower depth of focus. Schneider Classic Soft filters provided American Cinematographer

camera diffusion. The film’s fast-moving, free-floating camera suggests both the speed of the digital world and the paranoia the WikiLeaks operators feel with their many enemies just a step behind. Schliessler tips his hat here to Jouffret: “He is able to find the moments in swish pans and handheld movements that tell the story. He just knows how to hit dialogue. Bill and Jacques would discuss where these moments are and where he would land at certain times. Meanwhile, I was usually lighting for 270 degrees, so we could move around and find moments you would normally not be able to shoot because you’d be limited by lighting.” For onset look and color management, Leonard used Pomfort’s LiveGrade. “It provides a very efficient way to monitor and grade live,” he says. “Tobias would create a look, which I would then send as 3-D LUTs with rushes, along with any alterations that were made.” Budapest’s Colorfront handled dailies for the European shoot, while New York’s Company 3 worked on the Kenyan dailies. The movie was edited by Virginia Katz on an Avid system at Post Factory NY. The digital files were assembled and conformed in Autodesk Smoke at Company 3 in New York. Schliessler’s frequent collaborator, ASC associate and colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3, did the final grade on a DaVinci Resolve system, with Schliessler present throughout the process. In his long list of credits — which also includes Hancock  (AC July ’08), Battle ship and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3  (AC  July ’09) — Schliessler holds a special regard for The Fifth Estate. “It’s a thought-provoking subject,” he says. “I was very happy to do a movie that has a realistic feel. I also was very excited to work with Bill again. Giving this movie its scope while keeping the energy up was a great challenge.” TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Digital Capture Arri Alexa Studio, Plus Fujinon, Angenieux, Arri ●

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Facing the  Void Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC and his collaborators detail their work on Gravity , a technically ambitious drama set in outer space. By Benjamin B

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ravity  begins with a memorable 13-minute continuous take: a breathtaking view of Earth from space that slowly reveals a sunlit space station with three people in spacesuits floating peacefully around it. Suddenly, a mass of fast-moving debris from an exploded satellite pummels the station, killing one person and leaving the other two, astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and medical engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), marooned in space. The rest of the movie follows their struggle to survive with a dwindling supply of oxygen as they try to make their way to the nearest space station.

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 The 3-D feature is enhanced by long takes and fluid camerawork that immerse the viewer in the beautiful but dangerous environment of space with a groundbreaking level of realism and detail. It is the fruit of a five-year collaboration involving director Alfonso Cuarón; cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC; visual-effects supervisor Tim Webber, and their talented teams. Longtime friends Cuarón and Lubezki have worked together on six features to date, including Y Tu Mamá También and Children of Men ( AC Dec. ’06). Webber supervised visual effects on the latter.  The technical and aesthetic accomplishments of  Gravity become all the more impressive when Lubezki reveals that the only real elements in the space exteriors are the actors’ faces behind the glass of their helmets. Everything else in the exterior scenes — the spacesuits, the space station, the Earth — is CGI. Similarly, for a scene in which a suit-less Stone appears to float through a spaceship in zero gravity, Bullock   was suspended from wires onstage, and her surroundings were created digitally. (Most of the footage in the space capsules  was shot with the actors in a practical set.) In many ways, Gravity provides a new paradigm for the

American Cinematographer

expanding role of the cinematographer on films with significant virtual components. By all accounts, Lubezki was deeply involved in every stage of crafting the real and computer-generated images. In addition to conceiving virtual camera moves with Cuarón, he created  virtual lighting with digital technicians, lit and shot live action that matched the CG footage, fine-tuned the final rendered image, supervised the picture’s conversion from 2-D to 3-D, and finalized the look of the 2-D, 3-D and Imax  versions. “I was doing my work as a    d   n   a cinematographer on Gravity ,” says   s   o   t   o Lubezki. “In the process, I had to learn    h    P  . to use some new tools that are part of    y    d   r  what cinematography is becoming. I   a    H found it very exciting.”   o   e  .    i    l   r   u    J   o Lubezki says Cuarón initially told   t   s    d   e   n him that zero gravity would afford them   a   m   a    d   r   o great freedom in terms of camera moves   e    F    l    d   c   a   n and lighting. He recalls, “Alfonso said,   a    M  s   e ‘You’re going to love this movie because   o   r   u    d   t   r   c   u   i  you can do anything you want.’ But that    P    M  .  ,   s    l turned out to be untrue once we decided    l   a   o   r    B  we wanted the film to be as realistic as    W   r   e    k   c   n    i   r possible.” The cinematographer notes    N  a  ,    W that in addition to naturalism, the film  e   s   o   f   o    l makers’ goals included respecting the    C  y   s   e   y   t   a   r physics of space, and involving the   r   u   r   u   o   c  viewer with long takes and “the elasticity    s    M   b   y   a of the shot.” He explains, “We wanted to    b   r   g   s   o   e keep a lot of our shots elastic — for   t   o   m   a    h   r example, to have a shot start very wide,    P   f  

Opposite page: NASA scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) gazes longingly at Earth during her ordeal in space. This page, top and middle: Stone and a veteran astronaut, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), make repairs to the International Space Station. Bottom: Director Alfonso Cuarón (left) confers with cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC.

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Facing the Void

After fast-moving debris damages the space station, Stone and Kowalski find themselves in a life-threatening crisis.

then become very close, and then go back to a very wide shot.” “We wanted to surrender to the environment of space, but we couldn’t go there, so the only way of doing it was through all of these technologies,” notes Cuarón. “In a fantasy world, we would have shot the whole film in space. If we had, not much would have changed in terms of the visuals.”  Webber, who led the visualeffects team at Framestore in London, convinced Cuarón that his desire for long takes with a zero-gravity camera required that they go virtual. “We needed the freedom of a virtual camera,” says Webber, “so we created a virtual  world and then worked out how to get human performances into that world.”  The space setting offered three main sources for the lighting design: the distant sun’s hard light, the soft bounce from Earth and, occasionally, the bounce from the moon. “The settings are either outer space or the interior of a capsule,” says Lubezki. “In space, it’s mostly [the characters] against black   with a piece of the Earth, a piece of the sun and sometimes the moon. That’s not enough [visual] variety to keep you excited for 100 minutes, so Alfonso and I decided to make the lighting constantly change. “It was very exciting to deal only   with the quality of light — how harsh or soft it would be, the amount of bounce and its color,” Lubezki continues. “Those few elements made it possible 38

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As the astronauts’ situation grows increasingly desperate, Kowalski uses his experience and humor to reassure Stone.

for us to create many different environments. We were also lucky that these spacecraft move so fast; they go through many days and nights in 24 hours.” Indeed, there are rich and dramatic variations in lighting throughout the film, motivated by the rotation of the camera and the characters, as well as the 90minute sunset cycles in orbit. One stunning sunset scene ends with Stone twirling into the darkness of a field of  stars, barely illuminated by the lights in her helmet.  The filmmakers began their prep by charting a precise global trajectory  for the characters over the story’s timeframe, so that Webber and his team could start creating the corresponding Earth imagery. Cuarón chose to begin the story with the astronauts above his native Mexico. From there, the precise orbit provided Lubezki with specific lighting and coloring cues. The cinematographer recalls, “I would say, ‘In this scene, Stone is going to be above the African desert when the sun comes out, so the Earth is going to be warm, and the bounce on her face is going to be warm light.’ We were able to use our map to keep changing the lighting.” Next, the filmmakers defined the camera and character positions throughout the story so that animators at Framestore could create a simple previs animation of the entire movie. Lubezki and Cuarón employed a decidedly low-tech method to initially block  the actors. “The camera moves are really   

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Facing the Void

This sequence of images shows key steps in a progression that begins with the prelight animation (top) and proceeds to the live-action production shoot (where soft fill light is applied), the first-pass integration of live-action footage with virtual elements, and the final image.

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complex, but we started in the most simple way — first with storyboards, and then with a bunch of puppets and toy versions of the International Space Station and the space shuttle Columbia ,” Lubezki explains. “We talked about them in the most primitive terms with the animators. It was great to start with some puppets, then have the animator come back with a black-and-white block animation, and then start to add  volume, color and light. It’s truly about layers and layers of work.” Cuarón laughs as he recalls the surprises inherent in blocking characters in a zero-gravity environment. “The complications are really something, because you have characters that are spinning. Say you want to start your shot with George’s face and move the camera to Sandra, who is spinning at a different rate. You start moving around her, and then you start to go back to George, only to realize that if you go back to George at that moment, you will be shooting his feet! So then you have to start from scratch. Sometimes you find amazing things accidentally, but sometimes you have to reconceive the whole scene.”  Webber adds that the camera moves for a few of the shots were motion-captured with a small rig that the filmmakers moved in a real space to create moves within the CG environment. “We wanted the camerawork to have a natural feel,” says Webber. “So, rather than have everything key-frameanimated, we did some virtual camera work in a small motion-capture studio.  Alfonso, Chivo and I could take the rig and just wander around, controlling the camera and framing up shots, and we later tweaked it a bit to make it feel more like zero gravity.” Lubezki believes that the long take ( plano sequencia in Spanish) brings the audience into the movie in a striking  way. “The main thing about the  plano sequencia  is that it is immersive. To me, it feels more real, more intimate and more immediate. The fewer the cuts, the more you are with [the characters]; it’s as if you’re feeling what they’re going

through in real time. This is something  Alfonso and I discovered on Y Tu  Mamá También and Children of Men.” Cuarón notes that whenever he  was tempted “to do a camera move just because it was cool, Chivo would not allow that to happen.” He cites the example of the opening take, which ends with Stone drifting away toward open space. “When we were doing the previs, as she started floating away, I said, ‘We don’t need to cut. We can keep following her in the same shot, so the first two shots would be just one shot.’ But Chivo said, ‘I think when she’s floating away is the perfect moment to cut. If this were the chapter of a book, this would be the last phrase of the chapter.’ And he was right. Otherwise,  we would have started calling attention to the long take and creating an expectation that that’s what the film was about. But that’s not what it’s about.  The camerawork serves … I don’t want to say it serves the story, because I have my problems with that. For me, the story is like the cinematography, the sound, the acting and the color. They  are tools for cinema, and what you have to serve is cinema, not story.” In another memorable camera move, the frame starts on Stone’s point of view, looking through her helmet and its reflections, and then goes through the headpiece glass, ending on an external wide shot. Cuarón explains, “There’s a purpose there. At the beginning of the film, we wanted to present a kind of  objective reality, where we just see a routine mission. After disaster strikes,  we continue to follow Stone objectively  until we grab a POV and go to a subjective experience. The interesting thing is that from the moment it comes out of  that helmet, the camera is no longer either objective or subjective. It becomes an immersive experience, as if  the viewer is right next to her.”  After the creation of the previs animation with virtual camera moves, the next stage was the prelight, when Lubezki defined the CG lighting in concert with the team at Framestore. “Working with a lot of digital gaffers, I  

This progression sequence begins with the previs phase, followed by images that show the live-action footage captured in the “LED Box,” the first-pass integration of the live action with virtual elements, and the final image.

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Tracking an Intricate Workflow  •|•

ravity  was a complex production produce motion-control camera moves effects supervisors and compositing that mixed virtual and real imaging and animated lighting in the LED Box. supervisors to integrate the shoot data elements in innovative ways. What Lubezki tweaks the illumination from and the CG imagery to create the final follows is a rough outline of the key  the LED images, adding human- images, which are then reviewed and steps involved in the project’s workflow. controlled hard light for the sun. The fine-tuned by Cuarón and Lubezki. CG lighting supervisor Paul Beilby of  speed of the camera moves is modified 11. DI Ingest — Technicolor Framestore and senior producer to adapt to the actors’ performances. Michael Dillon of Technicolor  The finished 2-D files from Framestore provided these details, with additional 7. Live-Action Production with are ingested, accompanied by external input from other members of the film- Puppeteering Rig — Shepperton mattes to facilitate separate color timing making team.  Techvis data is processed on set to move of important individual elements in the Bullock on “puppet strings” to simulate frame. zero gravity in the space capsule. This 1. Orbit Path — Framestore 12. DI Grade — Technicolor Cuarón works with the team at sequence is lit traditionally. Framestore to define the trajectory of  Scott works with Lubezki and Cuarón the film’s action above the Earth, which 8.Live-Action to refine the 2-D image, using many   will define the Earthscapes in the film. Production/Traditional Shoot  — layers of animated rotoscopes. The final Shepperton files are used to create a 2-D DCP, 2. Previs — Framestore Most of the space-capsule interiors, as Kodak Vision 2383 release prints and Cuarón and Lubezki work with a team  well as one 65mm scene set on Earth, an HD master. of animators to produce a low-res are lit and shot traditionally. 13. Stereoscopic Conversion — Prime animated version of the movie with  virtual camera moves. 9. Conform and Rendering — Focus Film and Framestore Framestore Prime Focus converts the live-action 3. Prelight — Framestore  A. Animators and riggers work on the material and some visual-effects Lubezki works with a team of technical “performances” of the spacesuit “charac- elements to 3-D. Framestore converts directors to produce the lighting design ters” and space-vehicle actions using the rest of the picture. of every virtual sequence in the film. production data as a reference.  The CG assets are simplified to facili- B. Modelers create high-quality  14. 3-D Grade — Technicolor tate fast rendering and feedback.  versions of the previs assets.  The filmmakers optimize the grade for C. Look-development technical direc- 4.5 foot-lambert and 7 foot-lambert 4. Pre-DI tors and texture artists refine the look of  brightness levels of projection for 3-D Using two separate, accurately cali- the materials using reference photogra-  white screen and Imax 3-D, respecbrated DI theaters in Los Angeles and phy from NASA and material samples. tively. As part of this process, they selecLondon, Cuaron, Lubezki, supervising tively apply a reverse-vignetting digital colorist Steven J. Scott and 10. Integrating Live Action and CG adjustment to compensate for the hot  visual-effects supervisor Tim Webber — Framestore spot associated with RealD’s silverrefine the color timing of four rendered  A. Compositors work on the live-action screen projection system. film clips, working in real time. Results plates received from the shoot and are rendered out (sometimes as just a conform them back into the File formats single frame) and sent to Framestore as previs. Several teams of animators, - Live-action production: ArriRaw  reference for the final look of the shots. animation supervisors, creature-effects 2880x1620 deBayered to Log C v3 supervisors and technical directors - Framestore CG output: 2060x876 105. Techvis — Framestore collaborate with the filmmakers to bit Log C DPX   The previs and prelight data are used to create the final actions and camera - Framestore external mattes output: produce camera-movement trajectories moves based on the actors’ perfor- 16-bit RBGa TIFF  and lighting environments for both mances. - 2-D graded files: 2048x858 10-bit characters’ points of view for use in B. Lighting technical directors work  Log C production.  with internal visual-effects supervisors and lighting supervisors to produce lit — Benjamin B 6. Live-Action Production with LED shots, ensuring that they match the live action. Box — Shepperton  Techvis data is processed on set to C. Compositors work with visual-

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Top: Before shooting the actors in the LED Box, Framestore provided multi-screen frame-by-frame animations of the technical packages, including calculations for robotic camera movement (left), reference frames from the prelight (top right) and camera framing (below the prelight), and a dashboard with key motion variables for the camera and actor turntable. Middle: To prepare for a scene in which Stone floats in a space capsule, the filmmakers did a test by suspending a stand-in from a “puppeteering” rig, with motion programmed to match the previs. Lubezki used traditional lighting for this sequence, with reflective panels standing in for the capsule interior. Bottom: A similar stand-in test was done for a scene in which Stone fights a fire inside the capsule. Lubezki played the CG fire on LED panels through diffusion (offscreen left) to light the actor with a virtual fire.

 was able to design the lighting for the entire film,” says Lubezki, recalling that there were about a dozen people working on the lighting of different scenes. Paul Beilby, a CG lighting super visor, notes that the prelight with Lubezki was designed for speed and was much more involved than the process had been on any previous Framestore project. “We worked directly with Chivo,” he says. “We used rough interpretations of very primitive objects because he is used to very quick feedback in terms of what the light’s going to look like.” Senior visual-effects producer Charles Howell explains that Gravity ’s lengthy shots required the filmmakers to make many decisions early in the process. “I think there were only about 200 cuts in the previs animation, [whereas] an average film has about 2,000 cuts. Because these shots had to be mapped out from day one, many of  the lengthy shots didn’t really change in the three years of shot production. Because we did a virtual prelight of the entire film with Chivo, the whole film  was essentially locked before we even started shooting.” Lubezki emphasizes that Gravity ’s blending of real faces with  virtual environments posed a tremendous challenge. “The biggest conundrum in trying to integrate live action  with animation has always been the  

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Facing the Void

Top: For scenes shot onstage in the LED Box, an Alexa was rigged on a modified Mo-Sys remote head attached to a motion-controlled robot arm that could be moved around the actors in a preprogrammed trajectory. Middle: Footage of the virtual environments was played on LED panels within the 20' cube. Bottom: The camera is positioned during a test with a stand-in.

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lighting,” he says. “The actors are often lit differently than the animation, and if  the lighting is not right, the composite doesn’t work. It can look eerie and take  you to a place animators call ‘the uncanny valley,’ that place where everything is very close to real, but your subconscious knows something is  wrong. That takes you out of the movie.  The only way to avoid the uncanny   valley was to use a naturalistic light on the faces, and to find a way to match the light between the faces and surroundings as closely as possible.”  This challenge led Lubezki to imagine a unique lighting space that was ultimately dubbed “the LED Box.” He recalls, “It was like a revelation. I had the idea to build a set out of LED panels and to light the actors’ faces inside it  with the previs animation.” Lubezki conducted extensive LED tests and then turned to Webber and his team to build the 20' cube and generate footage of the  virtual environments, as seen from the actor’s viewpoint, to display inside it.  While constructing the LED Box, the crew also solved problems involving LED flicker and color inconsistencies. Inside the LED Box, the CG environment played across the walls and ceiling, simulating the bounce light from Earth on the faces of Clooney or Bullock, and providing the actors with  visual references as they pretended to float through space. This elegant solution enabled the real faces to be lit by the  very environments into which they   would be inserted, ensuring a match between the real and virtual elements in the frame. For Lubezki, the complexity of  the lighting from the Earth source was also essential, giving nuanced realism to the light on the faces. “When you put a gel on a 20K or an HMI, you’re working  with one tone, one color. Because the LEDs were showing our animation, we  were projecting light onto the actors’ faces that could have darkness on one side, light on another, a hot spot in the middle and different colors. It was always complex, and that was the reason to have the Box.” ➣

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Facing the Void Lubezki also needed to add a moving hard light that would serve as a sun source and match the CG sun in the prelit animation. To achieve this, he had his crew place a small dolly and jib arm alongside the actors, with a lightweight Robin 600E Spot on a remote head. Key  grip Pat Garrett moved the dolly and jib during each take according to the progression of the virtual sun, and camera operator Nick Paige controlled the head to keep the light trained on the actor. Lubezki used a technique similar to the LED Box for a live-action scene in  which a fire breaks out in the space capsule. To light Bullock, the cinematographer diffused an LED panel that displayed the CG fire, ensuring a perfect match of the color and rhythm of  the firelight source and how it played on Bullock’s face in the final scene. Lubezki shot most of the liveaction material in the film with Arri  Alexa Classics and wide Arri Master Prime lenses, recording in the ArriRaw  format to Codex recorders; the package  was supplied by Arri Media in London. (Panavision London provided a Primo Close Focus lens that was used for a single shot.) He filmed a scene set on Earth on 65mm, using an Arri 765 and Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, to provide a  visual contrast to the rest of the picture. “The Alexa allowed me to shoot  ASA 800 native, and it still looked great if I pushed it to 1,200, which made it possible to use the LED sources,” Lubezki notes. Also, the Alexa’s latitude enabled him to “deal with the overexposure of a harsh, hard sunlight. We didn’t  want to lose any of that detail.”  To shoot the actors in the LED Box, the crew put an Alexa on a modified Mo-Sys remote head, which in turn attached to a large, motion-controlled robot arm that could be moved around the actor in a preprogrammed trajectory.  This system enabled the filmmakers to take advantage of the relative motion between objects in space. Because there is no “up” or “down” in zero gravity, shooting a moving object with a static camera is visually equivalent to shooting

Top: Stone attempts to maneuver toward a Chinese space station — and possible survival. Middle and bottom: Cuarón works with the actors on the spacecapsule set.

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a static object with a moving camera, and the filmmakers elected to make the camera perform most of the motion.  The robot arm was originally  designed to assemble cars, according to  Webber. He explains that Warner Bros. executive Chris DeFaria read about a San Francisco design-and-engineering studio, Bot & Dolly, which had used the arms to move a camera. Webber adds that the production worked with Bot &  Dolly to add increased flexibility to the system, including the ability to adjust the speed of the preprogrammed moves so they could be adapted to the actors’ performances. To create even more options, they added a special remote head that was manned by camera operator Peter Taylor. Based on a Mo-Sys head, this remote unit was adapted to make it smaller and lighter, partly so that it would block less light. It could be operated live or set to play preprogrammed moves driven by the previs. Gaffer John “Biggles” Higgins,  who also worked with Lubezki on Children of Men, marvels that he has “never seen anything like the set of  Gravity .” Apart from the LED Box, he notes, there were also other, slightly more traditional setups. For interiors of the space capsule as it hurtles to Earth, for instance, the filmmakers used an Alpha 4K HMI without its lens to simulate the sun, moving the source around the stationary capsule with a crane and a remote head. Higgins says they selected the Alpha because “it is the only head that can be operated shooting straight down.” He adds that Lubezki would provide ambient light by punching powerful tungsten 20Ks through 20'x20' frames, using two layers of diffusion, Half and Full Grid Cloth, as well as green and blue gels, to simulate sunlight. “These diffusions were mainly used on the real capsules,” explains Higgins. “The green and blue filters were stitched to the back of the closest diffusion, the 20-by20 Full Grid.”  As the production footage of the actors was integrated into the CG imagery, some modifications were made to the virtual elements to reflect the

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Facing the Void

Stone floats in zero gravity while confronting her next dilemma.

actors’ performances or changes in the supervising digital colorist Steven J. lighting on their faces. Lubezki adds, “I Scott. Scott, an ASC associate member, suggested to Tim that we add lens flares  was struck by the duo’s passion for and chromatic aberrations in the CG so detail. He recalls, “Chivo and Alfonso it would look as if the [entire] image had  would start with something that would been captured with a camera.” look brilliant to 99 percent of the audiOnce Framestore finished the ence, but they’d say, ‘There’s a little too rendering process to the filmmakers’ much cyan in the top of his backpack as satisfaction, Lubezki and Cuarón super-  we pass by.’ So, we’d do a rotoscope  vised the final grade at Technicolor with animation to isolate that area, then fade

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the cyan adjustment in for the brief  moment it was needed, and fade it out as we went by. When you work with Chivo for weeks and weeks, you see that all those seemingly minor adjustments make a huge difference. The cumulative effect is inevitably a revelation.” In turn, Cuarón enthuses that Scott “understands and completely  respects and honors Chivo’s vision, but at the same time, he is also an artist with amazing technical resources. Steve has a great eye, and he understands what naturalism is all about.” Looking back at Lubezki’s work  on Gravity , Webber offers, “I’m not aware of any other prelight done anywhere near this level. I think this was a first. It was great working with Chivo,  who is not only an incredible talent, but also very willing to use this new technology and embrace lighting within this new environment. Even though very  little of the film is physically lit in the  way Chivo would normally do it, his

became a director. I know him well. He’s my teacher and also one of my  favorite filmmakers. I’m very lucky to  work with him.” “Chivo is my co-filmmaker,” says Cuarón. “He is not just doing what most people think of as the cinematographer’s job. On Gravity  he was every where, collaborating every single step of  the way.” ● TECHNICAL SPECS Struggling with unfamiliar controls in a space capsule, Stone must perform a complex sequence of technical procedures.

touch is all over everything.” Reflecting on his relationship Cuarón and Lubezki share an  with Cuarón, Lubezki offers, “The appreciation for “the genius” that truth is that ever since I met him,  Webber brought to Gravity . They also  Alfonso has always been one of my  note that cinematographer Michael most important teachers. I worked with Seresin, BSC filled in as director of  him in film school as his gaffer when he photography when Lubezki had to leave  was the cinematographer, as his boom the set for personal reasons. “Michael man when he was sound mixing, as his came into a very complicated set and second AC when he was a first AC, and adapted to it wonderfully,” Cuarón says. finally as his cinematographer when he

2.40:1 Digital Capture and 65mm  Arri Alexa Classic, 765  Arri Master Prime, Panavision Primo Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 Digital Intermediate Stereoscopic Conversion

Taking onWater In All Is Lost , shot by Frank DeMarco and Peter Zuccarini, a lone sailor battles the elements after his boat is damaged far from port.

time, and only one character — identified in the credits as “Our Man” (Robert Redford) — in the entire film. All Is Lost  is an exercise in pure cinematic storytelling, using only the actor’s performance, the camerawork and the juxtapositioning of shots to tell an invigorating tale. Our Man is a veteran sailor making a solo journey of  indeterminate origin and destination in the Indian Ocean. We By Jay Holben don’t know how long he has been at sea, but we do witness several days of his life that are fraught with one life-threaten•|• ing challenge after another. The film opens with the hollow  sound of ocean waves slapping against a large, metal object; irector/writer J.C. Chandor’s screenplay for  All Is Lost  there is no motion, no boat slicing through the water, no sail wasn’t really a screenplay at all, at least not in traditional cloth or rigging fluttering in the wind. Our Man awakens to Hollywood terms. A mere 32 pages, it was more of a this tinny rhythm and rises to find the cabin of his boat taking detailed treatment. The slenderness of the blueprint on water, and he soon discovers that a large shipping container  wasn’t due to lack of planning or foresight, nor was it because adrift on the ocean has punched a 2'x2' hole in the side of his the film was wholly improvised. In fact, every shot in the film 40' sailboat, the Virginia Jean.  was meticulously storyboarded. But there are only three  All Is Lost found Chandor reteaming with cinematogmoments of dialogue in the feature’s 106-minute running rapher Frank DeMarco, a collaborator on  Margin Call ( AC 

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Oct. ’11). DeMarco recalls, “When we  were filming Margin Call , we did a lot of nights in New York City in a tall building on 34th Street. At 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening, I would look out at the Hudson River and see all these little white sailboats gliding around lower Manhattan. I decided I wanted to be on one of those boats! So, after the shoot, I became a member of the Manhattan Sailing Club, not having any idea that J.C. was developing a sailing movie. I spent the next two years sailing a lot, and eventually I got my   American Sailing Association certification.” Because All Is Lost  would entail a significant amount of work actually in the water, Chandor also sought out  veteran underwater director of photography Peter Zuccarini, whose credits include Life of Pi  and all four Pirates of   the Caribbean films. “J.C. asked me to create ways to shoot Our Man seam 

Opposite: Our Man (Robert Redford), a sailor making a solo journey on the open ocean, must fight to survive in  All Is Lost . This page, top: Our Man scans the horizon. Bottom: Cinematographer Frank DeMarco (seated) confers on set with writer/director J.C. Chandor (right).

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Taking on Water lessly as he moves in and out of the  water,” Zuccarini explains. “We wanted the intimacy that is established above the water to continue through the  waves, storms and flooded compartments.” In prep, DeMarco, Zuccarini and Chandor watched all the seafaring films they could find. “In particular,” DeMarco recalls, “we looked at sailboat movies that had storms at sea, including The Dove , Wind , White Squall [ AC Feb. ’96] and The Weight of Water , and a ton of YouTube clips of sailboats getting swamped, rolling completely over and foundering. We also studied how other filmmakers filmed down below, in the boat’s cabin, and discussed what we liked and what we didn’t. We watched Dead Calm [shot by Dean Semler, ASC,  ACS] a lot and really liked it; we tried to convey a similar sense of expectation or dread throughout  All Is Lost . However, there were a lot of things we decided we  wouldn’t do, such as constructing a set  with wild walls, which gave Dead Calm a lot of freedom with camera movement. We wanted to maintain the physical parameters of the cabin and keep it confined and physically immediate.”  Another inspiration was Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water . “It’s amazing what Polanski and [cinematographer] Jerzy Lipman achieved using a camera barge made out of plywood and a tripod,” says DeMarco. “That film has a great feel to it. Lipman’s great handheld camerawork and evocative compositions convey a pervasive sense of  tension. I also took Polanski’s technique of keeping the handheld camera static  while allowing the actor to move about in the frame. With the right blocking,  you can get a wide, a close-up and interesting movement all in the same shot. It’s very efficient filmmaking!” Chandor notes, “About 97 percent of  All Is Lost  is shot from eye level, either in front of Our Man or behind him from just a few feet away.  We never really get more than 10 or 12 feet away from him, which is true to the real confines of the boat. In a space like a sailboat cabin, many filmmakers have

Top: Our Man assesses the damage as water fills his sailboat. Middle: Inclement weather leads to further peril. Bottom: Members of the crew meet aboard one of three versions of the Virginia Jean used for the film.

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the tendency to sweep the camera all over the place, trying to create energy  and stay away from monotony, but I  wanted to embrace that monotony.  That’s really the point: You’re trapped  with this character in this situation as an impotent observer, as opposed to being an omnipotent observer. The audience experiences this world the way the character does; they’re stuck on the boat  with him, and they never know more than he does. Had we put the camera in an unrealistic place, moved off the boat to get establishing shots or swept through where a wall would be, it would have violated that feeling of confinement and given the audience a breath I didn’t want them to take. “I said to everyone, ‘This film is a  very delicate flower, and the minute we try to make it something it’s not, the  whole thing will fall apart,’” adds the director. “I was very conscious of our budget and our restrictions and wanted to really work within those instead of  trying to push them. If we’d tried to make the film more than it actually is,  we’d have lost what we were trying to ➣ do.”  

Top: Our Man casts a worried look toward an approaching storm. Bottom: The crew employs a suspended cage to capture Redford at eye level for a scene in which he scales the mast.

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Taking on Water

The filmmakers deployed a Technochrane to film a shipping vessel for one of the movie’s early scenes.

Principal photography took place over 30 days at Baja Studios in Rosarito Beach, in the Mexican state of Baja, Calif. The same facility was used for such features as Titanic  ( AC  Dec. ’97), Pearl Harbor  ( AC May ’01) and  Master  and Commander: The Far Side of the  World ( AC Nov. ’03). Baja Studios’ Tank  1 is a 600'x600' exterior tank that is just 54

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3.5' deep, with a center trough that is 20'  wide and 40' deep. When filled, the 17million-gallon tank is like an infinity  pool; an overflow weir on the ocean view side creates a seamless 420'-long horizon with the Pacific Ocean. The facility also has two tanks (Tank 2 and  Tank 4) in soundstages and an exterior insert pool (Tank 3). American Cinematographer

Over the course of its production,  All Is Lost  employed Tanks 1, 3 and 4. “We shot nearly the entire film on ‘water stages,’” says DeMarco. “We used  Tank 1, which holds 16 acres of water, for most of our good-weather exterior sequences, and then we’d go into Tank  4, which was wrapped in either greenscreen or black drapes, for our foul weather interior and exterior day and night sequences. We used Tank 3,  where the rear deck of the Titanic  was built, for the final underwater night scene, and for the underwater daytime shots of the Virginia Jean completely  rolling over in a massive storm, which snaps the 60-foot mast and tosses Our Man overboard. “Production bought three Cal 39 sailboats,” DeMarco continues. “We cut holes in the interior and exterior walls of  one for shooting interiors; one had a gash in the side from the shipping container but was otherwise completely  intact and sailable; and the third had a chopped mast, chopped sails and a chopped keep so it would fit into Tank  4 and be easier for the marine crew to rock and roll during storm sequences.”

DeMarco shot  All Is Lost  with blasts hit it, which really added to the  water can be so frustrat frustratingly ingly slow slow..  Arri Alexa cameras, capturing capturing in 16:9 confused, frenetic feeling of being  There are probably only four shots in but composing for a 2.39:1 right there with Our Man in a nasty  the film where we actually utilized the (2880x1205) widescreen release. “We sea storm.”  Technocr  T echnocrane ane for what it’s primarily  centered the 2.39:1 on the 16:9 Super Chandor notes, “We didn’t use designed to do!” 35mm chip,” he explains. “W “ We exposed the Technocrane to do sweeping or  The film also featur features es a lot of  at 800 ISO, and we shot ArriRaw to a dynamic shots. We used it to get the handheld shots, both to compensate Codex recorder that was usually off- camera where we needed it to be, for the boat’s motion and to undercamera.  which was close to Our Man at all score the story’s tension. Throughout “We used Zeiss Standard Speed times. It really helped to expedite the the shoot, DeMarco operated the A MKII [T2.1] prime lenses from the shooting process, because shooting on camera while Zuccarini handled the B 1980s and 1990s. Because digital can be so hard and sharp, shar p, I like to use older lenses to create a smoother image; we didn’t want this movie to look super modern. We also used a Zeiss 15.545mm Lightweight Zoom a lot; it’s a small, easy-to-handhold lens that’s beautiful and not overly sharp. I also carried two Angenieux Optimo

“The audience experiences this world the way the character does.” Strong and Wide zooms, a 17-80mm [T2.2] and a 24290mm [T2.8]. I used ND filters to keep the stop around T2.1 or T2.8, because shallow depth-of-field felt right for this film.” Exteriors were frequently shot from a 50' Super Technocrane fitted  with a Libra Libra head. head. The crane was fixed fixed to its own self-propelled barge that could cruise through Tank 1. “The  Technoc  T echnocrane/Libr rane/Libra-head a-head combinatio combination n  worked beautif beautifully ully for us,” DeMarco enthuses. “Brendon [O’Dell] and his special-effects team used water cannons capable of discharging incredible blasts of water that could knock a person off the boat during storm sequences. We discovered that the Libra head gave us a wonderful shiver effect whenever the cannon

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Taking on Water

Underwater director of photography Peter Zuccarini used his own camera housing to capture shots beneath the water and at surface level.

camera; they were assisted by 1st ACs amazing — smaller, lighter and more Phil Shanahan and Peter Mano, efficient than any other underwater respectively. housing I’ve ever seen. Some of the “[Zuccarini’s] system is really  most dramatic shots in the film are fantastic,” Chandor observes.  when the camera can go from under“Through all the work he’s done over  water to above water with that feeling feeling the years, especially on the Pirates  of bobbing right at the surface. His movies, he has developed his own system does that wonderfully.” underwater camera housing that is just “I do a lot of wet on-top-of56

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 water work, where under water cameras are more effective than regular cameras but are not necessarily below  the surface,” says Zuccarini. “I’ve developed a whole approach to filming above the water and clearing water off  the lens in different ways, depending on the needs of the scene. Sometimes  we want a shot where water hits the lens and clears perfectly, and other times we encourage having a wet lens.  The incons inconsistent istent formations of water and foam sliding on the lens port create a subtle distortion, and these optical imperfections are nuanced to render an emotive moment or impressionistic image. “Sometimes a wave breaks over the [actor] and the camera,” Zuccarini continues. “Our special-effects coordinator, Brendon O’Dell, had a range of  dump tanks of different sizes to give us a palette of waves and swirling white water.. The turbulenc  water turbulencee and associ associated ated layer of bubbles at the surface made an excellent organic light scrim for the underwater work beneath the storm.  The contras contrastt between the powerfu powerfull  wave action and the the exquisite exquisite soft light light

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Taking on Water

Zuccarini frames up from beneath Our Man’s life raft.

that it rendered was fantastic.” “The most emotionally charged moments of the film are when the camera floats right at water level,  which was Pete [Zuccarini], or when Frankie was working close with Bob,” says Chandor. “Toward the end of the film, Bob is in a life raft, and Frankie  was right in there with him. There  wasn’t a lot of room, so they were only  58

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a six-minute take, and at one point the camera slowly tilts off to the side, as if  someone left the tripod unlocked and the camera is slowly drifting, and then rights itself. It’s a truly beautiful moment, because it really reflects how  physically exhausted and drained Our Man is. It translates to the subconscious feeling you have while watching it.”  When operating the camera, DeMarco says, “I try to be intuitive.  The term I like to use regarding my  handheld operation on  All Is Lost  is ‘the curious eye.’ If you’re walking down the street and you catch movement out of the corner of your eye, you’re likely to turn to see it, and then turn back to look where you’re about 2 or 3 feet apart. We put some going. I try to do that with my camera plywood under the base of the raft to operating. In the early 1980s, I loaded stiffen the bottom up a bit and make  Aaton magazines for a great the camera operating a little easier, but documentary cameraman, Richard it was still really hard to move around Chisolm, out of Baltimore and an 8-foot-diameter raft. That’s where  Washington, and the curious eye was Our Man starts coming to grips with his style. He’d be shooting an interhis mortality. Also, at that time, we  view and dip down to a finger tapping,  were four weeks into shooting and we a twitch or something passing by that  were all sunbaked and waterlogged. It’s  would be brilliant and really put you American Cinematographer

into that moment. I took that to heart, and I use it regularly in my work.  There’s a scene with Bob in the cabin of the boat when it’s being bashed around in the middle of a storm, and I chose to focus on the stove in the foreground — which, as it’s designed to do, was rocking like crazy — while Bob was out-of-focus in the background, holding on for dear life. To me, the swinging stove captured the sickening feeling of that moment in the best way possible.” For exterior lighting in Tank 1, DeMarco took a naturalistic approach. “That style really felt the best. The  weather in Rosarito is a lot like Los

“In the real world, when it goes cloudy, the ocean goes black, and I wanted to get that look onstage, too.”

 Angeles’ in June; it’s usually cloudy  and gloomy in the morning, and then it burns off to direct sun in the afternoon. So, we’d get up and look at the light. We shot our more stormy  sequences in the morning with the cloud coverage, and did our directsunlight sequences after the clouds burned off. We worked mostly with natural light and bounces, and sometimes, in the late afternoon or early  evening, I’d have Radium Cheung, the gaffer, bring out an HMI to give Bob an edge if the light was failing.” DeMarco carried this idea of  naturalism onstage for the greenscreen sequences of stormy weather. “When  you’re out at sea in bad weather, it’s all toplight. If the sky is clouded over, the

light is super soft, but it’s all still coming from above. So, key grip Pat O’Mara built an overhead 60-by-60foot soft box with double silk, with 40 space lights hanging above it. We dimmed that overhead lighting all the  way down to the level you would really  get in a heavy storm at sea. In the real  world, when it goes cloudy, the ocean goes black, and I wanted to get that look onstage, too.”

Inside the boat, DeMarco mostly used store-bought marine LED fixtures that ran off of DC power. He explains, “They were very  small units, and we installed them in the boat so we could cheat them around. Also, because they were low voltage DC, nobody could get zapped during the wet interior boat scenes. During prep, I had extensive conversations with the production designer,

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Taking on Water

Top: Zuccarini prepares to shoot. Bottom: The life raft is maneuvered into position.

 John Goldsmith, about the placement of practical lighting. I carefully  thought of where Bob would be most of the time, and installed lights accordingly throughout the cabin. I wanted to make sure he’d never have to deal  with finding his light or dodging  around lighting hardware or wiring. “Our marine coordinator, Jimmy  60

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hatches, especially in the forward sleeping cabin. I’d take a Fat Boy, a 2foot 4-bulb Kino, wrap it in plastic and put it right on top of the hatch to create toplight in the sleeping cabin. In the storm situations, I put foamcore around the railings of the boat at 45-degree angles and let that passively  accept the toplight from the overhead soft box, bouncing the light into the cabin through the portholes.” In addition to work at the Baja facility, Zuccarini spent more than a  week on the open ocean, shooting  underwater shots of sharks, fish and the underside of the life raft. “We had amazing luck, and we were able to capture every storyboarded shot that  J.C. had created for us almost exactly,” he recalls. O’Connell, and his crew built floating  DeMarco also went out on the Connect-Deck docks around the boat open ocean for a single day of shootfor lighting, grip and personnel ing with Redford. “We knew we access,” DeMarco adds. “I could needed to see real rolling water and punch Arri M18 HMIs through the ocean spray for certain sequences,” he portholes and let them burn out a bit, notes. “We were incredibly lucky   which felt more real to me than trying  because the day we went out with to see details outside. I also liked Bob, his last day of shooting, we had a putting Kino Flos over the top mix of conditions, from brooding  American Cinematographer

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Chandor references the project’ project’ss storyboards.

 weather with 9-foot rolling waves crashing on the bow to beautiful, clear skies and tame seas. We were able to shoot for a number of cruising sequences and seamlessly mix in that

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footage with our exterior stage footage. It’s just enough to convince the audience that the character is really sailing out on the ocean.” For the final grade, DeMarco

says he spent “a very enjoyable 10 days  with colorist colorist Chris Wallace Wallace at Deluxe Laboratories in Toronto.” 2K DPX  files were created from the ArriRaw  footage at 2048x1152 resolution, and  Wallace  W allace graded on an Autodesk  Lustre in P3 color space. “I always find that the DI sessions allow me to really polish the look of the film, and sometimes even finish some lighting that might have gotten away from me in the fray of  location shooting,” says DeMarco. “I also love to use blowups, repositions, grads, vignettes and even tilts in the DI to create a better composition or to smooth out a tough transition from one shot to another. We We were also able to destabilize the image when necessary to match other rocking-boat footage!” He adds, “[Visual-effects super visor] Bob Munroe and his team at Spin VFX did an absolutely superlative job on wave, wind, sky and cloud

backgrounds” in footage shot against greenscreen and against real backgrounds that needed to be replaced. “This was a very unusual film, and a very wet one,” Zuccarini reflects. “I felt very fortunate to have been included in the inner creative circle.” DeMarco adds, “It was very  interesting to work with a script that  was only 32 pages long. It’s It’s all internal. The whole film is about Our Man thinking and problem solving, or simply enduring really horrible stuff.  The trick for me was to figure out  what emotion or story point we should find in each scene. Is he just battening down the hatches, or is there more to that part of the story? I constantly quizzed J.C. about the emotional core of every scene, and we placed the camera where it needed to be and chose a focal length that would depict that feeling or help convey the character’s thinking. That approach  was both fun and challengi challenging, ng, and and we

didn’t have any dialogue to cheat with — All Is Lost  Lost is like a silent movie with sound! “Bob is great at internal acting, and it was my job to complement his skill — to tap into his inner monologue and conduct it into the heads and hearts of the audience,” he concludes. “It was a thrill and a privilege to work with such an astute director and a legendary actor, as well as producers Neal Dodson, Anna Gerb and Josh Blum. It was my most exciting film experience to date.” ●

TECHNICAL SPECS

2.40:1 Digital Capture  Arri Alexa Zeiss Standard Speed MKII,  Angenieux Optimo

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Seized at Sea  Barry Ackroyd, BSC reteams  with director Paul Greengrass on Captain Phillips , which dramatizes the real-life hijacking of a U.S. cargo ship. By Patricia Thomson •|•

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n 2009, four Somali pirates managed to hijack the U.S. cargo ship MV  Maersk Alabama . The container ship’s crew  had nothing but fire hoses and flares to fend off the armed attack. When Capt. Richard Phillips saw the pirates successfully board, he instructed his crew to let the ship “go black” and hide in the bowels of the engine room to await rescue. The pirates seized Phillips at gunpoint on the bridge,

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but his crew captured the Somali ringleader, Muse, when he came searching for them. During a negotiated swap, the pirates took Capt. Phillips hostage as they fled on a lifeboat.  The USS Bainbridge , later joined by the USS Halyburton and Navy SEALs, used both carrot and stick to rescue the captain. Based on the book  A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates,  Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea  by Phillips and Stephan Talty, the motion picture Captain Phillips is precisely  the kind of fact-based geopolitical story director Paul Greengrass and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, BSC excel at telling. Like their two previous collaborations, United 93 ( AC  June ’06) and Green Zone ( AC  April ’10), Captain Phillips  blends a knuckle-biting pace with a fidelity to fact, the latter an outgrowth of their mutual beginnings in documentary. “We have a very similar vision of the world, and our backgrounds are about using real locations,” says Ackroyd, who is also known for his collaborations with Ken Loach. “Whether it’s the interior of an apartment or the inside of an airplane or lifeboat, we have to get inside the real thing and shoot the truth of the matter.”

American Cinematographer

Opposite: Capt. Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) finds himself in grave danger after Somali pirates take him hostage in Captain Phillips. This page, top (from left): The four Somali pirates, Najee (Faysal Ahmed), Muse (Barkhad Abdi), Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman) and Elmi (Mahat Ali) stand poised aboard their skiff, weapons in hand. Bottom: Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, BSC, readies his camera.

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For Captain Phillips , which stars  Tom Hanks in the titular role and Barkhad Abdi as Muse, that philosophy  meant shooting aboard real ships on the open sea. Only 10 days of the 60-day  shoot were on solid ground, primarily  for lifeboat interiors at London’s Longcross Studios, where the 5-ton fiberglass craft was rocked on a gimbal. During April and most of May 2012, the cast and crew traveled five miles off  the port of Malta to shoot on the  Maersk Alexandria , doubling for the  Maersk Alabama , or plunged into a Malta water tank to shoot stunts involving Hanks. Then came two weeks on the swells of the Atlantic, 10 miles out from the Norfolk naval base in Virginia,  where they filmed the rescue operation  with real Navy battleships and personnel. “You can imagine how difficult this was for Barry and his crew,” Greengrass says. “There were two primary challenges. The first was shooting on water and everything that means.  There’s motion through every single plane: up and down, side to side and everything in between. You’re at the  

mercy of the weather and trying to create stability where there is none. The second challenge was the confined spaces, especially the lifeboat, which  was tiny.” Plus, the days were long, often extending well into night, and getting around the ships was physically difficult. “It was a tremendous feat www.theasc.com

of concentration and endurance,” Greengrass says, “but there wasn’t a thing Barry wouldn’t do or a place he  wouldn’t go.” Contemplating the logistics of  shooting on water, miles from technical support, led the production to choose film as its primary acquisition medium.  Thinking about handholding the November 2013

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Top: The pirates prepare to board the MV Maersk   Alabama. Middle: A-camera 1st AC Oliver Driscoll (in red shirt) and other crew and cast members prepare for the boarding scene. Bottom: Ackroyd used a bungee rig to help support an Aaton XTR Prod while he filmed from the pirate skiff.

camera in a skiff while riding the wake led Ackroyd to his reliable old friend, the Super 16mm Aaton XTR Prod, upgraded with Xterà video assist. He explains, “I realized we were going to be in 20-foot skiffs in rough water, day and night, with the camera. How were we going to do that? We thought we’d build a little bungee rig so I could handhold [the camera] on my shoulder with a 12:1 zoom; that way, I could be inside the skiff with the pirates, then zoom and find Phillips on the bridge or the first mate running along the deck being fired at by Kalashnikovs, and connect those shots. I thought I could do that only   with a 16mm camera with a 12:1 zoom,  which is light and reliable enough to survive the bashing it would take.”  The next choice was to differentiate the Somali and Phillips story  threads. To that end, scenes in the Somali fishing village (filmed in Morocco) and on the skiffs were shot on Super 16mm, while those aboard the  Maersk Alabama  and other Western  vessels were shot on 3-perf Super 35mm. “We literally switched over to 35mm as the pirates stepped onto the deck of the  Maersk Alabama ,” says  Ackroyd. 66

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Greengrass had additional dualities in mind. “It was important to me to construct a visual image of a giant container ship being chased by small skiffs, and then these giant naval ships chasing the lifeboat, [to create] a visual symmetry,” says the director. “I was also interested in images of extreme confinement and extreme scale; the way  their relationship shifts mirrors the changing relationship of the characters.”  When rendering extremities of  scale via aerial photography — tiny  skiffs vs. massive cargo ship or hulking battleships vs. a toy-like lifeboat — the filmmakers deployed an Arri Alexa, capturing in ArriRaw to a Codex recorder. “That’s a natural choice for helicopters because you don’t have to stop to reload,” notes Ackroyd.  To better capture any magic moments and enable quick cutting  without a jarring effect, two cameras  were running at all times. This was a particularly important strategy because the Somalis were nonprofessional actors. “They more or less improvised their performances,” Ackroyd says. “Of  course, they had lines to say, but they  took on the persona very much. Tom, being such a great actor, made them look great, and they likewise made Tom look great.” Throughout the shoot,  Ackroyd shared operating duties with Cosmo Campbell, who brought a customized Steadicam whose shortened center post made it more difficult to stabilize, but also enabled him to pass through bulkhead hatches and other tight spots. For the 3-perf Super 35mm  work, an Aaton Penelope supplied by  Ice Film served as the A camera. Arri Media supplied most of the other gear, including two Arricam Lites (B and C cameras) and an Arri 235 (D camera).  Ackroyd and 1st AC Oliver Driscoll brought their own Aaton XTR Prods. Rounding out the cameras were an Arri 435 that filmed 4-perf, a batch of  GoPros (used to capture the Navy  SEALs’ parachute drop), and a VistaVision camera that captured  

Top: Despite the fire hoses aimed in their direction, the pirates easily board the cargo vessel. Bottom: A crane steadies one of the cameras above the water.

www.theasc.com

November 2013

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◗  Seized at

Sea   visual-effects plates with Leica Summilux-C lenses.  Ackroyd has preferred zoom lenses since his documentary days.  Though he had an array of Zeiss Super Speed T1.3 primes on hand for lowlight scenes, he otherwise relied on a 24-290mm T2.8 Angenieux Optimo (with 2x extender for simulated binocular shots), as well as T2.6 28-76mm and 15-40mm Optimos. In addition, he tapped a rehoused Nikon 80-200mm zoom and, for 16mm work, Canon’s 300mm T2.8 prime (600mm T5.6 with a doubler) and a Canon 10.6-180mm  T2.7 16mm zoom. “The Penelope and Optimo 2876mm is a great combination for Barry,” Driscoll says. “He can really punch into a scene with that, which he likes to do. But we’d also go with the 12:1 Optimo. It’s not really a handheld lens — it’s massive — so we’d have that on a monopod. If you need to move, you can pick it all up and move quite easily. “No matter which zoom lens he’s using, Barry will use the entire zoom [range],” Driscoll continues. Ackroyd’s camerawork “is all about getting to the action. It’s very inquisitive. It’s almost like you’re reaching in with your ear; you can get over there and hear what’s happening. The zoom is the method he uses.”  Ackroyd physically put himself in the thick of things as well. When the Somalis attack and climb a hook ladder on the side of the  Maersk Alabama , “I  wouldn’t have been surprised if Barry  had put a camera on his shoulder and  just run up after them,” says Driscoll. (Ackroyd and the actors did stop as the stunt doubles took over.) “Once he gets the bite, he tends to go with the action.” For his film negative, Ackroyd stuck with some old favorites, Fujifilm Eterna 250D 8663/8563 and 500T 8673/8573. “I always rated it normally, but I’m never afraid to underexpose it and then bring it back later on,” says the cinematographer. “It brings up the grain a little bit, and we used that as a stylistic device. I like to use a lot of things that seem wrong because it tells you you’re in

Top: The pirates make their way through the  Alabama. Middle and bottom: The crew films the actors who play the  Alabama crew, first above deck and then down in the engine room.

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a place where that was the only possible  way to do it.”  As an example, Ackroyd points to a scene in the  Maersk Alabama ’s engine room, when the emergency  lights go off and the crew hides in darkness. Exposure was a good 2 stops under. “I like the feeling that the film stock is struggling to get something  onto the negative,” he says. “When I get to the DI, I might wonder why I did that, but at the time, I just felt it was right. I’ve always thought that in documentary work, the shot that’s underexposed or scratched or blurred lends honesty to the story. Nowadays it’s a trick, but I like the sense that this is  what was necessary.”  Ackroyd knew the Fuji stock   would also excel in high-contrast situations, such as the pirates’ dramatic takeover of the cargo ship, when their ebony faces were backlit by the wraparound windows on the bridge. “Because we were at sea, there was no  way of lighting or diffusing that,” says  Ackroyd, who even eschewed bounce materials while cross-shooting this partially ad-libbed scene. “I just trusted the film stock to cover that range of  exposure.”  Although the ship had its own pull-down ND shades, “they had a slight magenta tinge,” he continues. “We used them occasionally, but mostly   

Top: A tense Phillips considers what to do. Middle: Muse and Najee threaten Phillips on the bridge. Bottom: Steadicam operator Cosmo Campbell films Ali and Abdirahman.

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November 2013

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◗  Seized at Sea 

Top: Muse ushers Phillips into the vessel’s lifeboat. Bottom: The crew gets additional lifeboat shots on land.

might seem counterintuitive for a Greengrass film, given the director’s trademark rapid-fire editing. In fact,  Ackroyd’s camera operators have been known to question the logic of shooting a long walk down a corridor when only  a few frames will be used. “I say, ‘Well, if you can tell me which 12 frames he’s going to put in, you can shoot just those 12 frames,’” the cinematographer says  with a laugh. From Ackroyd’s perspective, “The reason Paul’s method works very   well goes back to documentary. There’s a massive amount of concentration in each minute, each frame. We try to do long takes — tracking with people, leading them in and out of rooms, doing  whole sections of dialogue from beginning to end — and we’re always trying to get it better than the previous take, [only when they were seen] in shot.” camera] down to a minimum. But he’s trying to capture more information than Instead, a circular polarizer was often happy to leave on a clip-on matte box  we had before. When [Greengrass’ used to include or exclude reflections.  with the 24-290mm or 28-76mm with longtime editor] Chris Rouse gets the “Barry likes to use a polarizer almost like a rotating pola in the front. And he’s footage, he can select the moments and an ND,” Driscoll observes. “Sometimes always very generous with the stop — synthesize these really economical and  we’ll just keep them in; Barry’s not  we tended to shoot around T5.6½.” dynamic edits, which tell the story very  afraid of any flaring. Naturally, we keep  Another part of Ackroyd’s precisely but also immerse you in the any loose light source in front [of the methodology was to do long takes. That story. And he uses only our best work, 70

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e l   O u C   r 1 e b r a  3 t  t i   h Y  n   g  e a  r !  

November 6-7, 2013 | Burbank Airport Marriott | www.createasphere.com/ete

The essential event for content creators of all sizes. Now in its 13th year, ETE stands as the leading Expo on the west coast for content creators working in every field. But just as the world of content creation is evolving, so too is ETE, making it more relevant than ever.

November 6th will be the Acquisition, VFX and Post Day and November 7th will cover Workflow and Data Management as well as New Tech/New Talent, focusing on the next gen of content creators. WORKSHOP PRICING

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Here, you’ll see the types of technology utilized by the new multiplatform content producers as well as the gear that industry professionals come to get an up-close look at every year:

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• • • • • •

And, of course, there’s also Gear Alley with its larger-than-life production equipment and our famous opening night cocktail party — all FREE with your ETE registration!

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Shooting Timelapse and the Workflow Working with Log Images ACES: the Colorspace for Production Useful Tools for Editing and Post Production Anatomy of an Edit Previsualization 4K Made Easy How to Tackle the Changing Workflows DIT on set Dailies Workshop How to Self-Fund, Produce and Distribute  Virtual Cinematography Transmedia 101

NEW WORKSHOPS

•

Our attendees demanded that we bring high-end, professional education to ETE, and this year we’re fulfilling that request. We’ll be providing two tracks of intensive, hands-on workshops for professionals taught by professionals, not  professional trainers.

Space is limited for these workshops, so register now! Just go to www.createasphere.com/ete  for full session and track descriptions and links to registration.

◗  Seized at

Sea  so it makes the camera look good.” On Captain Phillips , this approach required some physically challenging maneuvers, including the sequence when Phillips first inspects the  Maersk Alabama . “That shot is cut into pieces, as usual, but it started traveling down the corridor behind the captain, and he almost slides down a kind of  ladder to the lower deck,” says Ackroyd. “We positioned grips dressed as sailors  who’d clip a rope pulley onto the back of  Cosmo’s harness and lower him down one deck, and there he was unclipped and could carry on down another corridor. Then, when he got to another set of  ladders, he’d be clipped in and lowered again. I remember coming back and showing [the footage to] Paul, and he said, ‘Hmm, it could be a bit smoother.’ I said, ‘Paul, this is hard to do!’ Those  vessels are very hard, very unforgiving.  The number of bumps and scrapes you could get was incredible. It felt like I should be wearing a hard hat.” Filming on a small fishing vessel  was no easier. Custom-made by a Maltese shipbuilder, each skiff had three or four points to which the crew could attach an A-frame scaffold with a T-bar and change its position, even at sea. The  XTR Prod was hung from this by  bungee cords and positioned to sit on  Ackroyd’s shoulder. “That way I was free, as much as I could be, to swivel and tilt and pan and struggle with the camera to get the shots,” he says. Shooting Super 16mm with the Canon 10.6-180mm zoom not only  gave the filmmakers the range to go from a skiff interior to a cargo ship miles away, but also allowed 11-minute takes,  which the crew fully exploited. “That attack on the  Maersk was more or less done for real,” says Driscoll. “We did it three to four times with the actors and a stunt driver.” Here, as elsewhere, the camera was encased in a Hydroflex splash bag to protect it from the cargo ship’s water cannons.  A fishing boat equipped with two cameras was sufficiently fast for wide shots of the speeding skiffs, but for closer work, the filmmakers used a

Top: The crew and cast film within the lifeboat. Middle: U.S. Navy ships surround the lifeboat. Bottom: The crew readies a night scene.

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For the interior lifeboat scenes, filmmakers mounted the 5-ton fiberglass craft on a gimbal at London’s Longcross Studios.

speedboat to keep up, punching in with a zoom. For additional close-ups and sea-level POV shots of the skiffs crashing through the waves, a Hydrocrane  with a remote Libra head was attached to another small boat. “We’d try to hang the crane down to water level to get shots of the skiffs coming toward us, or the wake of the Alabama ,” says Ackroyd. “That was incredibly difficult because the crane arm is a moving object and the sea itself is moving. It wasn’t like we could put the camera in one position and make it stay there!”  Ackroyd salutes 1st AD Chris Carreras for coordinating complex sequences that included the Somali attack and the rescue scenes. “When  you’ve got an aircraft carrier, a freighter, a lifeboat and two helicopters, plus a camera helicopter and cameras in dinghies and on ships, all simultaneously shooting and trying to get this magic five or 10 minutes of light, it’s quite a feat,” says Ackroyd. “I just can’t praise the AD team enough. Chris and his guys really pulled all that together. Our job was to always be ready to shoot, and I think we were.” Readiness was also facilitated by Ackroyd’s 360-degree lighting

approach. Overall, he describes his lighting as “very subtle. That doesn’t mean it was easy, but it was subtle and based on realism.” He often drew inspiration from firsthand experience. For instance, the battleship command rooms were lit all red or blue to mirror  what he saw on the USS  Independence  during the first Gulf War, when he was shooting a documentary about Top Gun flyers.  When Muse descends into the engine room to search for the crew,  Ackroyd needed to replicate the ship’s dimmed emergency lighting, and because the ceiling space was congested  with piping, he needed units he could hide easily. He tapped one of his favorite tools, a Tubo, a 2' or 4' Kino Flo tube removed from its housing and placed in a halved pipe whose interior is painted white. Attached anywhere by  gaffer tape, it can add a touch of fill or put a little light on the shadow side of a face. “It feels like it’s the bounce light from a distant window or porthole,”  Ackroyd observes. “It just comes back  and wraps around.”  When the emergency lights go off, the engine room is supposed to be completely black, with Muse’s flashlight 73

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Large lighting balloons were maneuvered into position to augment the look of night scenes.

providing the only illumination. To augment the actor’s off-the-shelf model, gaffer Harry Wiggins and best boy  Chris Mortley randomly bounced flashlights into a shiny board made from trimmed housing insulation. “The beam  was floating around and would just 74

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disappear into the darkness,” says  Ackroyd, “but that justified a little bit of  extra theatrical lighting.”  Ackroyd admits to some “cheating” here, noting that he aimed light through a floor grill to shape things that  were supposed to be in absolute darkAmerican Cinematographer

ness. Here and elsewhere on the ships,  Wiggins found a handy tool in Rotolight’s RL48 Ringlight. Small enough to slip onto a DSLR, these LED ring lights could be attached with magnets and effectively created small spills of light. “We used them to throw a little bit of fill in that scene,” says  Ackroyd. “We ND’ed them down so there was hardly any exposure, and we had a row of faces that just disappeared into nothingness while the crewmembers are hiding. It’s that feeling that it’s such poor-quality light that it probably  doesn’t exist. Your eyes are pretty good, and when you’re in near-total darkness,  you can still see. That’s what I wanted it to feel like.”  All of the camera team’s challenges intensified in the lifeboat. The  vessel on stage had cutaways in front and back, but these were never used.  Treated as a practical location, the lifeboat was a tight space even without nine or 10 people crammed into it. Dual cameras were wedged into corners or onto shelves, or were suspended by  bungees, and greenscreen had to be

◗  Seized at

Sea 

Ackroyd confers with director Paul Greengrass.

positioned exceptionally close when rocking the craft on the gimbal. Furthermore, seasickness struck during the crew’s brief time at sea when a real lifeboat was released into the Mediterranean off the coast of Malta.

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Nonetheless, according to Ackroyd, “I think what goes on in the lifeboat is some of the most exciting footage I’ve ever shot. It has a color palette that’s just amazing: the green interior, the skin tones, the play of light. It was just amaz-

ing to be in there.” For the final grade at Company 3 in London, all film footage was scanned at 4K on an Arriscan. Ackroyd spent six  weeks on the color correction with colorist Rob Pizzey, who worked on a DaVinci Resolve. (The finalized files  were filmed out at 4K to Kodak 2254 on an Arrilaser. Company 3 created the 4K DCP, and Deluxe Laboratories in London created the answer print.)  The color correction was laborious, according to Ackroyd. “The film had at least 2,000 edits, and they were cut together from different moments and sources,” he says. “On a film with long, flowing tracking shots, you can  just get the grading light on one and skip to the next. But on this project, we had to look at each of the frames over and over again, backwards and forwards, relative to each other.” Matching was the biggest challenge: horizon lines, the color of the  water, the direction of boat wakes, the

time of day and the look of the sky were  Again, creating cohesion between the all tricky factors. For example, when the  various components was a big part of   Maersk Alabama creates a huge wake in the final grade. an attempt to capsize the Somali skiff, “Doing anything at sea, with all “we had to move the white water that its variables, is 10 times harder than trails the boat so it came toward the doing it on land,” Ackroyd concludes. “I Somali pirates,” says post supervisor have to thank the entire camera, grip Michael Solinger. “We had to create or and electrical teams, who were all great. take away choppy water that didn’t Sometimes I’d like to put a title at the match. Also, when you’re shooting tank  bottom of the screen that reads, ‘You  water as well as sea water, you have to don’t know how hard this is!’ But it’s our make sure they match! Some of that  job to make it look easy. You shouldn’t  was done with visual effects, and some know how hard it is. I just want you to  was done in the DI.” believe what you’re seeing.” ● Because so much of the story  happens at night, often with wide shots of multiple ships, Ackroyd determined in prep that a mix of day-for-night, dusk-for-night and night-for-night  would be necessary. After testing filtration during a test shoot in Agadir, Morocco, he saw that the best result came from shooting a straight negative and letting the visual-effects team at Double Negative add night skies.

TECHNICAL SPECS

2.40:1 Super 16mm, 3-perf Super 35mm and Digital Capture  Aaton XTR Prod, Penelope;  Arricam Lite; Arri 235, 435; GoPro; VistaVision Zeiss Super Speed,  Angenieux Optimo, Nikon, Canon, Leica Fujifilm Eterna 250D 8563/8663, 500T 8573/8673 Digital Intermediate

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2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster , and they wanted to take a more cinematic approach with their concert movie. Producer Charlotte Huggins was brought in to help shape the production. Topping her list of potential directors was Nimród Antal, who subsequently brought in cinematographer Gyula Pados, HSC.  Antal and Pados met while attending the Budapest By Iain Stasukevich Film Academy in Hungary. After graduating, they collaborated on a number of commercial projects before finding •|• feature-film success with the dark and stylish Kontroll  ( AC   April ’05). They reunited on the 2010 sci-fi thriller Predators , f there’s one area of filmmaking where 3-D has found a and Through the Never marks their third feature collaboration. comfortable niche, it’s the concert film. Hugely popular acts “I don’t have any siblings, but I could call Gyula a brother,” like U2, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry have all starred in says Antal. “He complements me personally and creatively. their own big-screen “experiences” designed to replicate the He’s never shy about voicing his opinion, but if he’s not thrill of attending a sold-out concert. When the hard-rocking understanding [what I’m trying to achieve], he trusts me heavy-metal band Metallica decided to mount their own 3-D enough to go for it.” epic,  Metallica Through the Never , their goal was to make it Neither Pados nor Antal had experience making bigger and bolder than anything audiences had seen before: concert films, so they researched their subject by attending the concert film cranked up to 11. Metallica’s rehearsal performances for the Mexico City   The band’s members had previously appeared in the portion of “The Full Arsenal Tour.” Pados recalls, “We were

Cinematographer Gyula Pados, HSC helps director Nimród Antal mount a conceptually ambitious concert movie for Metallica.

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Opposite page: Fireballs frame the members of Metallica as they thunder through the song “Fuel.” This page, top: Cinematographer Gyula Pados, HSC worked closely with concert lighting designer John Broderick to create a variety of looks for the band’s massive stage, which measured 200' long by 60' wide. “The stage was a character in itself — a character capable of spitting fire and smoke and lasers,” says Pados. Bottom: Steadicam operator Henry Tirl moves in for a close-up of lead singer James Hetfield.

stunned by the band’s energy on stage, and we wanted to translate that to the screen. We wanted to get really close to the band and take a more ‘feature film’ approach.”  The filmmakers strove to give the audience a chance to see the concert as the band does: behind the drums with Lars Ulrich, from the bridges of Kirk  Hammett and James Hetfield’s guitars, or down low with Rob Trujillo as he’s doing his crab-walk across the stage. “These are the kinds of shots the band encouraged us to do,” says Antal. “They   were never worried about us getting in their way. It was always about what’s best for the film.” Pados adds, “It was all about creating a close connection between the band and their audience.” In the film, the band’s performances are interwoven by a narrative storyline that follows a young roadie named Trip (Dane DeHaan) after he’s sent on an urgent mission during one of  Metallica’s performances in front of a sold-out arena audience. “The narrative gave us the opportunity to do something different from the norm,” says the director, who notes that this portion of  the movie was inspired by a favorite

 .   e   s   u   o    h   e   r   u   t   c    i    P    f   o   y   s   e   t   r   u   o   c  ,    l   a   g   e    S   e    l   o   r   a    C   y    b   s   o   t   o    h    P

 

book, Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist . As he explains in the movie’s press notes, “It’s about a boy who sets out in search of treasure, only to find the treasure he  was looking for was where he started.  That kind of circular narrative has always appealed to me.”  The stage used for Through the   Never  was designed specifically for the film by British concert designer Mark  www.theasc.com

Fisher, whose previous credits included shows for the Rolling Stones, U2 and Lady Gaga. The 200'-long-by-60'-wide platform was designed to be “in the round,” surrounded by an audience with a 360-degree view. It was packed with automated pneumatics, hydraulics,  video screens, lasers, trap doors, pyrotechnics and nearly a million LEDs. Four hydraulic lighting towers November 2013

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Top: Lasers and projected footage of marching soldiers set the tone as the band performs the antiwar song “One.” Bottom: In a spectacular moment of controlled chaos, Damaged Justice (a.k.a. “Doris”), a 35'tall statue inspired by the cover of Metallica’s And   Justice for All album, crumbles onstage. Held together with a combination of magnets and interior pins, the collapsing statue sent debris tumbling in every direction. According to bass player Robert Trujillo, “Chunks of her ended up in the audience some nights. A couple of pieces almost took out my basses.”

raise and lower over the course of the show, and at one point, four 10,000-volt  Tesla coils descend from the ceiling in a dramatic display of lightning.  The concert’s lighting was designed by John Broderick, continuing his 25-year collaboration with the band. 80

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He says the stage elements were intended to salute “the icons of  Metallica. The giant electric chair and the Tesla coils are off the cover of Ride  the Lightning . The crosses are from  Master of Puppets . The Lady Justice statue came from the  Justice  tour in American Cinematographer

1988. The hydraulic towers were part of  the Load  tour in 1995 and 1996. [But] everything is bigger now than it was on those tours!” Broderick began designing plots for the show in early 2011. He spent three months working alongside lighting director Rob Koenig and programmer Troy Eckerman in a warehouse on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, roughing in the show’s lighting while the stage elements were still being fabricated. When Pados was brought onto the project in 2012, the cinematographer was thoroughly impressed with Broderick’s work. “It was an incredibly  powerful lighting scheme, with something like 400 cues a minute,” enthuses Pados. He and Broderick quickly fell into step, and soon the show was ready  for its first rehearsal in Mexico City. Broderick and his team programmed more than 3,500 separate cues over the course of Metallica’s entire 17-song performance; the cues incorporated approximately 300 lights, most of  them Vari-Lite 3500 washes. “I don’t

 

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Top: As the band performs “Cyanide,” a wash of green light envelops the stage and coffin-shaped lighting rigs — projecting video footage of actors trapped “inside” them — descend toward the stage. Bottom: A closer view of the coffin rigs before they are deployed.

use hard-edged fixtures in most of my  single Lycian 3K follow spot on singer  work,” he says. “I like the Vari-Lite Hetfield and 12 blue, glowing LED because it’s a bright, powerful unit with crosses that rise out of the stage. Flames pure colors.” fly every which way during the band’s Each song in Through the Never  fiery performance of “Fuel.” The song receives its own dramatic presentation. “One,” an anti-war number based on “Enter Sandman” opens with dreamlike Dalton Trumbo’s book  Johnny Got His  sweeps of light across the audience. Gun, opens with massive pyrotechnics During “Master of Puppets,” the over- that simulate a terrifying battlefield, head lights are turned off, save for a  with sweeping red flares, fireworks, 82

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eruptions of fire and smoke, and flashing strobes. Broderick had already done the  work of establishing the show’s color balance and contrast, so Pados was careful to keep the lighting as designed. However, he did fine-tune the setup so the effects could be captured as well as possible by his camera of choice, the  Arri Alexa. “We were able to swap out some lights and change the colors — making them warmer or cooler — if  needed,” says the cinematographer, who notes that he used the Alexa M on the show’s Steadicam rigs and standard  Alexas for the rest of the rigs. “The only  real concern I had was that the nature of  a live show calls for follow spots on the band so the audience can see them clearly. John created a wonderful atmosphere, but eliminating [some of] the spots really made the stage feel more dramatic and cinematic. “Most of the time I was asking for less light to create more depth and contrast,” continues Pados, who shot all the performances between a T2.8 and  T5.6 at the Alexa’s native ISO 800. “Most of the overhead lamps were being

 

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Top: A roadie sent on a mid-concert errand is derailed when he runs a red light and his van is struck and flipped by an oncoming car. Bottom: Pados (right) coordinates the next setup with gaffer David Tickell while shooting the accident sequence.

used for the wide shots, but 85 percent of a concert film is going to be tight shots. If you have too much light, the  whole stage will get washed out.” Lighting the performance for 3-D cinematography called for all the objects in the frame to be illuminated in a way that would separate them from one another. This process, says Broderick, was a matter of subtraction: 84

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“You can have a performer by himself at one end of the arena and have almost nothing else between him and the farthest lighting tower” he observes, “but with lights on both of those subjects, some backlight on the audience and the rigging overhead, along  with some smoke for ambience, you’ll get a great 3-D effect.” Broderick saw the multi-city tour American Cinematographer

as an opportunity to take different approaches to lighting the band. For example, between Rexall Place in Edmonton, British Columbia, and Rogers Arena in Vancouver, the arrangement of the lights largely  remained the same, but their intensities  were varied depending on where the cameras were placed. Similarly, Pados took advantage of the multiple performances to stagger his camera placements. His goal in Edmonton was to focus primarily on the audience. “We started further back   with all of the wide shots on the first day,” he recalls. “We didn’t want any  cameras on the stage so we could get clean shots [looking toward] the band.  The next day we moved the cameras closer, and the day after that we moved right up to the stage for the close-ups.” Because Through the Never  was their first 3-D project, Pados and Antal turned to the experts at Cameron Pace Group to familiarize them with the minutiae of the process. CPG co-chairman Vince Pace, ASC joined the production as stereographer for the concert portions of the production. “Format is a secondary matter when

constructing a film,” says Antal. “I’m completely aware of 3-D’s capabilities, particularly in emotionally enhancing the material, but I still approach the construction of a scene with classical film language in mind. The potential limitations of the medium did nothing to change the course of how I would have otherwise made the film.” Pados and Antal used Arri Alexas in 10 CPG Fusion rigs to cover the show  on dollies, Technocranes, Steadicams and a swooping NavCam. Two 50'  Technocrane rigs were each equipped  with a pair of Angenieux Optimo 1780mm T2.2 zoom lenses, while the other systems used pairs of Optimo 1540mm T2.6 zooms. (Additionally, a miniature CPG “BlakeCam” and a Fusion rig with Sony HDC-F950 brains behind a beam-splitter were mounted to Ulrich’s rotating drum platform.) “For getting really close and personal during the show, we were always in the 25mm to 40mm range,” says Pados, adding, “The BlakeCam is a prototype camera about the size of a cigarette pack that James Cameron developed to use on his underwater missions.” In building his camera crew, Pados sought operators with experience not only in concert films and 3-D, but feature films as well, “so they would have that dramatic eye,” he relates. “When I first met with them, I said, ‘Every shot is a feature-film shot.’” Pados’ search led him to employ   A-camera/Steadicam operator Henry   Tirl, as well as cinematographers Mitchell Amundsen and Rodney Taylor,  ASC. Taylor’s cinematography credits include a number of Imax documentaries (including  Alaska: Spirit of the  Wild ), narrative feature films (That   Evening Sun) and 3-D concert experiences (Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds , a credit shared with  Amundsen). “Operating on this film was a cinematographer’s job,” Pados explains. Before each night’s performance, Pados gathered the operators to discuss ideal compositions and camera moves, “but for two hours they had to provide  

Top: After emerging from the wrecked vehicle, the roadie, Trip (Dane DeHaan), makes his way down an ominously deserted street. Middle: Blocks later, Trip finds himself caught in the middle of a violent confrontation between rioters and police. Bottom: A mounted executioner, modeled after Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer  paintings, gallops into the fray.

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During the song “Master of Puppets,” illuminated crosses emerge from “the Swiss Army knife of stages,” as Hetfield dubbed the versatile performance platform.

their own shots,” he says. “These are noisy, fast-paced concerts. It’s difficult to communicate in the moment, so it’s not like I was always on the intercom telling them what to do.” Nevertheless, Pados and Antal  would feed instructions to the operators  via headset from a “mission control” room set up elsewhere in the arena complex. The camera blocking was based around the stage and lighting design for each song; one number might get heavy Steadicam coverage, but the next one might include heavy pyrotechnics on the stage, requiring the cameras to pull back. “What initially seemed like a limitation for us actually turned out to be quite a gift because each song, through whatever limitations the stage antics presented, ultimately led to a unique visual language for that scene,” says Antal. “It was helpful to hear ahead of  time what Gyula and Nim were looking for, because then you can start thinking about how to shape your approach,” says 86

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 Taylor. “They wanted to draw the audi- the crew was critical, “but you don’t have ence in by developing each shot and time to describe every kind of moveletting them go longer, as opposed to ment, so I encouraged my crane operacutting between them. It’s not to say  tors and assistant to start feeling the that you can’t cut quickly with 3-D, music,” says Taylor. “Telling them because you can, but to me it’s better to exactly what I’m looking for works, but let the shot evolve through camera it all works better when everyone is just movement. feeling it.” “There’s a lot of choreography  Because verbal communication going on in terms of the staging and between camera teams wasn’t always  what the band is doing, but it’s not like possible, Taylor had to remain the Hannah Montana shows where cognizant of where the other cameras each one was exactly the same,” Taylor  were and stay out of their shots while continues. “A Metallica show is all about finding a complementary frame. “If I how they interact with the audience, so saw that Mitch’s crane was up high,  you have to be able to react to the band then I’d go lower,” he says. “We wanted and still keep in mind the shots you to give the editors more choices.”  were asked to provide.”  The two 50' Technocranes were  Taylor operated one of the equipped with the Optimo 17-80mm concert’s two 50' Technocranes in lenses, which aided in their ability to Vancouver, with the help of two techni- stay back and out of the other cameras’ cians (one for swinging and one for tele-  way, although Pados encouraged Taylor scoping the arm) and a camera assistant and Amundsen to stay within the 27(Terry McEwen, pulling focus and 40mm focal range and move the zooming). The communication of  cameras closer to the stage rather than  verbal and nonverbal signals amongst zoom in from afar. “We got really close American Cinematographer