Ac - Neon Demon PDF

J U LY 2 0 1 6
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER • JULY 2016 • THE NEON DEMON – INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE – NOW YOU SEE ME 2 – ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK • VOL. 97 NO. 7
J U L Y 2 0 1 6 V O L . 9 7 N O . 7
An International Publication of the ASC
On Our Cover: Newly minted model Jesse (Elle Fanning) takes command of the catwalk
in The Neon Demon, shot by Natasha Braier, ADF. (Image courtesy of Amazon Studios.)
FEATURES
30 Looks That Kill 44
Natasha Braier, ADF embraces bold aesthetics for the
psychological-horror feature The Neon Demon
44 The Aliens Strike Back

Markus Förderer, BVK shoots intergalactic action for the
blockbuster sequel Independence Day: Resurgence
58 Magic Acts 58
Peter Deming, ASC reveals the methods behind the
illusions of Now You See Me 2
70 Behind the Bars

Ludovic Littee breaks out of a prison’s confines with
the series Orange Is the New Black
70
DEPARTMENTS
10 Editor’s Note
12 Short Takes: Monster in a House
18 Production Slate: The Shallows • The American West
80 New Products & Services
84 International Marketplace
85 Classified Ads
86 Ad Index
87 Clubhouse News
88 ASC Close-Up: Shane Hurlbut
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next will be our clip on the
visually striking thriller
The Neon Demon.
WRAP SHOT
With each post, we dip into AC’s vast
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such films as Interview With the Vampire,
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF and PUBLISHER

Stephen Pizzello
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David E. Williams
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6
American Society of Cinematographers
The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but
an educational, cultural and professional
organization. Membership is by invitation
to those who are actively engaged as
directors of photography and have
demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC
membership has become one of the highest
honors that can be bestowed upon a
professional cinematographer — a mark
of prestige and excellence.
OFFICERS - 2015/2016
Richard Crudo
President
Owen Roizman
Vice President
Kees van Oostrum
Vice President
Lowell Peterson
Vice President
Matthew Leonetti
Treasurer
Frederic Goodich
Secretary
Isidore Mankofsky
Sergeant-at-Arms
MEMBERS OF THE
BOARD
John Bailey
Bill Bennett
Richard Crudo
George Spiro Dibie
Richard Edlund
Fred Elmes
Michael Goi
Victor J. Kemper
Isidore Mankofsky
Daryn Okada
Lowell Peterson
Robert Primes
Owen Roizman
Rodney Taylor
Kees van Oostrum
ALTERNATES
Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Kenneth Zunder
Francis Kenny
John C. Flinn III
Steven Fierberg
MUSEUM CURATOR
Steve Gainer
8
Editor’s Note Any artistic endeavor is ultimately intended to stimulate an
audience. In this respect, The Neon Demon had already
succeeded by polarizing viewers during its May premiere at
the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie’s mind-bending
imagery and risqué, tumbling-down-the-rabbit-hole narra-
tive inflamed passionate responses ranging from rapture
to outrage.
Director Nicolas Winding Refn has always embraced
his reputation as a cinematic provocateur. “Creativity is
about reactions,” he said during Cannes, “and reactions
are the essence of experience. If you don’t react, what are
you doing here?” On Demon he recruited cinematogra-
pher Natasha Braier, ADF to help him tell the sinister tale
of Jesse (Elle Fanning), a callow teenage model who arrives
in Los Angeles to take her shot at fashion stardom, only to find herself seduced toward a
narcissism that threatens to engulf her.
“Jesse is entering this new world that is totally alien to a girl from a small town,” Braier
observes in Jean Oppenheimer’s article (“Looks That Kill,” page 30). “It’s like Dorothy landing
in Oz.” The cinematographer reached deep into her bag of tricks to convey the character’s
trippy transformation from sweet ingénue to self-obsessed siren, and our coverage includes
frame pulls paired with Braier’s insightful diagrams of various setups.
Movie magic also informs the prestidigitation in Now You See Me 2, shot by ASC
member Peter Deming, whose facility with onscreen illusion helped director Jon M. Chu
achieve his idea that “magic could be used to actually tell a story.” In his interview with
Michael Goldman (“Magic Acts,” page 58), Deming notes that the production strove to make
the legerdemain on display seem as real as possible by “doing things in one take, using as
little visual effects as necessary for the tricks, having card tricks presented like you would see
them in a live show, and so on. We tried to adhere to the principle [of authenticity] and make
things a bit more realistic.”
Summer’s second wave of Hollywood blockbusters is led by alien invaders returning to
Earth with extremely hostile intentions. Independence Day: Resurgence pairs Roland
Emmerich with cinematographer Markus Förderer, BVK, who cites the director’s original 1996
film as a key inspiration for his own career path. “I watched the first Independence Day in the
theater with my sister and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing! I have to become a film-
maker!’” Förderer tells Jay Holben (“The Aliens Strike Back,” page 44). “I know that movie
inside and out; I had it on VHS and I watched it hundreds of times as a kid.”
Camera movement — whether elaborate or subtle — is a topic we’re specifically
exploring this month in both feature articles and sidebars. While discussing his overall
approach to the offbeat prison series Orange Is the New Black, cinematographer Ludovic
Littee also shares his kinetic strategies for a key sequence by breaking it down for Patricia
Thomson (“Behind the Bars,” page 70). Addressing this theme, Littee notes that he and his
Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.
collaborators “always have a reason why we move [the camera]. For me, the camera is an
emotional tool, and you have to use it as such.”
Stephen Pizzello
Editor-in-Chief and Publisher
10
Short Takes
Miah (Kitana Turnbull) embarks on a journey through her home to track down a monster fueled by her parents’ arguments in the short film
Monster in a House.
I Beast Hunters
By Debra Kaufman
was enough space for the actress and the operator following her to
run.” Once they had the location, Helenek and Dias blocked camera
and actors into the storyboarding that was already underway. “We
When Michael Helenek moved to Los Angeles five years ago, had every single composition storyboarded,” says Helenek.
he posted fliers at film schools, offering to work as a cinematogra- Early on, he sent the storyboards to Duguay, who would use
pher on graduate-student projects. Christiano Dias, who was attend- the Red Epic Mysterium-X camera package from Dias’ school. “I was
ing New York Film Academy, gave him a call, and the two worked happy to have a high-quality motion-picture camera with a substan-
together on Dias’ first graduate film, King Eternal. So it was a natural tial dynamic range that could capture the range of light and dark
next step for Helenek to shoot Dias’ thesis, Monster in a House, that we put in front of the lens,” says Helenek, who notes that they
about a young girl named Miah (Kitana Turnbull) who embarks on a shot in 4K to RedMag SSD cards at a 5:1 compression ratio.
journey through her home to track down the monster that appears When determining the right lens for the project, “weight
when her parents fight. was a consideration,” Helenek says. “A very large zoom lens would
Unit photography by Sam Zhang, courtesy of the filmmakers.

Dias had two specific visual ideas for the project: The audience have been too taxing for the operator.” In the end, he picked an
would never see the monster, and the movie would at least appear Angenieux Optimo DP 16-42mm (T2.8). “The focal range seemed
to comprise one continuous shot. “My jaw dropped,” recalls to be most appropriate, and it ended up working well,” he notes.
Helenek. “But then I thought, ‘He’s the director and my job is to To shoot Monster in a House in real time, Helenek knew
make this work for him.’ It became an amazing challenge.” Dias’ lighting would be the chief challenge. “We needed to light and rig
rationale was that a seemingly continuous shot would support the for every single storyboarded shot, throughout the house, ahead of
idea that Miah can’t run away from the monster and the family can’t time,” he explains. The production had the location for five days,
run away from their problems — so why should the audience be able but, the cinematographer adds, “there was so much real estate [to
to cut away from a shot? “Chris is a really talented storyteller, and light] that we needed three full days for rigging and electrical.”
very imaginative, which is exciting for me,” says Helenek. “His ideas Because the camera would cover 360 degrees, Helenek
are fantastical, which lets me experiment a bit.” planned to rig almost all the lighting on the ceiling. Neither Eddie
Setting out to attempt one continuous shot required meticu- Rubio nor the late James “Slim Jim” Ballard — who served as key
lous preproduction planning, beginning with the location; the film- grips on the production — had yet been hired when the tech scout
makers ultimately found the ideal two-story house in Chino Hills, east took place, so Helenek created architectural drawings with length
of Los Angeles. “The doors were definitely wide enough for the and width dimensions for every room. “That enabled us to order the
Steadicam operator, [Orlando Duguay],” Helenek notes, “and there proper speed rail and wall spreaders to support the overhead light-
12 July 2016 American Cinematographer

of field allowed us to see both of them
clearly.”
Helenek and his crew blacked and
tented the windows, where a few moon-
light and streetlamp units were placed.
“Inside the tents that covered our down-
stairs windows, we placed Kino Flos to
create moonlight glow, a Martin Atomic
3000 to create lightning effects, and a 1K
Fresnel with yellow gel to create an abstract
streetlight,” Helenek relates. Inside the
house, for the scene when Miah descends
the stairs, the production utilized fabric
grids of 20, 30 and 40 degrees on the
Chimeras for light control and to create a
dark, moody feeling. “These grids also
prevented Eddie and Slim Jim from having
to rig solids off the wall spreaders, which
were already near capacity in terms of
weight,” the cinematographer adds.
Top: Miah’s parents, Joe (Joseph Bottoms) and Emma (Lisa Roumain), bicker yet again. Bottom: The fantasy element of Monster in a
Cinematographer Michael Helenek (far right) checks the lighting and composition on a rehearsal day.
House takes flight in scenes set in the
garage and kitchen, the latter of which Dias
ing,” says Helenek, who thanks Cinelease Necessity also drove Helenek to describes as “a nighttime jungle.” For the
for providing more than 50 lights, nearly all shoot at a T5.6. “Miah was running and our kitchen, Helenek and his crew built a large
of which were rigged. The primary over- blocking marks couldn’t always be placed or soft box over the area that Miah explores;
head units were Arrilite 750s. “Since it’s an seen very well,” he explains. “Oftentimes three 8' single 5,500K Kino Flo tubes
open-face fixture, it has a beam spread that there was a wall between the Teradek trans- filtered with 1⁄2 CTO were rigged above an
fills its attached Chimera,” he says. mitter [on the camera] and the receiver that 8'x8' skirted Full Grid frame set 2' over the
Lighting from above prompted our first AC, Alex Grossfeld, was using. The girl’s head. “The massive source wrapped
Helenek to frame for a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. T5.6 didn’t make [maintaining focus] easy, beautifully around Miah’s face, since she
“The ratio was chosen for stylistic and but it gave us a cushion in some tight spots was so close to it,” says Helenek. “It also
compositional reasons,” he says, “but also — and the greater depth of field worked provided a general ambient light.” A K5600
out of necessity. Because of the lights in the stylistically, as well. We had a few composi- Joker 800 through a cucoloris and Half
ceiling, we needed a very horizontal aspect tions with Miah’s parents [Joseph Bottoms White diffusion provided the backlight.
ratio.” and Lisa Roumain], where the greater depth In the garage, Helenek wanted a

Top, from left:
Second AC David
Mori, Bottoms,
Steadicam
operator Orlando
Duguay,
Helenek, director
Christiano Dias,
art director
Becky Hughes
and Turnbull
prepare to
rehearse the
kitchen-jungle
scene. Bottom:
Turnbull stands
beneath the
overhead soft
box rigged inside
the garage.
the excess muslin past the light, so it doubled

as a bounce when Miah shone her flashlight
up into the bottom of the table,” he says.
Ford also rigged an MR16 with Pale Yellow
gel to the back end of the table, in order to
backlight Turnbull’s hair. A yellow-gelled 1K
tungsten unit was aimed through the
window behind the table to light the back-
ground chair, and to provide motivation for
the light of the MR16. “The final lighting
element was the LED flashlight that grazes
Miah’s cheek,” the cinematographer says.
Helenek recalls that colorist Eric
Schrecongost — who performed the grade
with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 11
— asked Dias and the cinematographer if
large overhead soft box to light the entire had to transition from high mode to low they wanted him to dial out the green light
space. “This time, however, the light level mode to get the camera angles we of the flashlight, “but we opted to keep the
needed to fluctuate, so instead of Kinos, we needed,” says Helenek, who notes that green in,” Helenek says. The cinematogra-
opted for a tungsten book light,” he says. they ended up with five cuts. “I had already pher further reports that color correction on
Gaffer Chris Ford and his team rigged four thought about cut points, just to be well- Monster in a House was fairly simple. He
2K open-face nook lights — fitted with prepared. I had prepped Chris for the possi- notes that Schrecongost was able to darken
Waterfront Green gels and routed into a bility that we might need to do that, and in the garage and increase the saturation of the
12K dimmer to generate a pulsing effect — the end he was fine with it. He knew if we turquoise gels, “but we didn’t have any
off the center beam of the garage, and hid the cuts well, they wouldn’t be apparent major color corrections. We played with the
aimed them straight into the white ceiling. to the ordinary viewer.” contrast a bit and Chris wanted to add some
Turnbull would then pass under an 8'x12' One of Helenek’s favorite images on glow to the highlights, but most of the expo-
Light Grid frame, and Helenek further the project is when Miah hides under a sure choices were native to the original
tweaked the lighting by adding “a table. “Since she stops momentarily, it was footage.”
makeshift control grid out of strips of really the only chance we had to bring the Monster in a House has played at
Duvetyne in the direction Miah walked to camera up close to her face,” he says. “We more than 20 festivals, garnering honors
increase contrast on her face,” he says. were on the 42mm end of the lens, fairly including the Best Cinematography award at
On the fourth day, after lights had close to our minimum 2-foot focus.” The the 2015 Los Angeles Independent Film
been rigged, the team put in significant cinematographer thus had the chance to Festival.
hours running blocking for the actors and create more “intimate” lighting, placing a To watch Monster in a House, visit
the Steadicam — and that’s when they 5,500K Mini-Flo under the lip of the table, www.monsterinahouse.com. ●
discovered that doing a single continuous just above her head, and covering it with
shot wasn’t going to work. “We realized we layers of bleached muslin. “We expanded

Production Slate
Stalked by a
great white
shark, Nancy
(Blake Lively) is
stranded just
offshore in
the thriller
The Shallows.
I Dangerous Waters makers downplay any resemblance. “Jaws is not only the best shark
The Shallows photos by Vince Valitutti, courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

By Mark Dillon movie, but one of the best movies, period,” Collet-Serra says. “Our
movie is a mostly one-character, one-location, survivalist thriller in
Director Jaume Collet-Serra and cinematographer Flavio Labi- which we want to capture reality.”
ano have their nets cast for summer moviegoers with the shark- Regarding the decision to employ CG for The Shallows’
themed feature The Shallows, an aquatic nail-biter sure to make deadly creature, Labiano notes, “We couldn’t have done it with a
ocean bathers think twice before going even ankle-deep in the mechanical shark. We were on a tight [40-day] schedule and
water. The thriller stars Blake Lively as Nancy, a Texas surfer on safari couldn’t wait on mechanics. For most of the time, Blake was the only
in Mexico. Her idyllic trip takes a terrifying turn, however, when a actor onscreen; she’s in nearly every shot in this difficult situation
great white shark attacks her and a couple of fellow surfers at an with the water and waves and rocks. That was enough to put up
isolated beach. She ends up stranded on a rock 200 yards from with.”
shore, with the determined shark circling her as the tide rises. The art department, headed by production designer Hugh
Longtime collaborators on commercials, Collet-Serra and Bateup, created a shark sculpture as the basis for the digital creature
fellow Spaniard Labiano previously teamed on the soccer drama Goal that was ultimately produced by Sweden’s Important Looking Pirates
II: Living the Dream and the Liam Neeson action movies Unknown (ILP), who had impressed the filmmakers with the sharks they’d
and Non-Stop. “There’s a chemistry between Jaume and me that provided for Kon-Tiki (shot by Geir Hartly Andreassen, FSF). Due to
works,” Labiano tells AC from Spain, where he is shooting the crime the tight turnaround for an estimated 1,100 visual-effects shots, ILP
drama El Guardián Invisible with director Fernando González Molina. shared the animation load with Scanline VFX.
“Jaume is very respectful and smart. He listens and he’s a hard The production did use partial shark models to give Lively
worker, and together we try to reach a different goal in every movie.” something to react to and to create ripples in the water. “It takes a
Whenever a great white is involved, comparisons to Jaws lot of time for a visual-effects house to calculate and generate water
(shot by Bill Butler, ASC; AC March ’75) are inevitable, but the film- displacement, so they asked us to provide as many live elements as

is separate from the head, it allowed faster
reloading of cards and [adjusting of] settings
without having to bring the crane down,”
notes digital-imaging technician Pete
Harrow. Additionally, a handheld Alexa Mini
allowed Spicer to get up close with Lively on
the rock. The Mini recorded ProRes Log C to
256GB CFast 2.0 memory cards, while the
XT Plus and M recorded ArriRaw Open Gate
to 512GB Codex XR Capture Drives.
Labiano is no stranger to the XT
system, having used it on Pierre Morel’s
feature The Gunman (AC April ’15). “On
that film, we used the whole sensor and
anamorphic lenses,” he explains. “But on
The Shallows, we wanted to get really close
to the actor, so we used spherical lenses and
only part of the sensor so it was easier to
shoot and more flexible.”
Meanwhile, the movie was Collet-
Serra’s first feature not shot on film. “There
was no other choice,” the director says. “If
it had been on film, I would still be there
shooting. It was so easy handling the Alexa
cameras. We could shoot for 20 to 30
minutes at a time. When we were on the
ocean, if a cloud came by, we’d wait and
not cut. Shooting on film, you would have
to cut, bring the camera back, dry it and
reload.”
The main underwater system,
dubbed “the Beast” and weighing 198
pounds, featured an XT Plus in
Christidis’ custom housing; it was some-
Top: The crew prepares to shoot in the water tank at Village Roadshow Studios in times mounted to an underwater scooter
Queensland, Australia. Bottom: Cinematographer Flavio Labiano (second from right) and
crew survey the scene. for shark POVs and high-speed plate shots.
The lighter “Little Girl” housed a Mini for
possible to reduce the volume in postpro- boarded the whole movie and mostly surf sequences and could also function as a
duction,” Collet-Serra explains. followed those boards. We also shot the C camera when occasions arose to shoot
After four weeks of prep, principal locations 360 degrees on plates at every upwards from the water surface. The “Little
photography began in Australia on Oct. 28, time of day, so when we went to the tank, Cousin” could take either a Mini or an XT M
2015 — and wrapped before Christmas. we knew the position of the sunlight.” — crane-mounted with a HydroFlex Hydro-
Lord Howe Island provided turquoise water The crew ran two cameras, manned Head — and could track Lively from under-
and rocky, verdant landscapes for establish- by A-operator Marc Spicer and B-operator to above-water during swimming
ing shots, while Queensland’s Village Road- Simon Christidis, ACS, the latter of whom sequences, with no droplets in the frame
show Studios offered large water tanks also served as underwater cinematographer thanks to the Wetport lens port developed
where 80 percent of the movie was shot; in the tanks and ocean. Much of the above- by Christidis. The in-and-out-of-water shots
the main tank was surrounded by blue- water tank work was captured on Arri Alexa proved particularly tricky for 1st ACs Chris
screens four containers high, arranged in a XT Plus and M units on a pair of cranes. The Child (A camera) and Ronald Coe (B), and
horseshoe configuration optimized for Alexa Mini was often used for handheld 2nd ACs Bradley Andrew (A) and Zachary
backlighting. “When you’re shooting in the and for some underwater work. Peel-McGregor (B).
ocean on boats, the tides make it very hard An Alexa XT M on a Supertechno 50 To establish the setting as an island
to control anything,” Labiano says, “so we was used for overhead shots that show paradise in The Shallows’ early scenes, a Red
planned out how we’d reproduce [that real- Nancy looking around the rock as the shark Epic Dragon, recording RedCode Raw files
istic ambience] on a tank set. We story- circles. “Since the XT M’s main camera body at 120 fps and 150 fps, captured slow-

Right: The
filmmakers ready
a buoy for action
in the water
tank. Below:
Underwater
cinematographer
and B-camera
operator Simon
Christidis, ACS
(left) and
A-camera
operator Marc
Spicer pause
beneath the
surface with an
underwater rig
dubbed “the
Beast.”
tion shots were lit if the weather necessi-

tated it, but the crew relied mostly on over-
head 20'x20' Ultrabounce, black side
down, and unbleached muslin for negative
fill and the desired beauty look.
At the tank, a pair of 12K Pars on a
125' Condor were situated over the water,
while eight 18K Fresnels on a pair of 50'
scissor lifts provided backlight sun replace-
ment when the clouds rolled over. Key
rigging grip Dave Thomson and his team
set up a huge cable-suspended 150'x160'
Full Grid that could be moved in and out
over the tank. They also moved around a
layer of Ultrabounce which, depending on
the setup, served as either negative fill or as
a cutter.
“Often Flavio asked for ‘the whole
enchilada,’ which meant the overhead
diffusion, 90-foot-by-30-foot and 60-foot- Bottom photo courtesy of Simon Christidis, ACS.
motion beauty shots of the surf and of look and handled latitude and sunlight very by-60-foot Ultrabounce, a 60-by-24 vertical
Nancy on the beach. A GoPro Hero4 Black well.” He primarily shot with 21mm, 29mm cutter, and flyswatters with 20-by-12
was sometimes used to capture the actress’ and 40mm focal lengths, with ND filters to frames rigged for bounce or negative fill,”
dialogue atop the rock and some underwa- reduce the sun’s intensity. A 16mm was Thomson recalls. “This gave him and Jaume
ter shots on the HydroHead, while a Sony used for shots from the shark’s POV. plenty of options.”
Xperia smartphone recorded a video The sun provided the movie’s Labiano adds, “We had huge blacks
conversation between Nancy and her family predominant lighting motivation, which and used negative fill to create contrast and
before the attack. required careful planning to match light something more interesting than having
Labiano cites the Leica Summilux-C between the location and the studio while [Lively] always under the bright sun. We
lenses — which were used on all of the Arri shooting in the early morning, late after- tried to make the audience go through the
and Red cameras — as a major discovery on noon and night. Gaffer Mick O’Brien, best whole day. We changed the atmosphere
the shoot. “They were fantastic on every boy Craig Perkins and rigging gaffer Craig and the lighting to tell the story.” To repro-
level,” he enthuses. “They have a creamy Clark had a full HMI kit on the island; loca- duce the sun setting behind mountains as

Nancy clings to the rock for the night, the
crew dimmed down a scrimmed 20K
directed toward the middle of the tank.
The filmmakers used a Log C to Rec
709 LUT for monitoring on set — on a 25"
Sony OLED display and other Sony and
Panasonic screens — and in post. Harrow
graded on set using DaVinci Resolve’s live-
grade capability and then handed off to
local studio Cutting Edge, which generated
dailies that were viewed on iPads.
Because Labiano would be on to his
next project when colorist Élodie Ichter
would perform the final grade with Collet-
Serra in May at Deluxe in Culver City, he and
Ichter spent a week in March pre-timing
and setting up looks. Working with deBay- The American West, a “hybrid documentary” miniseries, tells the little-known personal stories of
ered DPX files in 2K on a FilmLight Baselight Wyatt Earp (Jonathan C. Stewart) and other historical figures.
system, Ichter relied on the cinematogra-
pher’s guidance through the film’s intended
shifts in weather and times of day. The files
were prepared as DPX for mastering to a P3
I Reframing the Wild West
By John Ealer
shooting schedule, with the shoot split
between West Virginia and Utah.
To meet the challenge, I turned to a
DCP final deliverable. The eight-part AMC miniseries The longtime collaborator, cinematographer
“We created different atmospheres American West recounts how, in the after- Kevin M. Graves. “Working with John can
and decided on a natural skin tone and soft math of the Civil War, the United States be described in one word: intense,” Graves
contrast for the morning and daytime conquered and settled the American fron- acknowledges. “He often wants to move at
while revealing the beauty and color of the tier, transforming the vast western lands into a startling pace, but he never loses sight of
location,” she says. “We get into a more “the land of opportunity.” The show focuses the look we’ve created. So, going into this, I
aggressive look in the dramatic sequences on little-known personal stories of such knew it was going to be a fun but challeng-
with deeper blacks and less color overall. legendary historical figures as Jesse James, ing shoot, and that my background in docu-
The water color was also a challenge. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, George Armstrong mentary would be a huge help.”
Between the ocean, the weather changes Custer, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. For this project, Graves chose Arri’s
and the tank, it varies from deep blue and This series marks my fifth directorial Amira documentary-style camera with the
light blue to cyan and green-blue. Good collaboration with executive producer Premium license. “These shows have one
The American West photos by Kris Connor and Michael Moriatis, courtesy of AMC.
continuity is essential because the ocean is Stephen David on a “hybrid” documentary foot in the documentary world and one foot
an important part of the story.” — a form David pioneered that fuses the in the scripted space,” Graves explains. “The
For Labiano, the myriad logistics power of nonfiction with the immersive Amira seemed to balance those needs
made for a difficult shoot — which is all appeal of scripted entertainment. David’s perfectly.” The camera’s light weight, small
right by him. “We didn’t know how to earlier hybrid-documentary series include form factor, built-in NDs, and ability to shoot
make this film when we started, and the The Men Who Built America, The World at a maximum frame rate of 200 fps were all
process of learning how to do it and Wars and The Making of the Mob: New important features.
succeeding was very gratifying,” he reflects. York, and although I’d worked with him on For Graves, an even more important
”It was a challenge to try to shoot a kind of each of those projects, I found The American consideration was the Amira’s workflow for
film you will probably never shoot again.” West to be the most challenging of all our creating and maintaining looks. “In prepro-
productions. duction,” he says, “I spent many hours
TECHNICAL SPECS Unlike other documentaries, these working in the Amira Color Tool [which has
shows are much more than just re-creations. since been renamed the Arri Color Tool]. The
2.39:1 We’re doing a full historical narrative that power and simplicity of the application made
Digital Capture needs to connect seamlessly with traditional it possible to test dozens of looks on a laptop
Arri Alexa XT Plus, XT M, Mini; documentary elements such as talking-head before presenting them to John for discus-
Red Epic Dragon; GoPro Hero4 Black interviews and archival materials. With The sion. After we found what fit the feel of our
Leica Summilux-C American West, we were also basically show, an .aml file was created for the A and
making an action movie, complete with B cameras, and a copy was also given to
gunfights, cavalry battles and train robberies Johnny Saint Ours, our second-unit director-
— and we were doing it all on a 25-day cinematographer.” ➣

were used throughout the production by
both units.
The Amira’s form factor and work-
flow, as well as our use of zooms, further
enabled an improvisational approach
throughout the production. The actors and I
would frequently adjust the script on the fly,
which kept Graves — who operated the A
camera — and B-camera operator Tom
Inskeep on their toes. There were times
during the production when the set felt
more like a live event than a narrative set, as
I called shots to the camera operators over
IFB radios.
The improvisation also made lighting
particularly challenging for Graves, chief
lighting technician Justin Stroh and key grip
Chuck Smallwood. “Early on,” says Graves,
“I realized it was best to approach lighting in
terms of spaces and sets, and not target
areas for actors to hit.” This resulted in a
naturalistic yet dramatic look that empha-
Cinematographer sized window sources and practicals, mini-
Kevin M. Graves mizing the time required for relights and
(behind the helping the actors stay in character.
camera, top-
center and Further complicating the lighting, I
bottom) and have a tendency to position the A and B
crew capture the cameras at 90-degree angles to one another
Western action.
instead of stacking them side-by-side. When
you’re doing a hybrid show like this, you
can’t just think about covering the scene;
you always have to think about how you can
get a variety of shots that can be used in
another scene or even another episode. Yes,
Digital-imaging technician Bradley Sandy Patch to ensure continuity with the it makes lighting tricky, but it also opens up
Crane created H.264 dailies using the LUT looks Kevin and I established in the field. some interesting aesthetic opportunities. A
Graves had made, adjusting it as necessary Having this ability to track looks lot of beautiful images with silhouettes came
so the compressed footage would more throughout 30 years of story time — from out of our need to work this way.
closely match the on-set viewing LUT. “On Civil War Missouri to Tombstone, Ariz. — “The great thing about these
set, the look would be applied to the viewing and have those looks follow all the way shows,” says Graves, “is that you get to be
monitors, and it would be attached to the through postproduction was critical, espe- so creative so much of the time. There’s a lot
ProRes 4:4:4:4 camera files as non-destruc- cially given how fast we had to move on set. of pressure, but also a lot of freedom. I think
tive metadata while the cameras were actu- To further facilitate post and finishing, we it really forced us to think outside the box,
ally recording in Log C gamma,” Graves used the 1.78:1 aspect ratio, capturing especially for the action sequences.”
explains. “No additional hardware or LUT 1920x1080-resolution files. Final masters We had to be particularly creative
boxes were required on set. The editors were delivered to AMC as 1920x1080 about how we approached the show’s
could then access this look info with ease for ProRes 4:2:2 QuickTime files. centerpiece set: a two-story saloon that
the offline edit.” To move quickly between setups, we played for multiple locations. Production
Offline editing was done on Avid relied on Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm designer Ernesto Solo, art director Eric Whit-
Media Composer using the DNxHD 36 (T2.8) and 17-80mm (T2.2) zooms for our ney and construction foreman Damian Sarno
codec, under the supervision of co-executive dolly work, and Optimo 15-40mm (T2.6) showed incredible ingenuity that enabled us
producer Tim Kelly. Tim’s oversight was criti- and 28-76mm (T2.6) for handheld and to change up the look of the set on the fly;
cal to the finished show; he’s an amazing Steadicam. For his 2nd-unit work, Saint Ours my favorite feature was the bar itself, which
storyteller, and he worked tirelessly with Final utilized Cooke S4s. Schneider Hollywood was reversible and on wheels, and could be
Frame Post colorists Charlie Rokosny and Black Magic filters in 1⁄8 and 1⁄4 densities repositioned to give us a completely new

shooting on Antelope Island in the middle of
the Great Salt Lake in Utah,” Graves
explains. “It’s one of the few places in the
country that still has herds of wild buffalo,
which is the most sacred animal to the
Graves and Lakota way of life. Our dream was to shoot
director John
Ealer (wearing Sitting Bull riding through this herd of
cowboy hat) buffalo.”
discuss a scene However, since the Island is a
on train tracks.
protected wildlife preserve, we were only
allowed to film in specified areas, and there
was no guarantee that the buffalo would
graze nearby on the day of the shoot.
“When we arrived,” Graves continues, “we
could see the buffalo in the distance, but
look within minutes. to do his work, so I went with a static frame they were nowhere near where we were
Despite the scheduling magic of 1st instead. The result is a moment of silence in shooting. We were disappointed, of course,
AD Michael Meador, we also had to turn this a big action Western, where Stevens but there was nothing we could do.”
set around from day to night with very little breathes in the pain of Jesse James, and lets As we set up the Chapman G3
time for relights. “The saloon looked great, it out slowly for us all to hear.” The scene remote stabilized head with a vibration isola-
but it was big and had dark wood walls and was a perfect example of Saint Ours’ remark- tor on an ATV-mounted Fisher Model 23
furnishings, so it really soaked up the light,” able ingenuity and his ability to concoct crane, Moses Brings Plenty — who dedicates
says Graves. “Chuck and Justin had every- imagery that’s in perfect harmony with both much of his time to educating younger
thing pre-rigged overhead and on dimmers, the story and the needs of the production. Lakota about the Lakota people’s traditional
enabling us to change from a day look to a Perhaps the most important chal- way of life — mounted his horse and rode
night look — and back — very quickly.” lenge we faced while making The American into the field. “And that’s when the buffalo
Throughout the production, I relied West was telling the story of Native Ameri- began to move toward us,” says Graves. “By
extensively on Saint Ours’ remarkable can leaders Sitting Bull (Moses Brings Plenty) the time we were ready to shoot, the buffalo
creativity to help tell the story of The Ameri- and Crazy Horse (Will Strongheart) in an were all around him — it felt like they
can West. I would constantly ask him and his accurate and respectful way. Co-executive embraced him. I think we were all
tight-knit unit — whom we deferentially producer Shirley Escott and I talked inces- emotional, witnessing this amazing connec-
referred to as the “X unit” because of their santly about how incredibly important it was tion between the actor and the animal that
special-teams-like ability to move quickly and to all of us that we get this right, from script- was so important to him. It was a great way
with precision — to shoot critical dramatic ing and casting all the way through shoot- to end the shoot.”
scenes, not just wide shots and inserts. One ing. And that meant we had to be sensitive
of the most important scenes we asked him and respectful to Native American culture. TECHNICAL SPECS
to shoot was the moment when Jesse James We had to be willing to listen.
(David H. Stevens) learns that his little brother The first time I talked to Larry Pourier, 1.78:1
Archie has been killed by Pinkerton agents. our amazing Native American consultant, I Digital Capture
“John and I talked a lot about how mentioned a scene in which Sitting Bull Arri Amira Premium
important this scene was,” says Saint Ours. performs a Sundance ritual just before the Angenieux Optimo, Cooke S4 ●
“I was looking forward to working with Battle of Little Bighorn. There was an
David Stevens, who inhabited the role with a extended silence on the phone, and then
breathtaking authenticity. X-unit gaffer Wes Pourier told us that the Sundance was so
Sullivan had rigged the interior of the barn sacred to the Lakota Indians that it can’t be
hideout with skirted China lanterns and filmed. So, instead, Graves and I worked ERRATUM
raked an HMI through the slats of the wall, with Pourier to find a way to abstractly visu- In AC’s April 2016 coverage of Batman v
creating a beautiful, dramatic light. X-unit alize that part of the story while still respect- Superman: Dawn of Justice, it was incor-
key grip Mike Seitz and I had ambitious plans ing the Lakota way of life. Using a combina- rectly stated that the Imax camera nega-
for a complex tracking move to follow Jesse’s tion of silhouette, slow motion, long lenses tives were scanned by FotoKem. All scan-
gang member who brings him the news of and selective focus, we were able to suggest ning of the 65mm 15-perf Imax negative
his brother’s killing, but a casting problem the power and importance of the ritual with- was performed at Imax Post. The 65mm 5-
put us way behind schedule. In our race out actually showing it. perf shot for the production was scanned
against the clock, I knew my best course of On the last day of the shoot, some- at FotoKem, which also provided 65mm
action was to create a space for a great actor thing miraculous happened. “We were dailies transfers and 70mm prints.

Looks
That
Kill
Natasha Braier, ADF adopts a beauty and shy manner immediately attract the attention of the
Los Angeles fashion industry’s top photographers — and the
bold palette for director enmity of the more seasoned models.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylized tale “Society has become so distorted,” laments director of
of vanity run amok. photography Natasha Braier, ADF, who sat down with AC
during a 48-hour break between jobs. The cinematographer —
who was born in Argentina and earned her master’s degree in
By Jean Oppenheimer cinematography from the U.K.’s National Film and Television
School — reflects, “We are all trapped in a culture of youth that
•|• promotes the idea that you are worth more if you are beautiful.”
This emphasis on and pursuit of an idealized beauty was
T
he myth of Narcissus gets a contemporary spin in The a major impetus behind Danish writer-director Nicolas
Neon Demon, a psychological horror tale — as darkly Winding Refn’s script, which was co-written with Polly
comic as it is macabre — about the excessively high value Stenham and Mary Laws. “The window when one is consid-
that modern culture places on physical beauty. Set in the ered beautiful, or desirable, or ‘perfect,’ is getting shorter and
competitive world of modeling, the movie follows 16-year-old shorter, and it’s moving toward a younger and younger age,”
Jesse (Elle Fanning), a naïve newcomer whose unadorned Refn says, speaking by phone from his home in Copenhagen.

Given the story’s milieu and
subject matter, Braier had hoped to
shoot on film, but Refn urged digital
Photos by Gunther Campine and Natasha Braier, ADF;
screen grabs by Ernesto Joven. Photos and screen grabs
origination, making The Neon Demon

the first feature the cinematographer has
shot digitally. Her primary concern, she
says, was that “this picture is about beau-
tiful women. How do you make some-
body appear flawless on digital?”
Since anamorphic was the lens
courtesy of Amazon Studios.
decision from the beginning, choosing

the right glass to pair with the produc-
tion’s Arri Alexa XT camera was crucial. Opposite: In the opening scene of The Neon Demon, teen model Jesse (Elle Fanning) poses
“I needed super-soft lenses to keep the during a stylishly gruesome shoot. This page, top: The photographer, Dean (Karl Glusman),
actresses looking as beautiful as possi- develops a romantic fixation on his subject. Middle: Director Nicolas Winding Refn takes five on
set with Fanning. Bottom: Refn and cinematographer Natasha Braier, ADF scope out a scene set
ble,” she says. “I remembered a set of in the offices of Jesse’s modeling agent.
anamorphic primes I loved when I
www.theasc.com July 2016 31

◗ Looks That Kill
including its lens inventory, so Braier

asked Guy McVicker and Cathy Peirce
Ouellet at Panavision Hollywood if they
could “fish out the Xtals for me. Once
we had them, I went to Panavision
Woodland Hills to test them against six
other sets with [ASC associate and
Panavision’s vice president of optical
engineering and lens strategy] Dan
Sasaki, who ended up loving the Xtals as
much as me, and tuning them for me to
get them to work at their optimum qual-
ity. The way they refract and diffuse light
is really amazing. They keep the skin
tones looking like porcelain. Depending
upon where the light is coming from,
they also produce a random array of
Jesse cleans herself up after the bloody photo session. A Lowel Rifa unit provides soft backlight to flares and weird aberrations that help
augment the lighting built into the makeup table and the background set pieces.
break the digital feeling.”
The production’s Xtal Express
attended film school in London — JDC Dunton was an important figure package included 32mm, 40mm,
Cooke Xtal [Crystal] Express. They for Braier when she was in film school 50mm, 75mm and 100mm primes.
were made by Joe Dunton; the lenses are and just starting her career, lending her “Shooting at T4 you get a bit more defi-
old Cooke S2s and S3s inside, with an his Xtal Express lenses to shoot a nition in the eyes,” says Braier. “At night
added anamorphic front element number of short films. Panavision even- we sometimes had to shoot at T2.8
designed in Japan.” tually bought Dunton’s company, because there just wasn’t enough light.”

In addition to the Xtal Express lenses,
the filmmakers carried Panavision C
Series 150mm and 180mm primes and
a Panafocal 50-95mm (T4) zoom.
Braier recorded ArriRaw to
Codex XR Capture Drives mounted in
the Alexa XT’s internal XR Module.
She says the Xtal Express optics offered
a good counterbalance to the sharpness
of the camera. Lest the images still look
too clean, however, she sometimes
smeared an optical flat with a small
amount of Vaseline or other grease to cut
the digital feel. She also occasionally
placed lighting units inside the matte
box. “We cut a few half-round diffuser
aluminum channels and placed LED
hybrid LiteGear LiteStix ribbon inside
of them,” gaffer Manny Tapia says. “We
then Velcroed those to the inside of the
matte box and pointed them at the lens.”
Braier adds with a laugh, “It was like
flashing [the film] in the old days.”
Refn invited AC to visit the set
during the very first night of production,
on location in the attic of the Los
Angeles Theatre, a historic movie palace
in the once-grand Broadway theater
district of downtown L.A. Production
designer Elliott Hostetter recounts that
he, Refn and Braier were scouting the
theater’s lower floors when, on a whim,
they decided to climb up to the attic. “It
was just a big, dusty space used for stor-
age,” says Hostetter. “But it had this
huge window at the far end of the room
with a 2.35:1 ratio that was just perfect
for this slow dolly reveal [that opens the
movie].”
Refn strives to shoot his movies in Braier’s notes detail her approach to a scene in which Jesse meets a group of spiteful, jaded models in
the restroom of a nightclub. To create her digital “storyboards,” Braier took scouting stills with the
chronological order, so this first shot of Artemis Director’s Viewfinder app and used the Evernote app to add notations.
principal photography is also the open-
ing shot of the edited feature. In the
scene, Jesse wears an electric-blue metal- grisly crime scene, but a fashion shoot. shot of a movie defines the style.”
lic dress and reclines on a silky silver As the camera dollies farther back, the Indeed, the director’s style is marked
sofa. Her eyes, dotted with sequins, are enormous, rectangular window comes by such tropes as frames within frames
open but unblinking; blood cakes her into frame around the gold-papered wall and a frequently static camera.
neck where her throat appears to have behind the couch. Outlined in two thin Eschewing Steadicam, handheld and
been slashed. The frame remains static ribbons of bright-red neon light, the overt camera movement, he creates
until a sudden eruption of flashbulbs — window reveals the set piece to be just tension and energy within the frame’s
simulated via a Lightning Strikes 8K that: a set. “The red neon around the confines. “For me,” he submits, “it’s
Paparazzi light mounted on the camera glass was Nicolas’ idea,” says Hostetter. “I very much about the composition
dolly — cues the camera to slowly pull loved it.” inside the frame. The only visual clue I
back, revealing that the setting is not a According to Refn, “The first gave [Braier] was that I wanted every-

◗ Looks That Kill
the film’s colors and textures. “For the
opening scene, two 4-foot T12 [fluores-
cent] practicals, with 1⁄2 Minus Green
added, were placed camera-left of the
sofa,” recalls Tapia. “A 4-by-4, 3,200-
degree Kino, with 250 diffusion, loomed
over the back of the couch [and was later
erased in post], providing a toplight that
brought out the texture of the wallpaper
and added shine to Jesse’s dress. Finally,
a Source Four — with a 19-degree lens
and both a 3⁄4 CTB and a theatrical-
style Deep Blue — added a pronounced
blue tint from camera-right of the sofa.”
To provide contrast with the inte-
rior lighting, Braier had two Digital
Sputnik LED units placed at street level
to up-light the limited view through the
window. The DS LEDs had been
recommended to her by Greig Fraser,
ASC, ACS, who used them on the
upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
“He is in love with the Sputniks,” Braier
says with a laugh. “Greig called Kaur
Kallas, co-founder and CEO of the
company, and said, ‘You have to help
Natasha.’”
The DS LED units are the brain-
child of Kallas and his brother Kaspar
(see New Products and Services, AC
Oct. ’15). “Our system is based on a
modular [concept], with individual light
modules serving as the basic building
blocks,” explains Kaur Kallas. “The DS 3
has a single power supply that controls
up to three individual light modules,
which can either be grouped together or
used separately; the DS 6 has six light
Braier’s notes offer a partial summary of her strategy for a sequence in which Jesse spots a mysterious modules pre-built into a frame; and we
man who turns out to be a prominent fashion photographer. Lighting fixtures that were visible in some
of the screen grabs were later erased via postproduction visual-effects work. are now launching a DS 1, which is a
single light module that can be powered
by batteries. You can also panel the light
thing to feel like a static photographic referred to the work of American artist modules into whatever shape or size you
image.” (See sidebar, page 36.) James Turrell and late French fashion want — rather like Legos!”
Refn’s signature style also includes photographer Guy Bourdin for inspira- Braier says Tapia bought a DS 3
the use of slow motion. As Braier notes, tion. Bourdin, Hostetter notes, “was a set that was used throughout the shoot,
“We shot most of the film at 24 fps, but total master of texture. This had a huge “and Kaur very generously lent us addi-
some at 60 fps — using the slow motion influence on us. The textures of surfaces tional units for our bigger scenes. I
to create different emotional textures and can really help add a sense of dimension. played a lot with color on this film, and I
heighten specific moments.” Plus, Guy’s work was all about sex, death couldn’t have done it without their lights,
The production also employed and glamour, which was perfect for this which can be set up very fast. They
bold contrast between heavily saturated story.” trained our guys how to use the
colors, and an almost tactile sense of Braier and Tapia devised a light- Sputniks, and they taught Manny and
texture. Both Braier and Hostetter ing plan that would further accentuate me a lot about digital colorimetry. Kaur

comes from the digital postproduction
world so he is a total expert on it. Talking
with him prior to the shoot was like
having a master class — with invaluable
tips on how the color capture works on
the Alexa sensor and how to handle the
extreme colors I was planning to use on
set.”
The Neon Demon was shot in and
around Los Angeles, primarily on prac-
tical locations. One of the biggest setups,
in terms of both lighting and staging,
was for a nightclub sequence shot inside
the Orpheum Theatre in downtown
L.A. on the second night of principal
photography. Jesse is invited to the party
by makeup artist Ruby ( Jena Malone),
and they arrive to find hundreds of revel- Later in the evening, Jesse is transfixed by a bondage-suspension show that slowly unfolds amid
ers mingling amid a hip but ominous hypnotic red light. Throughout production, DIT Ernesto Joven created screen grabs off the
monitor as references for Braier.
ambience. “Jesse is entering this new
world that is totally alien to a girl from a
small town,” remarks Braier. “It’s like girls as they climb the stairs to the upper- Malone as they walked in profile. These
Dorothy landing in Oz.” gallery level and] down a 30-foot stretch, panels were the result of Tapia’s
Stephanie Martin, the operator on as they maneuver through and around approaching Sean Goossen and Al
the single-camera shoot, describes the crowds to reach two friends of DeMayo at LiteGear and asking them
bringing the two women into the build- Ruby’s, Sarah and Gigi [played by to create what the gaffer describes as a
ing: “An elevator door opens on the first Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote, respec- “custom Frankenstein” light. “At the
floor, and we dolly back as Jesse and tively].” time, [LiteGear] had just started build-
Ruby step out and walk down the corri- Six LED panels provided ing their Hybrid LiteMats,” Tapia says,
dor. [The camera dollies parallel to the magenta output and backlit Fanning and “but they weren’t really building

•|• Moving Pictures •|•
T oday’s culture is
obsessed with beauty
and the power of beauty.
an emotional one that
moves subconsciously.
You can move the back-
It’s not just the United ground and it feels like
States; it’s universal — the camera is moving. A
although you could say change in lighting can
the preoccupation is make the viewer
more extreme in the subliminally feel that
U.S., because the U.S. is the camera is moving.
generally more of an I am partially color-
extreme country on all blind. Red and blue
levels. It’s not even so aren’t a problem; green
much about how we and some other colors
look, but how we want are difficult. But I can
to be viewed or only relate to what I can
perceived. We no longer see, which means I tend
even have an image of toward extreme and
ourselves; rather, it’s an highly saturated colors.
image of our perfect self. And I demand a lot of
My intention with contrast. My cine-
The Neon Demon was to matographer, Natasha
make a teenage horror Braier [ADF], was very
film — a funny, melodramatic horror gets so tiny that the shot suddenly instrumental in the film and in [achiev-
film — but without a horror film’s becomes subjective. ing] what I wanted to do — so inven-
DNA. It’s about the aspirations of the That first shot — like any first tive, and wonderfully talented with
illusion. It’s about “observed perfection” shot in any film — defines the style, lighting.
— the static [nature] of beauty — and which then continues through the rest I set Demon in Los Angeles for
in order to zero in on what essentially of the movie. In general, I do very few two specific reasons. The first consider-
drives the movie, I wanted to keep [the setups and I’m very specific about them. ation was a practical one: It was the
images] very static. Camera movement I always shoot chronologically and only place my wife wanted to go.
would have gone against the kind of prefer using one camera. I love slow Second, L.A. is a magnet for every-
artificial life that the frames represent. I motion and used quite a bit of it in thing. Even though the cultural world
wanted everything to feel like a static Demon. When used correctly, it has the is spread out — the high-fashion
photographic image, which is composi- same effect as a moving camera: It’s a industry is really in New York and Paris
tion within a single frame. visualized unreality. I also love to zoom — the dominant cultural aspects of the
I find that a moving camera can and did a lot of zooming in the film. I Western world [flow into] Los Angeles
feel very unrealistic; on the other hand, find it much more emotional than a and then are beamed out to the rest of
it can add a whole new landscape to the tracking camera, which is more about the world via digital link.
composition. There is no question that the dynamic. But it depends upon what Perfect beauty is unattainable, yet
[camera movement] has to be used the scene is about. Moving the camera we all strive for it. It’s universal. I’m not
properly; it has to have a function. In is very much about how you want to tell saying that’s a good thing or a bad
Demon, the first introduction between the story. When I [incorporate] a move, thing, but it is a common denominator.
Jesse and the photographer is static. The it is a very specific one, as in Demon’s And it’s moving toward an ever-
design I had in mind was that by intro- opening pullback. younger age. The window when one is
ducing her static and him static, and I don’t like curves as much as I considered beautiful or desirable keeps
seeing him observing her, it’s like turn- like straight lines. I always have diffi- shrinking. It’s never about aging up; it’s
ing a page in a photo book. And then culty working with Steadicam because always moving down. What’s going to
the camera starts pulling back. It tracks once it moves out of its clear lines, it happen if it continues to flow down-
back so far that it becomes out of the reminds me even more of the illusion. ward?
norm — to the point where you say, A moving camera doesn’t have to be a — Nicolas Winding Refn
“this is an unnatural movement.” Jesse physical movement, however; it can be

◗ Looks That Kill
anything with RGB capabilities in a 2-

foot-by-3-foot size, which is what I
figured I would need. So they built six
three-panel LiteMats [based on their
LiteMat 3 unit] that [offered daylight,
tungsten] and RGBA all in one unit. We
ran them exclusively wireless so I had full
dimming control in my hand. The light-
ing crew affectionately called them Braier sought to
‘Manny Mats.’” create an ominous
Also integral to the walking noir ambience for the
seedy motel where
sequence with Fanning and Malone was Jesse rents a room
an oil-wheel projector with colored-glass after arriving in Los
gobos, which projected a lava-lamp Angeles.
pattern over the actresses’ heads as they
exited the elevator; this same unit was
employed to light the stairs area from the
out-of-frame ground floor. A couple of
1,500-watt Clay Paky Alpha Profiles,
each with its own gobo, produced a simi-
lar effect during the dolly move. Practical
light came from five large chandeliers,
each containing 50 to 60 bulbs. “We
wanted a lot of color, but it was too
expensive to replace all the regular tung- Compatible with standard practical held remote, Tapia could then swirl
sten bulbs with RGB LEDs,” acknowl- lightbulbs, the MiLight LEDs, as Tapia through color options while also pulsing
edges Braier. “The electricians replaced explains, “have Wi-Fi capability. The the MiLight LEDs up and down.
most of the bulbs with [‘party-blue’ brightest at the time were 6-watt globes, “I chose a range of colors,” Braier
globes] and used 10 to 15 MiLight or the [approximate] equivalent of a 20- says, “and got Manny to slowly go
RGBW LEDs in each chandelier.” watt incandescent bulb.” Using a hand- through them, creating a kind of

◗ Looks That Kill
Jesse is silhouetted against her motel room’s patterned wallpaper while eavesdropping on a disturbing encounter taking place in the room next
door. To get the shot, Braier and her crew rigged a small soft LED light with Depron that lit the wallpaper at the beginning of the shot, showing its
texture, and dimmed it down as the camera dollied back from the wall. “At the beginning of the shot you do see the wallpaper texture
superimposed on Jesse’s silhouette,” says Braier, “but as we pull away, the wallpaper disappears and we end up with a more abstract image of just
her in the rabbit hole that gets smaller as the camera is pulling away from it — like [she’s] falling down.”
hypnotic and almost imperceptible shift The Neon Demon called for a different Natasha, I knew we would need a lot of
in color.” Adding still more color were approach to lighting than other projects gels for the traditional incandescents and
Digital Sputnik DS 3 LEDs, which on which he’s worked. “Not only is there HMIs.” Cinelease and Tapia’s own
would also slowly shift in color and a lot more color, but Nicolas uses color to company, Tap In Power, supplied most of
intensity, that lit the chandeliers from the move the story forward and to lead the the lighting equipment.
ground. audience in certain directions,” the gaffer The major turning point for Jesse
Tapia readily acknowledges that notes. “From my early discussions with — and the movie — is the Narcissus

scene: the big fashion show, during become even more pronounced, so we ues. “It’s as though she is seeing both
which Jesse catches her reflection in a bounced [three of the Digital Sputnik herself and another side of herself — a
mirror and falls in love with her own DS 6 units] into [pans] of water that had more evil Jesse. At that moment, the
beauty. The scene begins with a group of [broken bits of ] mirrors in the bottom of triangle changes colors from blue to red.”
runway models standing backstage, them, and the textured water effect Feeling empowered, Jesse kisses her
waiting for their cue. When it’s Jesse’s bounced back on Elle. reflection in the mirror, turns around and
turn to step onto the runway, the other “Conceptually, the idea is that walks back to the entrance triangle,
women disappear and the imagery turns when Jesse reaches the star structure, she which now also glows red.
abstract. “It’s like we go into Jesse’s head, glimpses herself in a three-paneled There was, in fact, some sleight of
into her mental state,” says Braier. mirror and undergoes a kind of transfor- hand involved in Jesse’s kissing of the
The sequence was shot at Calvert mation,” the cinematographer contin- mirror. To obtain the most pleasing
Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., where a
large triangle of mirrors was constructed
to serve as the doorway to the catwalk.
Mirrors above and on both sides of the
triangle reflect Jesse as she makes her
entrance; Hostetter describes the config-
uration as “a mirrored cave, or a kind of
inverted pyramid that was faceted in
such a way that the light bounced all
around, as did Jesse’s reflection. It was
almost like Jesse was inside of a
diamond.” Jesse walks down the runway
toward a double triangle in a star-like
configuration, outlined in neon-blue
light, which was accomplished with
RGB LiteRibbon. Undulating blue light
surrounds her as she walks; the rest of
the room is dark.
To create this watery effect in the
wide shot of Jesse walking, Braier
explains, “we bounced Sputniks
[outputting] blue light into big pieces of
silver and white silk that the grips would
rustle. We then cut to a medium shot of
her, at which point Elle is actually walk-
ing on a treadmill.” The use of the tread-
mill was per Refn’s directive, Braier
notes, “so Elle could walk on and on
without having to cut every 60 feet, and
he could keep the shot running and
work on the performance without tech-
nical interruptions. The grips and
electrics made a patchwork of gels —
green, blue and turquoise. We put them
on a big frame that rotated in front of
[an Arri M40 bounced into an 8-by-8
silver lamé].” Tapia describes the gel rig
as “a sort of stained glass on a pinwheel
that could be spun manually.”
“That continued the watery
effect,” Braier adds, “but with a slight
change in colors. As Jesse reaches the
star, we wanted the water effect to
◗ Looks That Kill
angle for Elle’s reflection, Refn actually

had Fanning gaze into the star as if she
Top: Jesse becomes were looking into a mirror, with plans
spellbound by her for visual-effects artists to add her reflec-
own reflections
during a futuristic- tion later. On a whim, the filmmakers
looking fashion kept the camera rolling as Fanning
show. Middle: walked back to the entrance, where her
Braier and Fanning
rehearse Jesse’s image actually was reflected in the
walk down the mirrors surrounding the triangle.
runway. Bottom: As Fanning kissed her reflection in those
Fanning prepares
for Jesse’s mirrors, and that shot was then edited
transformation into the footage at the other end of the
from unsullied runway. Because the sequence is so
ingénue to hard-
edged Narcissus, abstract — “and we didn’t care about the
camera operator ‘reality’ of it so much,” Braier notes —
Stephanie Martin the cut doesn’t call attention to itself.
(top right), key grip
Amos James After Jesse returns to her motel
(wearing headseat) room, someone tries to pry open her
and camera door, fails, and then moves on to the
assistant Hector
Rodriguez (far left, adjacent room, where he proceeds to
pulling focus) run rape the girl inside. Jesse stands frozen as
through a take. the camera pans across her room to the
James is creating a
watery reflection wall she shares with her neighbor; the
with the help of a camera stops on the wall, and Jesse re-
Sputnik bouncing enters the frame, kneeling down to
onto a pan
containing broken listen. The scene then cuts to a silhouette
bits of mirror. of her listening, as if shot through the
wall from the adjacent room. Framing
Jesse’s silhouette is a circular black “iris”
effect that gets smaller as the camera

Jack (Desmond Harrington) assesses Jesse in an all-white, limbo-like studio space.
tracks backwards, away from Jesse. directional [800-watt Jo-Leko HMI

“This is a key moment in the with a partially diffused iris], creating
movie,” says Braier, “which we chris- the iris on camera with her silhouette
tened ‘Alice through the rabbit hole.’ In inside. On the other side of the wall, we
this moment the movie takes yet had the camera on a track, perpendicu-
another turn in its lar to the wall, so it
language and would pull back as
distances itself even far as the size of the
more from reality. stage. On the dolly
The camera goes to “We were making we rigged a small
the room next door, soft LED light with
where the rape is a punctuation, and Depron that lit the
taking place, and it’s wallpaper at the
‘magically’ shooting saying that we are beginning of the
Jesse’s silhouette
through the wallpa-
now going into the shot, showing its
texture, and we
per texture. Then it rabbit hole, into dimmed it down as
pulls away, revealing we got away from
Jesse inside an iris the abyss.” the wall. So at the
— old silent-movie beginning of the shot
style — and then you do see the wall-
pulls away even paper texture super-
more, making the imposed on Jesse’s
‘hole’ smaller and smaller in a sea of silhouette, but as we pull away, the wall-
black. This was a moment where we paper disappears and we end up with a
were making a punctuation, and saying more abstract image of just her in the
that we are now going into the rabbit rabbit hole that gets smaller as the
hole, into the abyss, the darkness, and camera is pulling away from it — like
everything is possible. [she’s] falling down.”
“Elliott printed an 8-by-8 piece Frightened, Jesse phones Ruby
of material with the texture of the wall- and seeks refuge at the mansion where
paper, which we rigged on a standard her friend is housesitting. There, the
silk frame. We positioned Elle on one story’s final chapter begins. Gigi and
side of it and lit her from behind with a Sarah arrive in the movie’s sole
41
◗ Looks That Kill
placed inside the mansion’s empty
swimming pool, while violet-hued
Sputniks bounced into a large silk just
off-camera, behind and to the left of the
diving board, creating a strong violet
wash over the scene.
Partially color-blind, Refn is able
to distinguish reds and blues, which is
why those colors dominate his work. “I
don’t know what I can’t see,” he admits.
“But if I can’t see it, I can’t relate to it.
This forces everyone on the crew to
pretty much approach the production
with the same handicap that I have.”
Braier adds, “A lot of colors look
the same to Nicolas’ eye. If you can’t pick
For a climactic scene set at a mansion’s empty pool, Braier created a violet hue by up on color separation, things look flat-
aiming Digital Sputnik LED units through white silks. The wall behind the Sputniks was lit with
LED panels. The cinematographer augmented the look with gelled fluorescent Kino Flo units ter, but contrast compensates for the lack
positioned in the pool. of depth perception. So, that’s why Nic
loves contrast and wants a lot of it in his
Steadicam sequence — which ultimately Braier was particularly pleased films. I am also a very contrast-y person
involves a chase inside the house — that with the mix of lighting on the mansion’s and I’m always trying to create depth
transitions to a “long, side dolly shot,” as back terrace, where the four women with contrast, so it was easy to give him
Braier describes it, as the action transi- converge. Eight to 10 Kino Flo 4' four- what he wanted.”
tions to the swimming-pool area. banks gelled with Peacock Blue were Braier had been interested in
collaborating with Refn for some time.
She refers to the director’s work as For another
“poetic,” and admires his insistence on poolside
shooting in chronological story order. sequence later
in the movie,
“His process is not dictated by the ‘time Braier’s lighting
is money’ paradigm as most films are, strategy
where everything occurring at one loca- included
Sputniks, HMI
tion has to be shot on the same day or units, mirrors to
consecutive days,” she observes. create flares,
The director and cinematogra- and red gels
combined with
pher collaborated on the film’s final additional
grade with freelance colorist Norman mirrors to create
Nisbet, who graded the movie in 4K red flares.
with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci
Resolve at Act 3 in Copenhagen for a
4K final deliverable. Due to previous tions of digital-imaging technician TECHNICAL SPECS
commitments, Braier had to move on Ernesto Joven, 1st AC Hector
before the work was completed, but Rodriguez, 2nd AC Eric Jensch and key 2.39:1
Refn remained to supervise the comple- grip Amos James. In turn, Refn credits
tion of the grade. The Neon Demon Braier for being “instrumental [in Digital Capture
premiered in May at the Cannes Film achieving] the look I wanted for the
Festival, where it screened in competi- film. She is inventive — and absolutely Arri Alexa XT
tion. amazing to work with.” ●
In addition to Tapia, Martin and JDC Cooke Xtal Express;
Sasaki, Braier emphasizes the contribu- Panavision C Series, Panafocal zoom
43
The Aliens
Strike Back
Markus Förderer, BVK puts a
premium on simplicity and realism
surely have perished. In an epic speech to rally a ragtag band
of American pilots, President of the United States Thomas J.
Whitmore (Bill Pullman) announced that the final battle,
for the summer blockbuster fought on July 4, would mark the date as not just an American
Independence Day: Resurgence. holiday, but as the day the entire world declared its indepen-
dence as a united planet.
Twenty years later, the nations of Earth have partnered
By Jay Holben to form an immense defense program. Scavenging downed
alien spacecraft, scientists have studied the engineering and
•|• integrated extraterrestrial technology into the Earth’s weaponry
to better defend the human race if the aliens ever return. And
I
n 1996, a powerful and violent alien invasion brought the return they do, in an unprecedented force that no one could
world to its knees and devastated major cities across the have predicted in Independence Day: Resurgence.
globe. If not for the genius of satellite expert David Writer-director Roland Emmerich returned to helm this
Levinson ( Jeff Goldblum) and the bravery of Marine long-awaited sequel to his blockbuster action film — this time
Corps Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith), humanity would with Markus Förderer, BVK at his side to bring the colossal

tale to the big screen. Förderer’s previous
work includes the Mike Cahill-directed
drama I Origins (AC Sept. ’14), along
with Emmerich’s Stonewall. “The main
challenge of something like this is, how
do you make the movie look consistent
in its own universe, but still have an
interesting take and variety to it?” says
Förderer. “My goal was to make it feel
like an Independence Day film, but to give
it its own character.”
Unit photography by Claudette Barius, SMPSP, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
The original film (shot by Karl

Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK; AC July
’96) has a particularly special place in the
cinematographer’s heart. “I watched the
first Independence Day in the theater with
my sister and I thought, ‘Oh, my God,
this is amazing! I have to become a
filmmaker!’” Förderer recalls. “I started
reading books and figured out that what
I was really interested in was
cinematography. Independence Day was
the film that sparked that in me. I know
that movie inside and out; I had it on
VHS and I watched it hundreds of times
as a kid.
“For Resurgence, Roland wanted a
really dark look,” he continues. “Usually
you fight as a cinematographer to make
[a movie] interesting and darker, and the
director will say, ‘I want to see the
performance! I want to see their faces!’
Opposite: Twenty years after staving off a violent alien invasion, the nations of Earth partner to
But Roland would be like, ‘Darker! combat an even greater extraterrestrial attack in Independence Day: Resurgence. This page, top
Darker!’ until there was almost no light and middle: Earth Space Defense (ESD) director David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) and a group of
hitting the sensor! The way to get away scientists help prepare the planet for the impending onslaught. Bottom: Cinematographer
Markus Förderer, BVK (right) and camera operator Robby Baumgartner line up a shot.
with that is to make sure you have the

◗ The Aliens Strike Back
right kind of eye light — then you can
go dark and still be connected to the
characters.”
Förderer shot 4K and 6K
anamorphic on Red Epic Dragons for
the bulk of the movie. For selected
scenes when multiple cameras were
rolling, he employed a prototype Red
Weapon camera fitted with a 6K
Dragon sensor. The Weapon was often
employed in “tight car interiors where
the compact form factor allowed us to
shoot with longer lenses inside the car,”
he notes. Both camera models recorded
RedCode Raw at 5:1 compression to
512GB Red Mini-Mags.
In prep, the cinematographer
spent significant energy and time
developing a one-look LUT that was
used for monitoring on set throughout
the entire film. “We shot a 15-minute
sequence in prep to set a look,” Förderer
says, “and then tested that look on a
number of different types of shots in our
sequence to see how it held up.
Supervising colorist Florian ‘Utsi’
Martin created the show LUT with
me.”
The LUT that was ultimately
used was based on Kodak film-print
emulation and also incorporated aspects
similar to what happens in the toe of
Fujifilm negative, while taking
advantage of Red’s own color matrices as
well. “With the film-print emulation,
you get a really nice roll-off on the
highlights, but we were still
incorporating the native color space of
the Red to get the detail in the shadow
areas that film would compress,”
Förderer details. “Some Fuji-like
characteristics came in the shadow range
to put just a little green shift into the low
end. We loaded the LUT right into the
Weapon camera, whereas the Dragons
were connected to a Fujifilm IS-Mini
LUT box for monitoring on set.
“This way, everyone was looking
at the image the way we wanted, and this
LUT was baked into the dailies so that
Roland, the editors and our visual-effects
artists were working with it from day
Cast and crew work on a stage-bound desert set surrounded by bluescreen, with a day-blue muslin
stretched overhead. one,” the cinematographer notes. “That
makes a huge difference, because if you

don’t have look management from set to
post, and then you get into the color suite
and set the original intention, everyone
is thrown for a loop from the sudden Top: Levinson
meets with Dr.
change. I prefer to make sure that the Catherine
intention follows through the entire Marceaux
process.” (Charlotte
Gainsbourg).
The final grade was performed at Middle and
FotoKem in Burbank. Förderer worked bottom: Multiple
with Martin as well as colorist Walter cameras roll for a
sequence in
Volpatto; the DI employed a 2K and 4K which Levinson
workflow, grading EXR files in and Marceaux
Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve. “I meet with
Dikembe (Deobia
worked with [Martin] to set the look for Oparei).
the 2D master and continued polishing
with Walter Volpatto,” Förderer says.
“We then did the 3D version and Dolby
Vision HDR.
“I like working with just one
LUT,” Förderer adds. “It’s like shooting
the entire movie on one film stock. I don’t
want to mess with 10 different looks for
day and night, interior and exterior. Once
I had the LUT, I knew I was lighting for
that specific look and everything we were
doing was going to work with that LUT,
because I was seeing the results
immediately. Other than that, we didn’t
do any grading on set or for dailies.”
Jeroen Hendriks served as on-set digital-
imaging technician throughout the
shoot.
Even on a tentpole production the
size of Independence Day: Resurgence,
speed and efficiency were paramount, as
the feature — generally a two-camera
show — was shot almost entirely onstage
in Albuquerque, N.M., over the course
of a scant 78 days. It thus took a bit of
convincing for Emmerich to consider
anamorphic lenses, according to
Förderer, who ultimately decided upon
Vantage Film 2x anamorphics — Hawk
V-Plus zooms and Hawk V-Lite primes.
“Roland used to be a big spherical guy,
and he really likes to use zooms to be
fast,” the cinematographer says. “He saw
me work with the Hawk Front
Anamorphic zooms on Stonewall, and
saw how fast I could be with them and
still get an interesting look, and that
helped convince him. He loves the look
of anamorphic lenses and how they
render skin. I’ve worked with the Hawks

several times, and I think they have the
right balance of being a newer lens but
with a really nice organic look. The
Hawks have all the things we love about
anamorphics — the all-important oval
bokeh and the wonderful characteristics
of light distortion and subtle flare.” The
production made frequent use of the V-
Plus Front Anamorphic 45-90mm and
80-180mm zooms (both T2.8). The
Arri/Fujinon Alura 15.5-45mm (T2.8)
zoom was also employed on the
production, as well as Zeiss Compact
zooms — the latter mainly for visual-
effects plates.
“I like to use digital cameras to our
advantage,” Förderer emphasizes. As an
example, he offers, “Sometimes you just
want to be a little tighter on a shot, and
changing a lens or moving the camera
can take too long in the middle of an
intense scene, even with an amazing
crew. In those situations I just crop in on
the sensor, changing down to 4K instead
The crew works
with Bill Pullman, of 6K, and that lets me get a little tighter.
reprising his role You can click a button and get a different
as the now- field of view. In a wide shot you want as
former President
Thomas J. much detail as you can get, but in a
Whitmore. tighter shot you’ll never see the
difference, and you still have plenty of
resolution to work with. It’s a wonderful
tool that allows you to move really fast.”
Generally desiring full control of
the environment, Emmerich prefers to
shoot nearly everything on stage.
“Roland loves magic hour — that ‘last
kiss of sunlight’ is his favorite,” Förderer
says with a laugh. “We’ve got, like, 10
different variations of it. Obviously, you
have to do that on stage or you’d only
have 20 minutes, tops, to shoot every
scene, and then the light would be gone.”
In order to achieve even greater
control, the cinematographer made the
unorthodox decision to forgo traditional
lighting sources and light the feature
nearly entirely with LED units. “With
only a few minor exceptions, we lit the
entire movie with RGBW LED
fixtures,” he explains. “Working with
RGBW LEDs is basically like grading
on set, except you’re adjusting color
timing with the lighting instead of
manipulating a video file. We had

everything hooked up to a dimmer
board, and we could change the color of
any fixture at any time. Our dimmer-
board operator, Kevin Hogan, had an
iPad to do simple corrections of
brightness and color, [though] complex
effect sequences timed to certain cues
would only be possible from the big
dimmer board.”
In prep, Förderer set several base
looks for the mix of RGBW colors,
which he would call “tungsten” and
“daylight,” along with several other
preset looks. “The out-of-the-box
presets for daylight and tungsten didn’t
really hit what I wanted, especially with
the combination of our show LUT,” he
explains. “We created a few presets for
each light so we could have a place to
start, and then say, ‘Dial in 10 percent
more red,’ ‘5 percent less blue,’ ‘Make this
one a little cooler, that one a little
warmer, and pull some green out of that
one.’ There were no gels at all; color was
created in the fixtures themselves. It
became like printer lights, and after a
while it was just intuitive. Roland is so
ambitious and there was so much
coverage, there’s simply no downtime —
you have to be efficient, and this system
allowed us to move incredibly fast.”
To maintain color consistency,
Förderer primarily limited his choices of
LED fixtures to two brands: LiteGear
Top and middle: Whitmore and Levinson must work together again. Bottom, from left: Levinson, Whitmore and General Adams (William Fichtner,
wearing green) observe a distressing turn of events.

LiteRibbon LED strips and Digital
Sputnik DS 6 LED fixtures. “One of the
problems with LED technology is that
the color and spectrum of the lights vary
so much from manufacturer to
manufacturer,” he notes. “Mixing and
matching can be a nightmare, so I stuck
with limited choices. Sometimes even
various batches of LEDs from the same
manufacturer can have a different
spectrum, so we had to be careful.”
Also during prep, gaffer Jay Kemp
collaborated with LiteRibbon to create
custom 4'x4' and 6'x6' soft sources that
were lined with RGBW LEDs. “These
fixtures were basically a self-lit diffusion
frame,” Förderer explains. “I essentially
used them for every setup. I don’t like
stands; I believe filmmaking and stands
are enemies. Wherever you put a stand,
you can’t point a camera. With
traditional soft lights you have a
stand for the light and a stand for the
diffusion and stands for the flags — it
gets crazy. With these fixtures there was
only one stand, and it was all self-
contained.” To control the soft light, the
cinematographer employed custom 30-
and 40-degree DOPChoice Snapgrids
— soft egg-crate accessories that attach
quickly to fixture frames — which
eliminated the need for flags.
LiteRibbon LED strips were also
integrated into the production design.
Practical fixtures were fitted with LED
clusters instead of traditional tungsten
bulbs, thus allowing the cinema-
tographer to easily dial-in intensity and
color on a shot-by-shot basis. A wide
shot might have had a practical at 30-
percent intensity, for example, but when
the camera moved in for a close-up, the
cinematographer would increase the
intensity to accentuate the modeling on
the actors without introducing new
fixtures into the setup.
“We built the LiteRibbon into the
set wherever it made sense,” the
cinematographer explains. “When I
needed something harder [and]
Top: The crew films a scene in which Levinson and pilot Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) walk on the
punchier, I went with the Digital
moon. Middle, from left: Pilots Dylan Hiller (Jessie Usher) and Morrison meet with Cmdr. Jiang Lao (Chin Sputnik fixtures, which are very powerful
Han) in the moon base. Bottom: Förderer and A-camera/Steadicam operator François Daignault ready a LED lights with narrow beams. You can
scene with Han.
group them in clusters, and they work as

a great hard light.”
The cinematographer also takes an
Top and middle: unorthodox approach to his lighting of
Morrison and bluescreen, which surrounded many of
other ESD pilots the project’s soundstages. Instead of
prepare to take
flight in fighter reaching for the traditional Kino Flo or
craft that cyc lights — or even space lights
combine alien — Förderer elected to line the entire
and human
technology. ceiling of the stages with day-blue
Bottom: The colored muslin. He would then bounce
filmmakers light into the muslin, to both serve as
capture an
onscreen media toplight and to gently light the
event in an ESD bluescreen with soft fill from above.
base. When he needed some “punch” on the
bluescreen, he placed a BBS Lighting
Area 48 remote-phosphor LED fixture
on the floor — literally, with no stands
or base — and pointed it as necessary.
“We had 20 of those Area 48 fixtures
to fill in holes where needed,” the
cinematographer says. “They fit in tight
spaces behind cars, rocks or even people.”
To light the muslin-bounce setup,
Förderer employed combinations of
Digital Sputnik LED fixtures, 4K and
9K HMI Pars, and Area 48 units. “We
had seven stages, including a huge
ice-hockey stadium, in Albuquerque
that were all lined with 360-degree
bluescreen,” the cinematographer recalls.
“I didn’t rig any lights on the ceiling. It
would have been so expensive to have all
these stages pre-rigged with lights that
just sat there as we moved from one stage
to another. Muslin is lightweight and
easy to hang, and then you only have a
couple units on the ground to bounce
into it. It’s much better than a perm lined
with space lights, and much more
efficient and less ‘source-y.’ I think it’s a
common mistake when shooting on
stage — it doesn’t represent natural
daylight realistically. The sky is a large,
soft [source], and that’s what I try to
replicate with a perm full of fabric.” He
adds that the muslin bounce “reflects a
much cooler color onto skin.”
The muslin also served the
production well in terms of Emmerich’s
preference for using practical cars on
stage. “With cars there are glass and
reflections,” Förderer says. “I really prefer
to use the muslin ceilings in these
situations, as it provides a much more

realistic reflection in the glass.” Taking
this concern further, Förderer
experimented with gobo projections of
clouds on the overhead muslin to
provide some texture in the reflections.
“It wasn’t exactly perfect,” he says, “but I
think it helped to add a little extra
element to make it more realistic.”
The production additionally
employed Outsight’s Creamsource Sky
full-spectrum LED soft source “for
interactive lighting effects,” Förderer
notes. “Due to [its] high output and wide
spread, we could program it to switch
between explosion light and green alien
laser-fire effects.”
From his time working with
Emmerich, Förderer reports that he’s
learned important lessons in “visual
sleight of hand.” He explains, “It’s
understanding the psychology of the eye,
and misdirection from where the trick is
happening. The eye is [attracted] first to
the brightest portion of the frame, and
then to the movement in the frame, and
then it looks for eyes.”
Applying this to bluescreen work,
the filmmakers opted to place their main
actors in front of real objects — “a plane,
a wall, a rock,” Förderer suggests — such
that matte lines would appear around
those objects rather than around the
actors themselves. Thus the break Top: Alien spacecraft wreak havoc in the skies above fleeing ships. Middle:
between in-camera and visual-effects The crew readies a bluescreen scene in which David’s father, Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch),
imagery appears where it won’t be “as mans the helm on one of the fleeing boats. Bottom: Daignault operates as Hirsch inspects the
trunk of a car.
scrutinized or important,” the

cinematographer explains. “This makes

the shot not only cheaper but that much
more effective. Roland is a master at this.
He has an ‘eagle eye’ for making sure
that the principal elements of a shot
have clean silhouettes that [don’t
overlap] the effects. In a movie like
Independence Day, when you’re cutting to
a new shot every few seconds, you only
have to deflect [the viewers’] attention
for a short period of time.
“So many cinematographers and
gaffers obsess about the perfect blue-
and greenscreen,” Förderer continues.
“They spend hours carefully making
sure it’s all evenly lit and always at a
consistent stop. The truth is, as long as
you have an evenly lit area around your
main subject and enough contrast to
separate the subject from the
background, the rest of it doesn’t matter.
The effects artists will matte it out,
anyway.”
One sequence shot on stage in
New Mexico employed photographic
backings. While in the first Independence
Day an iconic scene featured Will
Smith’s character dragging an alien
across the barren Bonneville Salt Flats
in northwestern Utah, this time around
the flats are the setting where a school
bus full of children race for their lives.
Concerned about the cost and
Top: The production re-created Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats onstage for a sequence involving a
school bus full of children. Middle: Förderer keeps tabs on multiple cameras. Bottom: The
practicality of sending the production to
cinematographer checks the frame on a setup involving an Oculus stabilized head. the salt flats, the producers asked
Förderer whether there might be

Director Roland Emmerich (right) discusses a shot with 1st AD K.C. Hodenfield.
another solution. After scouting the than the first unit would shoot, and if
flats, the cinematographer determined in you don’t like it you end up throwing it
this specific case that there was no out and reshooting it anyway. We
benefit to shooting on location. budgeted it in from the beginning that
“We went to look at the salt flats, we would be shooting all our own inserts
and there’s no depth out there at all,” he and cutaways, and figured an extra two
says. “It’s infinite white space, almost like to three hours each day to get that stuff
snow, and mountains so far away that — but it makes sense. You’re already lit
there’s no parallax. You have no sense of for it and you know exactly what you
distance whatsoever. I said, ‘There’s no want and need. Sure, it means the actors
point going there to shoot. We can easily might have to stand around a little bit
do this on stage.’ I shot plates with a Red while you shoot a piece of paper on a
Dragon, shooting at a very tight shutter desk, but in the end it’s a lot more
angle and slowly panning 360 degrees. efficient and cost effective.” Förderer
We then extracted stills from this reports that the production employed
footage and I sent them to Rosco, and approximately two days of separate stunt
they created one huge photographic inserts.
backing for us.” As is the director’s preference,
The production opted for Rosco’s Emmerich’s master shots were most
SoftDrop backings, which are made often captured with a moving camera.
from a woven, wrinkle-resistant, all- Noting that “camera movement is
natural cotton fabric. The SoftDrop falls designed to not attract any attention,”
easily with minimal creases, can be Förderer expresses the importance of
backlit and has essentially no sheen. being “very smooth, always in the right
“One of the things to keep in mind with place and always moving. There’s a lot of
a backdrop like this is to let it blow out Technocrane and Steadicam [on this
a little,” Förderer notes. “Let it lose a project] to keep the image alive at all
little detail, which will make it feel real. times. We also knew this was going to
People make that mistake a lot and they be a 3D movie [following a stereoscopic
expose ‘properly,’ and then it looks fake conversion in postproduction handled
— it’s too controlled.” by Stereo D], and movement is very
Independence Day: Resurgence had important in 3D for depth perception.
one principal unit, with no second unit. There was no set rulebook for how and
“On these big films, no one questions when we moved — it was mostly
having a second unit,” Förderer attests. motivated by characters and story.” The
“But they’re not always as efficient as you production also made use of dollies,
want them to be. To give the director tracks and handheld. François Daignault
options, they’ll generally shoot way more served as A-camera, Steadicam and
135mm lens for a close-up! Sometimes
it’s impossible to keep focus on those
shots, but you know you have other
moments to [cut away to], since every
shot covers all the action.
“Roland organizes and orche-
strates all the actors and background,”
Förderer relates. “We talk [briefly] about
where to place cameras, we do one
rehearsal, and he sees what will
potentially be a problem in close-up five
or 10 setups later, and we change it for
the master to avoid the problem later. It’s
a big puzzle, and it’s a challenge to light
this way because we’re basically always
lighting for 360 degrees. We might bring
in a diffusion frame from time to time if
we’re shooting a special close-up, but
President Lanford (Sela Ward) meets with Hiller.
otherwise our master look is what we run
with for the coverage. This is where
Technocrane operator. choreographed and moving through the LED really helps; it’s quick and easy to
To ensure smooth cuts with the frame with incredible precision,” dial in a little more backlight or fade up
master shot, Emmerich’s coverage tended Förderer says. “Then we go into or down an area as we pass by it. It’s
to be moving, as well. “You end up with coverage and every shot covers the full amazing how fast it can go.”
this master shot and all of these people action, even if you’re moving on a In commending the crew of
56
says with a laugh — and adds in
conclusion, “People ask me, ‘You’re so
young, how can you handle this big
show?’ The truth is that it’s no different
from any other show. You have a
schedule, you have shots and coverage,
you have lighting and lenses and camera,
and you deal with it all one shot at a time.
Big budget, small budget — it’s all about
being prepared and creating the best
image you can, and that’s how I
approached this film.” ●
Lanford addresses humankind.

TECHNICAL SPECS
2.39:1
Independence Day: Resurgence, Förderer The cinematographer, who is still
acknowledges “key grip Kurt in his early 30s, admits, “I get flack Digital Capture
Kornemann and his team, who were sometimes for being so young. Roland
phenomenal and always open to new told the studio that I was his guy and Red Epic Dragon, Weapon
ideas, and gaffer Jay Kemp, who jumped they didn’t question it, but then they met Vantage Film Hawk V-Plus,
deep into using brand-new LED me and they were like, ‘Oh, my God! Hawk V-Lite; Arri/Fujinon
technology like the Digital Sputniks.” You’re a baby! Is this legal?’” Förderer Alura; Zeiss Compact Zoom
57
Magic Acts
Peter Deming, ASC assists director
W
hen he took the reins for Now You See Me 2 — the
follow-up to the rollicking 2013 mystery-crime
Jon M. Chu in crafting a cinematic thriller Now You See Me — director Jon M. Chu gave
experience that adheres to the aesthetics careful thought to how the two films might diverge
of illusion for Now You See Me 2. visually. Given that the sequel would have new blood at the
helm — the prior picture having been directed by Louis
Leterrier and shot by Mitchell Amundsen and Larry Fong,
By Michael Goldman ASC — Chu sought a cinematographer with sensibilities
similar to his own, and ultimately tapped Peter Deming,
•|• ASC to help design the continuing adventures of a team of

Opposite, from left:
Maverick magicians the
Four Horsemen — Lula
(Lizzy Caplan), Jack
Wilder (Dave Franco),
Merritt McKinney
(Woody Harrelson) and J.
Daniel Atlas (Jesse
Eisenberg) — resurface
for the most astounding
caper of their careers in
the feature Now You See
Me 2. This page, top:
The Horsemen are forced
to work with Arthur
Tressler (Michael Caine)
and Walter Mabry
(Daniel Radcliffe).
Middle: Thaddeus
Bradley (Morgan
Freeman) continues to
haunt the Horsemen.
Bottom: Director Jon M.
Chu (left) and
cinematographer Peter
Deming, ASC on set.
maverick magicians dubbed the “Four

Horsemen.”
Now You See Me presented the
origin story of the Horsemen and
revealed the secret mastermind behind
the spectacular and seemingly impossi-
ble feats that served to force backroom
greed and corruption into the light of
day. With the sequel, Chu saw his
initial challenge in the fact that the
audience now knows full well who the
Horsemen are and how they operate,
and thus took to the task of revisiting
the renegade illusionists in their new
incarnation — a fully formed and func-
Unit photography by Jay Maidment, SMPSP, courtesy of Lionsgate.
tioning team who use their unique skills

to grapple with an enemy striking at
them from the shadows.
“What intrigued me about this
[franchise] was the idea that magic
could be used to actually tell a story,”
Chu explains. “But more than the last
movie, we wanted to create more of the
lived-in world, have texture-on-texture
a bit more, play with darkness more —
and more atmosphere, to make things
feel worn away, that all is not bright and
glittery like in their [stage shows]. We
[maintained] the spectacle and lights
and energy when we needed it, but for
the most part we stayed with our
Horsemen, on the ground, getting

◗ Magic Acts
down and dirty. I wanted a cinematog-
rapher who could accomplish all that,
and still shoot [the complicated magic
tricks, stunts] and effects that we had to
do. I had never worked with Peter
Deming, but was a fan of his work. We
met several times and realized we had
the same vision for how to do this.”
That shared vision, both men
agreed, largely revolved around “using
camera movement as part of story-
telling,” as Chu puts it. “That was
important, since the whole theme of
this movie is perspective — seeing how
tricks are executed from different points
of view.”
As Deming elaborates, that
meant laboring to make the magic-
related scenes in the movie “as true to
real magicians as possible. Doing things
in one take, using as little visual effects
as necessary for the tricks, having card
tricks presented like you would see
them in a live show, and so on. We liked
Top and middle: The
Horsemen re-emerge
a lot of the kinetic things about [the
for a comeback camera movement] from the first
show at the Octa movie, but some of it was a bit too much
performance venue.
Bottom: The crew
for us, and we wanted to tone some of
prepares to roll that down. We tried to adhere to the
camera. principle [of authenticity] and make
things a bit more realistic.
“For us,” Deming continues,
“camera movement was about adding to
the style of the experience, rather than
distracting from it. When it reinforced
the action or the magic or the drama —
and did not make the audience think
about the camera itself, or take you out
of the flow of the film — that was when
we knew we were on the right track
with it.” As the camera was moving for
the majority of the show, the filmmak-
ers relied heavily on Steadicam, various
cranes — the 30' and 50' Technocrane,
in particular — and dollies in various
permutations.
The production was shot primar-
ily on stages and locations in London,
before finishing up with two weeks in
Macau, China, where crucial segments
of the story take place. The filmmakers
primarily utilized the Arri Alexa XT
Plus camera system — usually running
two cameras but occasionally three —

recording ArriRaw files in the 2.39:1
aspect ratio. But for specialty applica-
tions, they also utilized the compact
Sony a7S and a7R, recording to an
Atomos Shogun 4K recorder, along
with GoPro Hero4 Black cameras for
security surveillance footage and Red
Epic Dragon cameras for drone
footage. Deming credits key grip John
Flemming for the construction of a pair
of “descender rigs” for a particular scene
that called for a transition from a ware-
house-set to the opening of a theatrical
sequence at the Octa performance
venue.
According to 1st AC Iain
Struthers, the production primarily
relied on a Panavision Primo lens pack-
age, with focal lengths ranging from
Top: FBI agent
14.5mm-150mm; Primo 19-90mm and Dylan Rhodes
24-275mm 11:1 zooms (both T2.8); (Mark Ruffalo)
Angenieux Optimo 15-40mm (T2.6), helps the
Horsemen plan a
28-76mm (T2.6) and 45-120mm surprise
(T2.8) zooms; and a first-generation appearance in the
Lensbaby for a flashback sequence. The hopes of exposing
a corrupt tycoon.
Lensbaby, Struthers notes, was the Middle: A-camera
“original manual tilt-shift version, operator Peter
which was converted to a PL mount to Cavaciuti slides
down a chute with
attach to the Alexa.” a handheld camera
Digital-imaging technician Ben to capture the
Appleton managed data on set, creating Horsemen’s escape.
Bottom: Although
scene looks at his DIT station in part- they entered the
nership with Deming; viewing footage chute in New York,
on 25" Sony PVMA250 OLED moni- the Horsemen exit
in China.
tors; and using Fujifilm IS-Mini image-
processing LUT boxes, Pomfort
LiveGrade, and the X4 module of the
Qtake digital video-assist system. His
data manager, Will Gardner, used
Pomfort Silverstack to do a safety
backup on set, adding metadata and
look info, so that Deluxe’s EC3 unit
could process near-set dailies in both
the U.K. and Macau. EC3’s team
ingested ArriRaw files from the mags
delivered from set; verified and backed
them up; color graded them using
Colorfront’s On-Set Dailies system;
and then delivered dailies, as DNx115
files, to editorial and to the set — where
the filmmakers could view them in a
preview truck — and to producers for
viewing using the Dax remote digital-
dailies platform. ➣
◗ Magic Acts
Top: The magicians

arrive at a high-
tech facility, from
which they must
steal a computer
card and escape
undetected.
Middle and
bottom: The crew
captures the theft
sequence, which
Chu refers to as
the film’s “flagship
moment.”
When it came to designing visu-

als for the movie’s set-piece illusions,
Chu put together what he called the
“War Room,” housed inside a large
conference room at the production’s
London-based offices, for the entire
crew to use as a visual and physical
reference tool. He explains that the War
Room had both concept art and story-
boards for key sequences — involving
either intricate action or mixtures of
action and CG — strategically “pieced
together as inspiration” and placed on
the walls in chronological order.
“You could walk from one side of
the room to the other and see the sets,
art direction, production design — all
on the walls,” Chu explains. “You could
‘walk’ through the beginning of the
movie to the center of the room, which
was the mid-point, and all the way
down to the end reveal. You could go in
there and study the palette and color.
We even had costumes in that room.”
This was particularly helpful for
Deming’s team as they figured out how
to film the in-camera elements related
to the Horsemen’s major stunts. “The
War Room allowed everyone to get the
big picture, the flow of the film,”
Deming explains. “From a lighting
perspective, we had models of all the
bigger sets and builds, and we could talk

The Horsemen
employ sleight-of-
hand “cardistry”
and other tricks in
order to abscond
with the computer
card.
about different ways to light them, and

[options] if we were planning extrava-
gant shots.”
Toward the beginning of the
film, the Horsemen — comprising J.
Daniel Atlas ( Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt
McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Jack
Wilder (Dave Franco) and newcomer
Lula (Lizzy Caplan) — must beat a
hasty retreat from a stage after their
mysterious nemesis ruins their
triumphant return to the global arena.
They attempt to depart via a pre-
planned escape route, which entails
sliding down a metal chute from the
roof of the facility to waiting vehicles.
When they reach the bottom of the
chute, however, their magically inclined
adversary pulls a stunt of his own and pointing them toward their faces. the Alexas.” For all passes down a real
things go horribly awry. Another pass had our stunt people slide slide, the actors and stunt people were
Deming notes that the produc- down that slide,” filming their own “always on wires, harnesses and pulleys
tion ran four different passes to get the bodies while clothed in the appropriate so they wouldn’t collide,” Struthers
coverage Chu wanted for the sequence actor’s wardrobe and often with real notes.
— employing a combination of real actors sliding in front of them. “The No sequence better illustrates the
inclined slides and horizontal chutes third pass involved the actors and the challenge the production faced in
with cables to pull the actors through. camera operator [Peter Cavaciuti] in a portraying complex “cardistry” and
According to Struthers, “sometimes horizontal tube as we pulled them other magic-related techniques than
[the shots were captured] with the along with pulleys, filming them with what Chu calls the movie’s “flagship
Alexa, and other times with the Sony the Alexa camera to get full bodies. moment.” It’s a scene in which the
a7S.” Deming adds, “One [pass] And then we also did a POV pass Horsemen attempt to pull off the
included the actors going down a huge where the operator followed them seemingly impossible theft of a wafer-
real slide while holding GoPros and down a real chute, filming them with thin computer card, which contains

◗ Magic Acts
Top: Lula hits the

tables in a Chinese
casino. Middle and
bottom: An Intuitive
Aerial Aerigon drone
was employed for
select shots inside
the casino.
priceless encrypted data, from an ultra-

secure vault by removing the card from
the bottom of a supercomputer, replac-
ing it with a fake, and performing
choreographed sleight-of-hand to
outwit a host of security protocols
before making their escape undetected.
The entire sequence was shot at
96 fps — to accommodate ramping in
post — inside an approximately 40'x40'
abandoned facility in London, which
was a space too small for elaborate false
walls that might have eased Deming’s
ability to hide cameras. Instead, the
camera crew had to essentially “follow
the journey” of the stolen card, in the
words of A-camera/Steadicam operator
Cavaciuti, as it is flipped, thrown, slid,
handed off, kicked, palmed, and strate-
gically hidden within and moved
through the clothing of various charac-
ters, until they can move it out of the
vault. Portions of the sequence did
require CG elements, but the goal was
to shoot the live-action pieces fully, in
choreographed order, so that the CG
sections could be inserted seamlessly,
and the finished sequence would appear
as a realistic voyage.
As Deming points out, “We had
extensive previs for that sequence, and
many versions, so by the time it came to

shoot it, we were well prepped on what
we had to accomplish — and the meth-
ods to do so. The intent was to create a
flow and energy that keeps the antago-
nists and the audience on their toes, like
they could never quite keep up with
where the card was. But of course we
had to plug the audience into the trick
long enough, as to not lose them.”
The myriad mandates for this
flagship sequence ensured that shoot-
ing the live-action elements predomi-
nantly via Steadicam and crane, in long
takes, would be incredibly challenging
and akin to “a dance sequence,”
Struthers says. “Being in the right place
at the right time, with the actors doing
the same.”
“All of that required a lot more
precision than normal,” Cavaciuti adds.
“With magicians, you have to follow
their timing exactly. If you are late
getting into a certain position, the trick
will be revealed. That was an extra chal-
lenge for us in the camera department,
because [the operators] and grips had
to be really precise with our movement
to get the timing exact. There were a lot
of card tricks, and cards flipped at the
camera, which might later be a CG
element, so you had the challenge of
framing, focusing and timing your
camera move on something that wasn’t
there, and then making it all sync with
the rest of the trick. There was
Steadicam work to show the Horsemen
going into the building, but then we
take them through the high-security
area, where they trick the security
guards. We used crane work combined
with very precise Steadicam with
Dutch angles to follow the path of the
card from the time it leaves the bottom
of the supercomputer.”
The other issue for the heist
scene was how to light the sterile, white
room that housed the giant supercom-
puter and little else. Gaffer Perry Evans
filled the room with LED units —
which were used extensively through-
out the show — including Panalux
TekTile ceiling panels that, Evans says,
“were the same size as real ceiling tiles,
so we made the whole ceiling out of
◗ Magic Acts
Top: The crew

readies a large
London exterior
for a rain
sequence. Middle:
Atlas performs
illusions in the
rain. Bottom: Rain
falls as the
filmmakers
capture the action.
them. They looked real smart on set

and helped us set levels [for important
shots], because they can be individually
processed and programmed into the
lighting desk as needed. We did some-
thing similar for car-processing work
later on with single-cell strips of
Panalux LEDs called ‘Sunbars.’”
Another crucial set piece was the
so-called “skid-plane” sequence — to
appear onscreen as occurring on the
River Thames — which was shot on an
exterior set behind Surrey’s Longcross
Studios, west of London, and involved
a grounded airplane surrounded by
360-degree, 40'-high greenscreen. It
was, according to Deming, “the biggest
lighting setup in the movie.”
Evans’ team had to light the
massive greenscreen so that the screen
itself could appear as part of the story-
line, and then mix in glitzy theatrical
lighting effects. “That rig was probably
the most difficult on the film because
we were in England and it was winter,”
the gaffer relates. “[We rigged] what are
very technical, intricate electronic
lights, and moving lights, that are not
designed to be out in the weather for —
by the time we rigged and de-rigged
them — about six weeks. So our biggest

Cast and crew prepare to shoot a night-exterior motorcycle scene.
headache involved doing a lot of good captured would have been impossible
housekeeping — wrapping them up with a helicopter.” Indeed, Cavaciuti
every night, and unwrapping them an describes the shot of the Horsemen on
hour or two before we got there, and the airplane wing as “a close-up of the
fleshing everything out, because we actors, [which moves] right into a high,
tended to lose a unit per night over the wide shot, [where] they added CG of
course of time. Our crew put plastic the River Thames and the Tower
coverings on everything every day; it Bridge.”
didn’t rain every day, but if you don’t To light the greenscreen for its
take those precautions, you will be in appearance in the movie, Deming
trouble.” explains, “we preferred not to use a
For this sequence, the filmmakers ground row of lights whenever possible,
captured swooping aerial shots of the since I used a method of lighting from
on-set airplane, which for the sake of the top of the screen that we had
the narrative was surrounded by the utilized on Oz the Great and Powerful
public and media, as the Horsemen [AC April ’13]. Perry and I did some
walk onto the plane’s wing. For those tests and came up with a formula for
shots, the production strategically the screens that worked for 90 percent
utilized an unmanned aerial vehicle of the work. Perry had a rig for bounc-
(UAV) — better known as a drone — ing [key light into the greenscreen] that
provided by London’s Helicopter Film worked very well, which could give us
Services. The unit was an Intuitive some height and withstand the wind
Aerial Aerigon fitted with a Red Epic and elements.”
Dragon and 15-40mm Angenieux According to Evans, the tech-
Optimo, assisted by an RT Motion nique involved using “big telehandlers,
remote lens-control system. or what you call Pettibones in America
The Aerigon was also employed — essentially like forklifts, but with a
for certain shots in Macau — again big telescopic arm. We had one with a
supplied by Helicopter Film Services, 20-by-20 Ultrabounce on it [and
who accompanied the crew to the loca- another with a 12-by-12 Ultrabounce],
tion — and ended up being “a great tool and we would drive them around, poke
for this material,” according to them into the set where we wanted
Deming. “Some of the shots we them, and then bounce light into it,
◗ Magic Acts
part we had decided when we went into
the project [which elements] would be
more or less saturated. We mainly
wanted to keep things natural and real-
istic — maybe accentuating weather
and things, but most of it was art-direc-
tion based.”
“Peter likes to get his ideas into
the images on set and then refine them
in post,” adds Nakamura. “A lot of it is
dark and mysterious, but ultimately it’s
a feel-good movie, so there are bright,
saturated parts, too. A lot of the work
on the dark parts was about making
power windows and pulling keys to
bring down luminance in parts of the
frame — like underwater, where we
had characters swimming around.
There, we’d pull the levels down every-
where except where the characters
were. But occasionally, once the visual
Chu (center) and crew prep an Aerigon for an exterior scene. effects were composited in, some of the
magicians’ tricks proved a bit too subtle
giving us ambience as if it was coming as more of a showtime effect that hit for audiences to notice amid the action,
off the lights around London, reaching some high points and low points to give and I would go the opposite route and
them there on the Thames. That was things life. For that, we mainly used slightly bring up just the element in the
the only way to get fixed light into the Clay Paky Sharpy and Mac 2000E frame that the viewer needed to focus
set in those places. If they had opened [beam lights]. With the Sharpys, they on.” ●
the greenscreen at one end or the other, give you almost a pointed laser beam —
the wind would have blown right they are that fine, and you can spin
through there.” them around, sweeping those beams in
Due to the volume and nature of the air. And with the Mac 2000s, we
the various lighting requirements on can play with color and size of the
the production, and the theatrical beam.”
nature of some of the setups, Chu, The final grade was performed at
Deming and Evans realized the neces- Deluxe’s Company 3 in Santa Monica,
sity of hiring an outside lighting where Deming and Chu worked with
designer from the theatrical world. colorist Stephen Nakamura, who — for
Enter Fraser Elisha, who was tasked the standard 2K DCP in P3 color space
with designing the moving-light — employed Blackmagic Design’s
system for the greenscreen set, and also DaVinci Resolve 12 in a grading
designing the lights for the magicians’ theater outfitted with a Barco digital
afrementioned big theatrical bow early cinema projector. For the HDR
in the movie. In hiring Elisha when version, Nakamura completed a subse- TECHNICAL SPECS
production was already in full swing, quent pass in Resolve 12, again in 2K,
Deming explains, “we had to work in Company 3’s Dolby Vision- 2.39:1
quickly to come up with a plan that equipped theater. The colorist and Digital Capture
would work for Jon, and that would Deming agree that a key challenge
also fit into the logic of the film and the during the DI was in matching and Arri Alexa XT Plus;
budget, since nothing of this scale was integrating visual effects seamlessly into Sony a7S, a7R;
in the original budget.” scenes that largely consisted of live- GoPro Hero4 Black;
Red Epic Dragon
In describing Elisha’s design for action elements. “But we didn’t need to
the greenscreen sequence, Evans notes do many radical things to the color Panavision Primo, Primo Zoom;
that the production “used moving lights palette,” Deming says. “For the most Angenieux Optimo; Lensbaby

Behind
the
Cinematographer Ludovic Littee
emphasizes planning, communication
Bars yuppie whose story kicked off the series, becomes entangled
with white supremacists.
On the lighter side, we see the introduction of inmate
and efficiency for the series Judy King (Blair Brown) — a television chef who’s the prover-
Orange Is the New Black. bial “steel magnolia.” There’s also the continuation of inmate
and guard backstories, which take the show’s subplots beyond
the drab prison walls. As always, the writing is sharp and
timely, referencing such topics as Black Lives Matter, Abu
By Patricia Thomson Ghraib and Eric Garner’s death by police chokehold, as well
as the broader debate surrounding appropriate punishments
for minor crimes.
•|• One person who’s happy to be back behind bars is
Ludovic Littee, the show’s cinematographer since midway
through season three. For Littee, Orange is a significant mile-
I
t’s tough times for the inmates in season four of the Emmy- stone — his first major credit as a director of photography.
winning Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Following Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique and schooled in
its privatization, Litchfield Prison is spinning out of film at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Littee spent
control, with severe overcrowding and chain-gang labor much of the past decade working as a camera assistant and
masquerading as vocational education. Meanwhile, Piper camera operator. He first joined Orange Is the New Black as an
Chapman (Taylor Schilling), the self-absorbed Brooklyn operator in season two, with Yaron Orbach serving as director

of photography. (Vanja Černjul, ASC,
HFS held the position for the pilot and
first season.)
Recalling his formative years,
Littee points to Sean Bobbitt, BSC as
one of his most important mentors.
Littee’s takeaway as 1st AC while work-
ing with Bobbitt on Shame and The
Place Beyond the Pines (AC April ’13)
was “understanding camera placement
and keeping it simple.” Today, he says,
“the question I always have is, ‘Do we
need more coverage? Is it necessary?’ If
you feel you have a frame that tells a
story and the pacing is right, you don’t
need anything else. Also, I love the
simplicity of Sean’s lighting — very
well-placed lights and not many of
them. Just watching that was an eye-
opener.”
Another influential experience
was operating B camera on season two
of Netflix’s House of Cards. What he
learned from director of photography
Igor Martinovic and A-camera operator
Gary Jay was “really understanding how
to use dolly and movement. Igor has so
much experience and understanding of
how to use blocking to move the
camera. The two [disciplines] coincide.
If the camera moves just to move, it’s
not as dynamic, but if the blocking is
working with the camera, that’s when
everything comes together and you have
Unit photography by K.C. Bailey and JoJo Whilden, SMPSP, courtesy of Netflix.
some really powerful shots — and, in

the end, a powerful scene. That’s what I
learned from House of Cards, under-
standing that dynamic.”
Littee put those lessons to use in
Orange Is the New Black, as he explains:
“What I’ve tried to do with the show is
to always have a reason why we move
[the camera]. For me, the camera is an
emotional tool, and you have to use it as
such.”
The cinematographer is happy
with how the series has evolved. Orange
began as a predominantly handheld
show; in season one, the rule was that
everything shot inside the prison was
handheld and everything outside was
not. That approach was largely aban- Opposite: The incarceration continues for Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling, middle) in the fourth
doned, however, by the end of season season of Orange Is the New Black. This page, top and middle: Chapman and her fellow inmates
at Litchfield Prison struggle with overcrowding and chain-gang labor. Bottom: Cinematographer
two — and for good reason, in Littee’s Ludovic Littee lines up the Panasonic VariCam 35 on the cafeteria set.
view. “When the entire prison was

◗ Behind the Bars
Top: Chapman
finds herself in a
tense situation.
Middle and
bottom: Littee
and crew ready
scenes inside the
communal
bathroom.
always handheld, it created one mood all

the time,” he says. “It limits you.”
Litchfield is the inmates’ home, after all,
and sometimes for years, so friendships
form and moments of happiness occur.
“There are a lot of moments in the
prison where it doesn’t need to be hand-
held, where people find peace and are
happy,” Littee notes. “The camera has to
represent that.”
Littee has solidified Orange as a
dolly-oriented show, and a series shot on
primes. “That’s really important,” says
Wylda Bayrón, who operates A camera
while Spencer Gillis handles B camera.
“We’re not just hosing stuff down,
taking the fastest route. We’re really
trying to go for a more cinematic
approach. It’s not slower, in my opinion;
it sets [the show] up [to have] a very
clear vision. Just by being a prime show,
it helps to have that second to compose
properly and move the camera a few
degrees. Having that extra second to
breathe makes the show better. Even
when we’re on zooms, we still take an
extra minute to get it right.”
Nowadays the show uses hand-
held just 15 percent of the time, in
Littee’s estimate. A handheld camera is
always used inside the prison green-

Top: Inside the
prison dorms,
Tasha “Taystee”
Jefferson (Danielle
Brooks) tries to
silence Suzanne
“Crazy Eyes”
Warren (Uzo
Aduba) while
Cindy Hayes
(Adrienne C.
Moore) looks on.
Middle: The crew
preps a scene with
Brooks and Moore.
Bottom: Two
cameras roll for a
scene featuring
the characters
Chapman and Alex
Vause (Laura
Prepon).
house, and then when the scene

warrants the technique — such as the
brutal fistfight that a sadistic guard
forces upon Suzanne “Crazy Eyes”
Warren (Uzo Aduba) and another
inmate. Steadicam — operated by
Littee — is used for long walk-and-
talks on the grass or running track,
sometimes with the Steadicam traveling
on an electric cart.
Though crane shots are still rela-
tively rare, this season deploys more
than in prior years. Director Phil
Abraham, a fan of moving camera, put a
crane to effective use in several episodes;
when a dorm construction has the
prison garden being ripped up, for
example, the crane swoops down from
an overview to a close-up of a disem-
bodied hand emerging from the dirt —
the telltale remnant of an earlier
episode.
Season four’s biggest change was
a switch in cameras from the Arri Alexa
to the Panasonic VariCam 35, due to
Netflix’s desire to upgrade Orange to 4K
origination. “It took me a whole episode
to really understand the new camera,”
Littee says. “[The VariCam is] so sensi-
tive and the curve is so massive — [it
required] just getting used to not over-

•|• A Dynamic Double-Whammy •|•
I f a shot can be a gut-punch, then

Orange Is the New Black delivers a
double-whammy in the final two
kind of movement. It worked because
there was this peer pressure going on
at all sides. She has to make a decision
guard. “We rarely use shots that are
gratuitous,” says Bayrón. “We always
try to [infuse] some emotion into the
episodes of season four, using an over- in the midst of this chaos.” camera move. You could have just had
head crane shot and a 360-degree The cafeteria skirmish was a static shot of her, but that little push-
Steadicam to powerful effect. Orange’s biggest scene ever, requiring in really adds emotional power.”
Directed by Matt Weiner and 59 principal actors, three cameras and Framing signaled the moment
Adam Bernstein, respectively, episodes a 16-hour Sunday at Kaufman Astoria the tables turn in the power dynamic.
12 and 13 advance a storyline — Studios. After blocking, the crane was Initially, Piscatella is shown from
spoiler alert — that centers on the brought in during lunch, and the final Red’s seated POV, a looming presence
death of inmate Poussey (Samira shot was executed immediately after in the doorway. But after the inmates
Wiley). In episode 12, the denouement “because it was so important,” says climb onto the tables, there’s a wide
begins quietly in the office of kitchen Littee. Getting the desired height shot of the protestors that booms
supervisor Red (Kate Mulgrew). A required some effort. Key grip Dave down behind Piscatella. “The women
guard, Piscatella (Brad William Stern had selected a Scorpio 23' with [occupy] the majority of that frame,
Henke), bursts in, hauls her into the remote Mo-Sys L40 head because of and he’s lower down in the [fore-
cafeteria, and talks tough to the whole the narrow crane base, which could fit ground] corner [with his back to the
room. One inmate has had enough and through doorways. But to go full camera], so it’s not about him — it’s
stands defiantly on a dining table. extension, they had to cut a hole in the about them,” says Bayrón. “They have
Others follow, and all hell breaks loose. 12' ceiling and lighting rig, then steer the power.”
During the melee, Poussey is pinned the camera through that small open- In the following episode, as
down and inadvertently suffocated. ing. Plus, to exploit the checkered floor inmates race down the corridors, the
The scene ends with a graphically pattern, Littee had operator Andy production switched to handheld
bold, ascending overhead shot of Voegeli line up the tiles with the frame camera on a dolly. “[Doing that] added
Poussey and her wailing friend Taystee at the beginning and end of the a dynamism that we wouldn’t have had
(Danielle Brooks) on the floor, encir- camera’s 90-degree pivot. “You really if it had just been handheld, because
cled by a ring of blue uniforms and try to control the graphic shots, we could acquire tremendous speed
jostling inmates. because we live for those moments,” while giving [the shots] that uncer-
During a press conference in notes A-camera operator Wylda tainty,” says Bayrón. Dolly grip Mike
episode 13, the warden calls the guard Bayrón. Morini built a boomable seat for
a “victim” of the system, and Taystee When shooting the melee, “we Bayrón on one of the PeeWees, and
storms through the dorms with the used camera moves very deliberately,” “since it’s red, Mike and I called it the
news. Furious prisoners stream down Bayrón says. “On a scene like that, you ‘hot seat,’” says Stern. Mounted on the
the hallways. At a convergence point, a probably think you’d spray it down Mitchell head of the PeeWee boom
guard loses grip of his gun and it slides handheld, but we kept to our intention arm, it gave Bayrón a high angle on
into the hands of an inmate. As she to make [the shots] on a dolly.” Their the converging waves of angry
decides whether to fire, the Steadicam meticulousness yielded visuals that inmates.
circles as prisoners scream at her from showed the shifting power dynamics The final Steadicam shot, oper-
all sides. This cliffhanger ends season and the unspoken communication ated by Littee, was director Bernstein’s
four. between inmates. “In this show, every concept. “It starts out slow, then keeps
The uniqueness of the two shots character is a planet,” says Bayrón, and wrapping and wrapping,” says the
lends them added power. The crane each had her moment in the cafeteria cinematographer. “His idea was to
shot, effectively a goodbye to Poussey, sequence — like the look of forgive- speed up the shot as the voices get
had “a kind of religious theme, with the ness exchanged by Poussey and her louder in her head. I just went as fast
camera rising,” beckoning her soul to girlfriend, or Taystee spotting as I could go without getting too dizzy.
heaven, Littee opines. As for the Poussey’s lifeless body. The dolly also It was a pretty cool shot to do as an
Steadicam shot, he notes, “I like the enabled subtle, emotionally charged operator.”
Steadicam turnaround because it’s a moves, like the push-in on Crazy Eyes — Patricia Thomson
shot you rarely see in Orange — that (Uzo Aduba) when she spots a sadistic

◗ Behind the Bars
lighting.” The production shot 4K 4:2:2
10-bit AVC format in the VariCam’s
VLog mode to onboard P2 cards, and
moved to 4K 4:4:4 12-bit for green-
screen or visual-effects work.
For season four, Littee didn’t
delve far into creating customized
LUTs, “but I do want to start playing
with that next season,” he says. “I want
to work the curve between the falloff
and the blacks. The falloff is very soft,
and I want to make it steeper. A lot of
that you can do with your lighting and
having more negative fill than you
normally would, but I want to see if the
camera can help me out with that.”
Along with the camera, Littee
changed lenses, moving from Cooke
S4s to Panavision Primos. “First AC
Scott Tinsley and I spend a lot of time
discussing and testing lenses — not to
mention I’ve always wanted to shoot
Primos,” he notes. “The look was quite
consistent [with the Cookes], so it was
an easy transition.” Plus, “the Primos
looked softer on skin tones, especially
African-American skin tones,” he says.
“I felt it was gentler and just a hair
warmer.” The camera package was
supplied by Panavision New York.
The production carries a couple
of Panavision Primo zooms — the 24-
275mm SLZ11 and 19-90mm PCZ
(both T2.8) — but Littee tries to limit
their use. “A lot of directors just want to
snap in from a wide to a close [shot]. I’ve
been fighting that constantly, because
you light a wide very differently than
you do a close-up; I don’t think it’s fair
to the actresses or the crew. We do use
zooms, but mostly for exteriors.”
As in years past, Orange was shot
at New York City’s Kaufman Astoria
Studios, as well as at some of the
remaining operational locations at the
semi-abandoned Rockland Children’s
Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, N.Y.
Standing sets at Kaufman Astoria
provided most of the prison’s interior:
dorms, kitchen, cafeteria, common
room, visitation room and guards’ living
Top: Kitchen supervisor Galina “Red” Reznikov (Kate Mulgrew) meets with a guard inside an
quarters. The psychiatric institute office. Middle: Another angle reveals more of the scene’s lighting. Bottom: The camera is lined
offered additional rooms — including a up over the shoulders of Schilling and Prepon for a scene in the prison cafeteria.
library, hair salon, basement laundry

◗ Behind the Bars
room and guard offices — as well as the
prison exterior, with its basketball court,
gazebo, garden and parking lot. Season
four also utilized a real correctional facil-
ity, the Queens House of Detention,
that has a section open to film produc-
tions; this was a stand-in for the maxi-
mum-security facility down the hill
from Litchfield.
All of the show’s backstories are
shot on practical locations in and around
New York City. For this reason, the
show makes use of Chapman/Leonard
PeeWee dollies, manned by dolly grips
Mike Morini on A camera and Joey
Paolini on B camera. According to key
grip David Stern, “Ludo felt it would be
easier, since we do a lot of small loca-
tions [including a five-floor tenement
walkup]. We do a huge amount of
Top: Brooks and dance-floor work, and it’s just physically
Aduba share easier to get the cameras closer together
another scene in with the smaller dollies. Since both dolly
the dorm. Middle:
Constance Shulman grips are really good, they can handle the
(center) and Blair sometimes-problematic ‘stand-up shots’
Brown prepare for a on the boom of a PeeWee just as well as
scene between
their respective on a bigger studio dolly. Ludovic expects
characters, Yoga a lot out of the camera movement, so we
Jones and Judy basically have two A-camera dolly
King. Bottom: The B
camera gets an grips.”
angle on a prison In addition, Stern continues, “I
guard from over have a ton of different camera-support
Schilling’s shoulder.
tools on the truck. Between key rigging
grip Alan Blagg and I, we have two
small jibs — an 11-foot Aerocrane that
we break out sometimes and a 4-foot
Elemack Mini Jib we call ‘the reacher,’
which we use as a balanced long-camera
offset — as well as vibration isolators,
over-under speed-rail wheels, 6-foot
and 3-foot sliders, standard aluminum
dolly track and precision ‘I-beam’ track
for the rockier terrain, a lazy Susan, a
leveling high hat, a bazooka, a rocker
plate, a Dutch head and a couple tilt
wedges/plates, and a bunch of different
adaptors for rigging cameras wherever
Ludo wants them. We try to make the
camera support as important as the
lighting support.”
A HaloRig handheld stabilizer is
one item that can help create subtle
emotional cues. “The interesting thing
about it,” says Littee, “is that you can

arrange the Halo so you have a static
feel, and then as the scene progresses
into a shakier world, you can slowly start
to move the camera so you’re changing
the emotion within the scene.” This
technique has been used several times in
the prison visitation room, during scenes
when tensions develop between charac-
ters.
Orange is billed by Netflix as a
“comedic drama,” and while it’s not Oz,
it is heavy enough on the drama side for
Littee to avoid generalized sitcom light-
ing. “I approach comedy and drama
relatively the same,” he says. “I try to
push a little more with the darkness,”
favoring a chiaroscuro effect. “I light Telecine &
more through windows, and that allows
me to work a little faster. I like how the
Color Grading
light slowly falls off to give it a natural “Jod is a true artist with
feel. [Gaffer] Bill [Newell] and I like a great passion for his craft.”
when the light becomes part of the – John W. Simmons, ASC
scene but never overtakes it.”
Littee has nine days for each Contact Jod @ 310-713-8388
episode — eight for shooting and one Jod@apt-4.com
for tech scout and prep. “We don’t story-
board anything,” says Bayrón. “Blocking
is very intuitive; it always starts with the
actors.”
Because of the speed television
requires, Littee is a big fan of pre-
rigging. “Bill, Dave and I are always
talking about the next shot — it allows
us more time to tweak,” he says. One
lesson the cinematographer carried
forward from all those years as a 1st
assistant is to think ahead. “Say we’re
laying a long track,” he says. “I’ll pull a
director over and say, ‘Can we walk over
there and talk about the next scene?’
Then I’ll bring my key grip and gaffer
over, so they have a notion of what we’re
doing. And the process moves forward.
That came from being an AC, and
learning to always anticipate the next
shots, so you’re ready. On a lot of shows,
they don’t do that.”
In addition to the expected array
of HMIs and Kino Flos, Littee’s light-
ing package includes a number of items
that facilitate speedy setups. Barger
Lites — both the 6-Lite and 3-Lite
— are his go-to for soft sidelight, typi-
cally coupled with a Chimera and 8'x8'
◗ Behind the Bars
One instance was the backstory
of Blanca Flores (Laura Gómez), the
curt, unibrowed inmate who had a
surprising prior life as a caretaker for an
elderly woman. “There’s a scene with
Blanca in the shower, and I wanted to
add this feeling of bars somehow,”
Littee explains. “I had the opportunity
to do that with reflections of the
window on the shower door, which
created a bar-like pattern. When I find
those moments, it makes me happy.”
Orange’s postproduction takes
place in L.A., with color timing
performed via FilmLight’s Baselight at
Encore Hollywood for a 4K IMF final
Cast and crew prepare to shoot an exterior prison-yard scene. delivery. Littee communicates with
senior colorist Tony Smith by phone
or 12'x12' diffusion in the more spacious happen to be Littee’s most difficult set, after sending stills — but just a handful.
settings. Applying 8'x8' and 12'x12' egg as it’s cramped both inside and out. “If you send too many, they tend not to
crates to make diffusion more directional None of the exterior dorm walls come go through them because it becomes
has been another time-saver. “It creates down, and on one side of the room the overwhelming,” the cinematographer
less flagging,” Littee says. “When you windows are fairly large, while those notes. “They’re coloring many shows;
add flags, you add time.” Newell also opposite are narrow and small. “The it’s not like you’re the only one, so time
employs LiteGear LiteMat LED units biggest challenge is that we don’t have a is a constraint there as well.”
for convenient fill. “The fact that you can whole lot of room outside the set,” says All 13 episodes of season four
put them close to walls, dim them and Littee. “There’s 15 feet before I hit the were released on Netflix on June 17. In
change the color temperature allows you backdrop — sometimes less. Bill and I February, the streaming service
to move pretty fast,” the cinematogra- are constantly fighting for space.” announced it would be renewing
pher notes. Littee often places 5Ks outside Orange Is the New Black for three more
In the prison setting, Littee has no the dorm windows. “Inside, I try to seasons. Littee is already at work on
fear of toplight — typically tungsten- match Image 85s with massive rags, just season five, which began shooting in
balanced units with a touch of blue gel, a to help fill,” he explains. “Then I come June. He still marvels that this opportu-
continuation of season one’s lighting in with smaller lights, either the nity came along when it did. “Did I
— nor of the sun. Outside, he says, “I LiteMat or small Kinos, that will go think I’d be director of photography on
control the light with a bit of diffusion through another frame. I also like to a show like Orange at the time I was
and maybe some negative [fill], but for bring some Kinos up above; if two char- offered the job? No, that wasn’t even on
the most part I let it go. We are shooting acters are talking, I want to feel the light my radar. I thought I’d have another five
a prison show, and there’s a harshness to right above them, to give them a three- to eight years as camera operator and
it.” And in the scenes that revolve quarterish feel. I like to keep that harsh- shooting my little shorts. Then this
around inmates breaking ground for the ness alive from overhead in the prison.” came along, and it was very difficult to
dorm construction, Littee explains, “the Shooting for six months in those say no — but it took some courage to
sun becomes a player in the dilemma rooms over the course of a season, Littee say yes.” ●
they’re dealing with, working outside. relishes his time outside the prison as
You have to embrace that. A lot of times, much as any inmate would. On the
too, I’ll toplight them. My gaffer looks at various backstory locations, the color
me like I’m crazy, but it’s good! It doesn’t palette expands beyond beige walls and TECHNICAL SPECS
have to be all pretty. Let’s live through beige uniforms — the entire spectrum
these characters and what they’re experi- available, offering Littee the ability to 1.78:1
encing.” create special flourishes. “When I shoot
A large part of Orange involves the backstories, I always try to do a fore- Digital Capture
two given characters engaged in conver- shadowing of prison life,” he says, both Panasonic VariCam 35
sation, and many of these tête-à-têtes to enhance the story and as a personal
occur in the prison dorms — which challenge. Panavision Primo

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DJI Expands Fleet Arri Acquires Artemis Range

DJI has introduced a number of products to enable Arri has taken over the Artemis range of camera
moviemakers to capture innovative imagery: the Phantom 4 flying stabilizers from Sachtler, a Vitec Group company. Arri is
camera, the M600 platform, the Ronin-MX gimbal system and the now the sole global sales and service provider for all
A3 series of flight controllers. Artemis products, which includes stabilizers, vests,
Able to avoid obstacles and automatically track a subject, the spring arms and other accessories.
Phantom 4 can record 4K Arri has also demonstrated an
video at 30 fps and 1080p improved version of the Artemis Trinity
video at 120 fps. Featuring system, which consists of a compact and
a redesigned eight- lightweight two-axis gimbal head, a moni-
element aspherical lens, tor mount and joystick that attach to the
the system can also gimbal handle, a battery-hanger module, and a pendu-
capture 12-megapixel and lum that allows perfect drop-down moves. Trinity
Adobe DNG raw-compati- combines well-established mechanical camera stabiliza-
ble stills for a professional tion with modern, 32-bit ARM-based gimbal tech-
look. Expanded battery capacity and improved efficiencies through- nology, enabling fluid, wide-ranging and precisely
out the Phantom 4 bring flight-time capability up to 28 minutes. controlled movements. The modular design permits customized
The M600 builds on the adaptability of DJI’s M100 while solutions and simple integration into existing workflows.
increasing the maximum payload to 13 pounds. It is designed to fly While Trinity works especially well in a compact configuration
the Ronin-MX gimbal and is compatible with all of DJI’s Zenmuse with the Alexa Mini, its 30kg (66-pound) maximum payload and
gimbals and cameras. When combined with the Ronin-MX, this height adjustability mean that larger cameras and heavy lenses can
carrying capacity allows a wide range of cameras to be flown. The also be supported; film cameras such as the Arriflex 235 and 416
M600 is capable of flight times of up to 36 minutes when carrying are easily accommodated. Additional stabilization in the roll axis of
a Zenmuse X5 and up to 16 minutes with a Red Epic. the Trinity head permits the use of telephoto lenses, and the joystick-
DJI’s Ronin-MX brings the stability of the Ronin series into the controlled, fully-stabilized tilt axis allows low-angle or over-the-
sky. It easily mounts onto the M600 and is shoulder shots, as well as smooth, in-shot transitions between low
ready to capture aerial images in minutes. mode and high mode.
It supports a continuous 360-degree pan Curt O. Schaller (pictured with the Trinity system) developed
rotation through a slip ring, meaning it Trinity and, with Dr. Roman Foltyn of Foma Systems, invented the
does not need to be centered in between Maxima gimbal that functions as the head of the system. Schaller
shots and is always ready to shoot. has joined Arri as product manager, camera stabilizer systems. His
Whether used on the ground or in the air, long-term colleague Jörg Pitzing is also moving to Arri and will over-
it can carry a huge selection of cameras, see service support for the product range. Arri has taken over sales
from Micro Four Thirds up to systems of the Maxima as a stand-alone gimbal, along with all other system
such as the Red Epic. The Ronin-MX is components.
actively stabilized for a smoother shot, Like Arri cameras, Artemis products are made in Munich,
and it is the first DJI gimbal able to Germany, to exacting standards of precision, build quality and relia-
communicate directly with the A3 flight bility.
controller and an optional GPS. For additional information, visit www.arri.com.
The A3 series of flight controllers provides reliability and
customization. When equipped with DJI’s D-RTK GNSS system, Mo-Sys Enhances StarTracker, ViaRail
aircraft positioning is enhanced to centimeter accuracy and Mo-Sys Engineering has introduced a handheld version of its
magnetic interference is eliminated. A3 controllers are also upgrad- StarTracker camera-tracking system. The versatile StarTracker studio
able to A3 Pro for triple modular redundancy and increased reliabil- camera-tracking system uses a single optical sensor per camera, and
ity. Using the new Ground Station, up to five aircraft can be retro-reflective stickers — or “stars” — on the studio ceiling, making
controlled at a time, and a new Route Planning system automates it an inexpensive and robust system already used by the likes of ESPN
complex flights. and the BBC. The system is now available for handheld cameras as
For additional information, visit www.dji.com. well as pedestals, jibs and cranes, addressing the growing demand

The ViaRail is available as a floor-
based or ceiling-hung rail system. It offers
optional VR data output, a dual-joystick
console for camera control, and a ShotBox
touch screen for preprogrammed camera
positions. The hanging ViaRail system incor-
porates a scissor-lift that lets the camera
drop from ceiling height to eye level; a gyro
camera leveler compensates for the
centrifugal force of the hanging camera as
it travels along a curve. The unique rubber- table in the White House situation room for
capped rail provides a single continuous HBO’s The Brink,” Muro offers. “It can,
running surface, reduces noise and removes obviously, fit in a much tighter space than a
joint ripple. conventional dolly. It simply makes for an
for all-in-one systems that enable virtual For additional information, visit intuitive operating experience, where there
sets, augmented 3D graphics and previsual- www.mo-sys.com. is not a lot of discussion, not a lot of laying
ization. track, not a lot of big equipment. With the
In a studio environment, StarTracker Dutti Dolly, I can be in and out of the loca-
places no restrictions on where the camera tion quickly and still have a massive amount
can go and what it can do, since it does not of production value.
interfere with the set or lighting. The “On the television series Southland,
camera can do 360-degree pans and move we were always trying to have smaller,
anywhere in the studio as long as enough simple solutions to get the camera crew in
stars remain in sight of the tracking camera. and out of the locations within two to three
For outside broadcasting, StarTracker offers hours,” Muro adds. “A couple of 12-foot
an ad-hoc solution for Steadicam systems planks, the Dutti Dolly and various-sized
with a net fixed with ready-mounted stars sliders [were] pretty much all we needed.
or a “star carpet” that can be rolled out on The dolly ended up being the staple of the
location. camera movement on that show.”
With no drift of tracking data and no Joaquin Sedillo, ASC has also used
recalibration required, StarTracker is Matthews Rolls Out Dutti Dolly the Dutti Dolly. “While shooting Glee
immune to light sources from above, as it Matthews Studio Equipment has sequences on stage at [the] McKinley High
uses blue or infrared LEDs. The system is joined forces with dolly grip James Saldutti Auditorium set, rather than taking time to
also compatible with all popular render to produce Saldutti’s Dutti Dolly at the remove one or several rows of auditorium
engines. company’s Burbank facility. “James has seats, I simply used James Saldutti’s setup,”
Mo-Sys has also extended the managed to pack a whole lot of punch in a he says. “We could easily throw down a 16-
ViaRail product range — a family of broad- small, light, stable and efficient dolly,” says foot plank, a couple of ‘A-frame’ lengths of
cast traveling-rail systems — with the intro- Robert Kulesh, VP of sales and marketing simple track, and his lightweight but solid
duction of the ViaRail dolly with a column for MSE. “It can get into extreme low Dutti Dolly on the armrests of the seats, and
that allows vertical camera movements. The angles or can carry a bazooka or tripod for we could pull off a tracking shot in record
rails can be customized and built to any other heights. The stability gives the opera- time.
length, exploring the whole studio tor the ability to whip pan and quick tilt. It “The same thing with low-angle
from one end to the other, and rolls directly on the ground or can be shots on the edge of our auditorium
allowing for curves with a mounted on stands or track, and can be stage,” Sedillo continues. “It saved us valu-
minimum radius of 4m. over- or under-slung. It can fit in places able time in a frequent scenario where,
where conventional dollies cannot fit — rather than hoisting one or more of our
airplane or bus aisles, or even church pews. regular dollies from the stage pit
Dutti Dolly is great for long takes, stunts, onto the stage with chain
poor-man’s process and more.” motors, we’d throw
Saldutti devised the dolly while down Dutti’s light-
working with cinematographer James M. weight track
Muro. “The dollies out there rest too high and dolly. It
on track,” Saldutti opines. “To make shots [provided] a
work for James, I had to get lower.” huge time
“I’ll put the Dutti Dolly on top of the savings plus

great ease of execution.” and the motor’s cable is 27" with a Lemo
Matthews has also introduced the seven-pin connector.
Wedge — a simple, lightweight, three-point Chrosziel products are manufactured
triangular stand that is portable and easily in Germany and distributed in the United
configurable — and the Cam Tank — a low- States by Schneider Optics. For more infor-
angle support that preserves the operator’s mation, visit www.schneideroptics.com.
ability to pan and tilt the camera. With the
Wedge, users can simply attach the camera
to the stable mount and then have the abil- Chrosziel Supports Sony FS5
ity to capture low-angle, rock-steady shots. Chrosziel GmbH has introduced a
The Cam Tank also enables Dutch angles or purpose-built shoulder-mount solution for
straight-down shots when mounted to a Sony PXW-FS5 cameras. The Light Weight
fluid head or jib. Support (LWS) 401-FS5 provides optimum
For additional information, visit balance when the camera is handheld.
www.msegrip.com. The new baseplate features a slim
design with a sturdy and ergonomic shoul-
Panther Expands Track Options der pad that simply slides into a comfort-
Panther GmbH has updated the able location for optimal balance on the
design of its Precision Mono Tracks and shoulder. The system offers two 205mm-
introduced Variable Starter Tracks. long 15mm rods, with a threaded insert for
Available in lengths from 1.5' to 18', extension rods. The integrated Hirth Redrock Micro Unveils Eclipse
the updated Precision Mono Tracks boast a rosettes provide mounting points for acces- Redrock Micro has unveiled the
highly stable, sories such as Chrosziel Leather Handgrips. Eclipse equipment series, which is designed
aluminum An integrated V-mount reliably affixes the to enable small crews and solo operators to
“triangle profile” camera to most quick-lock plates. The LWS get shots that often require a larger foot-
that in turn enables mounts to the camera base at several print.
compact transport. The points for secure positioning; it can be The Eclipse range includes: the Halo
system can be used with combined with the Chrosziel 19mm Solo, which automatically keeps the subject
or without “sleepers” — DigiCine Bridgeplate 401-F235 to provide in focus while maintaining creative focus
aka spreaders — and support for large zoom lenses. control; the Orbit monitor-positioning
Panther offers various system, which automatically positions the
spreader options. The track is monitor to face the operator in real time, so
also compatible with Panther’s the operator can comfortably frame shots at
Precision Leveling Track, telescopic tubes any angle, especially when using gimbal
and Variable Starter Track; an integrated stabilizers; Atlas Motors, which offer preci-
lock mechanism ensures the smooth transi- sion control of focus, iris and zoom with a
tion between the tracks. system compact enough to keep on the
Panther’s Variable Starter Tracks are camera at all times; and the Navigator 7-in-1
designed to help users easily roll a dolly up Command Module, which offers one-hand
onto the main track. The lightweight, robust Chrosziel has also introduced the control of the gimbal, camera, lens and more
system offers an adjustable angle for a maxi- Chrosziel Digital Motor CDM-100. Engi- without ever needing to set down the rig.
mum height of 30cm. Variable Starter Tracks neered for focus and iris control on cine Eclipse products are the first to fully
are available for all Panther tracks, including primes, DSLRs or ENG lenses, the motor is incorporate s.bus for use in aerial cine-
Precision Steel Track, Precision Vario Track extremely small and lightweight, and is
and Precision Leveling Track. ideal for use with a gimbal, drone, stabilizer
For additional information, visit or any other application where weight is an
www.panther.tv. issue. With the small gear, the motor
weighs only 4 ounces.
The CDM-100 is compatible with
Chrosziel Magnum and Aladin MK II
controllers, as well as other lens-control
systems. The digital motor comes with
40mm and 60mm gears, and a universal
rod clamp with captive slider for 15mm and
19mm rods. Maximum voltage is 24 volts,

matography. Operators can make on-the-fly 30mm (1.18") from the ground, the system
adjustments to camera and lens settings features a low-profile track design while
without landing the drone, with minimal providing stable movement at the highest
added weight, and with the full range of level; the low profile of the Hexagon system
their RC transmitter. also minimizes the risk of tripping.
All Eclipse products work on Featuring four traction wheels with
EclipseNet, a network of technologies and dual synchronized motors, the Hexagon
communications. Products connect and system boasts high-traction operation with
communicate to each other to share virtually no slipping. It also provides an
resources such as power, show real-time optional positioning belt for AR and VR.
status and alerts, and have configurable The track position can be accurately
controls rather than hard-coded buttons. Bar Builds Mark 3 Stabilizer measured and sent to a graphics engine
EclipseNet supports and translates between Camera operator and equipment so that the system can be used in an
important protocols including Wi-Fi, RF, developer Nir Bar has introduced the Mark 3 augmented/virtual-reality environment.
Bluetooth, s.bus, PWM/PPM and CAN. NB Stabilizer. In designing the system, Bar The Vinten Hexagon Track System
For additional information, visit explains, “I wanted it to be lightweight, powered by Tecnopoint enables flexible
www.redrockmicro.com. simple, modular, with [a] tough structure. It configurations, including straight or curved
needed to contain minimum components, track shape, up to two dollies on one track
to be comfortable, silent, accurate, smooth with collision avoidance, as well as the
and, finally, to be able to fold into one box.” option for either high-speed/low payload or
With a 3.1kg arm that is powered by low-speed/high payload options.
rubber bands, the NB Stabilizer can carry
any camera from a DSLR up to an Alexa.
Featuring minimal components, the Stabi-
lizer is smooth and silent across its boom
range.
“The sled was also built to be tough
and simple, with [minimal] components,”
Bar adds. Featuring ample outputs to power
accessories, Bar notes that the sled is
“super-modular, can easily be assembled
and disassembled, [and operators can]
change and add components in no time.”
For additional information, visit
www.nbstabilizer.com. Vinten now offers a complete solu-
tion including x-y and elevation-only
Cinema Devices Enables Vinten Moves With pedestals, track solutions, and head-only
Antigravity Hexagon Track systems, which can all be operated by the
Motion-picture startup Cinema Vinten, a Vitec Videocom brand, has same control system. This enables current
Devices has introduced the Antigravity Rig, a unveiled the Hexagon Track System. The users of the Vinten Control System to inte-
body-mounted suspension system for system brings together two leaders in grate the Hexagon System as an alternative
camera gimbals. The patent-pending system production equipment by fully integrating to robotic pedestals or cranes.
alleviates operator fatigue during extended the Vinten Control System (VRC) with dolly- For additional information, visit
shots while holding heavy gimbal stabiliza- systems manufacturer Tecnopoint for an www.vinten.com. ●
tion systems. advanced robotic dolly system on tracks.
The Antigravity Rig allows a floor-to- The Vinten Hexagon system features
ceiling boom range without counterweights fast setup and easy assembly with no cables
and is buoyant — providing a weightless outside of the track, making it perfect for
feel — throughout the entire range, with both high-end news studios and outside
complete motion isolation and elimination broadcast rental setups, such as concerts
of footsteps. It is easily configurable to a and sporting events. The Hexagon Dolly’s
narrow footprint in order to pass through motorized column and robotic head natively
doorways or for large boom shots. interface with the Vinten control protocol
For additional information, visit and can be fully managed from the Vinten
www.cinemadevices.com. Control System. With a height of only

International Marketplace

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All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set TJ’s Grip Design, Inc. HOLLYWOOD STUDIO ANTIQUES
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First word of ad and advertiser’s name can be set Grip Rigging Accessories www.CinemaAntiques.com
in capitals without extra charge. No agency 5/8" fittings Mini Ball heads BUY-SELL-TRADE
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Advertiser’s Index
Adorama 11, 25 Deck of Aces 85 P+S Technik Feinmechanik
Alan Gordon Enterprises 84 Digital Sputnik Lighting Gmbh 85
Arri 7, 23 Systems 29 Panavision, Inc. C3
ASC Film Manual 56 Duclos Lenses 65 Panther Gmbh 57
ASC Master Class 42 Eastman Kodak C4 Pille Filmgeraeteverleih
B&H Photo-Video-Pro Audio Gmbh 84
Filmotechnic 55 Powermills 84
19 F.J. Westcott 67
Backstage Equipment, Inc. Pro8mm 84
Fluotec 77
65 Scheimpflug Rentals 41
Blackmagic Design 5 Group TVA/Mels Studio and Schneider Optics 2
BZ Media 79 Post 15 Selected Tables 86
Camberwell Studios Ltd. 85 Hawk 51 Super16, Inc. 85
Carl Zeiss, SBE, LLC 21 Hexolux/Visionsmith 85 Teradek, LLC C2-1
Cavision Enterprises 84 IBC 27 Vantage Gmbh 51
Chapman/Leonard InterDrone 79
Studio Equip. 13 Willy’s Widgets 84
Cinebags, Inc. 85 Jod Soraci 77 www.theasc.com 8, 69
Cinematography Kino Flo 43
Electronics 65
Lights! Action! Co. 84
Cinekinetic 84
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86
Clubhouse News
From left: Peter Suschitzky, ASC (third from left) accepts the ExcelLens Award from Viggo Mortensen; John Seale, ASC, ACS (right) receives the Gold Milli
Award from ACS President Ron Johanson; ASC members speak during J.L. Fisher's open house.
Suschitzky Receives say I’m proud and delighted would be an Burbank headquarters. An array of
Suschitzky photo by Pauline Maillet, courtesy of Thales Angenieux. Seale photo courtesy of the ACS. J.L. Fisher photo by Kelly Brinker.
Angenieux Award understatement. I would like to thank vendors, manufacturers and other indus-
Peter Suschitzky, ASC was director George Miller, for his spirit of try organizations exhibited in Fisher’s
presented with the Pierre Angenieux collaboration; the wonderful crew; the parking lot during the daylong event,
ExcelLens in Cinematography Award at VFX team; and the incredible David Burr, which was once again co-presented by
the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. On behalf ACS, who was responsible for so many of the ASC, the International Cinematogra-
of Thales Angenieux President and CEO the amazing action scenes on Mad Max: phers Guild and the Society of Camera
Pierre Andurand, actor Viggo Mortensen Fury Road.” Operators.
presented Suschitzky with the award, an This is the third time Seale has won The day concluded with a
Optimo 28-76mm zoom engraved with the Gold Milli; the first was for Goodbye “Dialogue with ASC Cinematographers”
the cinematographer’s name. Also partic- Paradise in 1983 and the second for panel. ASC associate Frank Kay — J.L.
ipating in the ceremony were a number Witness in 1985. Seale also received a Fisher’s marketing director — introduced
of Suschitzky’s collaborators, including Ron Windon ACS Contribution Award the session, which was moderated by Bill
director Matteo Garrone and actors Alba during the ceremony, which was held for Bennett, ASC. Joining Bennett were
Photo of Clubhouse by Isidore Mankofsky, ASC; lighting by Donald M. Morgan, ASC.
Rohrwacher, Juliette Binoche and Valeria the first time in South Australia’s Adelaide Society members Dean Cundey,
Golino. Convention Centre. Michael Goi, Denis Lenoir, Isidore
In conjunction with the tribute, Mankofsky, Donald A. Morgan,
Thales Angenieux sponsored a “Meeting Cundey Participates in David Stump, Kees van Oostrum and
with Suschitzky,” which was moderated PhotoCon Lisa Wiegand.
by AC’s senior European correspondent, Dean Cundey, ASC recently
Benjamin B. participated in a discussion titled “The Knapp Joins Pro-Tek
Making of Jurassic Park: The Virtual Associate member Tim Knapp
ACS Salutes Seale Effects & Its Impact on Today’s Sci-Fi recently joined Pro-Tek Vaults as vice pres-
John Seale ASC, ACS was Adventure Genre.” The hour-long session ident, client engagement. Having earlier
awarded the Gold Milli for Australian was part of the schedule of events for worked for Kodak and Technicolor,
Cinematographer of the Year at the PhotoCon L.A. 2016. Presented by Samy’s Knapp came to Pro-Tek from motion-
2016 Fujinon Fujifilm Australian Cine- Camera and held at the Magic Box at the picture-archiving company Reflex Tech-
matographers Society (ACS) National Reef in downtown Los Angeles, Photo- nologies, where he served as president.
Awards. Seale also won the Gold Tripod Con L.A. was a two-day photo and Launched by Eastman Kodak Co.
Award for Features in Cinema for his cinema consumer trade show for enthu- in 1993, Pro-Tek Vaults was acquired by
work on Mad Max: Fury Road (AC June siasts and professionals alike. LAC Group in 2013. With facilities in
’15), which previously earned him Oscar Burbank and Thousand Oaks, Calif., Pro-
and ASC Award nominations. ASC Members Speak at J.L. Tek offers archiving, inspection, preserva-
“It is an honor and a privilege to Fisher Open House tion and storage services for an array of
be recognized by your peers in this way,” J.L. Fisher recently hosted its 10th clients, including studios, corporations,
Seale said after receiving the honors. “To annual open house and barbecue at its universities and private collectors. ●

Close-up Shane Hurlbut, ASC
When you were a child, what film made the strongest it was going, and three days later I got a call from Rob’s office
impression on you? requesting an interview. A week after that, I started my first narra-
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, because of the light, the mystery tive film with Rob, The Rat Pack. I will be forever grateful to him for
and the aliens. Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, HSC was such an inspiration believing in me and giving me a chance to prove myself in the
for me. narrative world.
Which cinematographers, past or present, do you What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?
most admire? Each feature project is satisfying in its own way, but if I had to
Gregg Toland, ASC, for his use of contrast and composition. Roger choose just one, it would be Act of Valor. That experience was
Deakins, ASC, BSC, for his seamless, effortless unlike anything I had ever done before. Under
and stunning visuals. Robert Richardson, ASC, for the leadership of directors Scott Waugh and
his ballsy exposures and mixing formats. Mike McCoy, we made the movie with a core of
Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC, for his extraordi- about 10 storytellers, and the teamwork neces-
nary talent to immerse you as a viewer. sary to pull it off was inspirational.
What sparked your interest in Have you made any memorable blunders?
photography? My first day as a gaffer, I had set my meter to
I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York 100 ASA and we were shooting 500 ASA film.
with very little money, but my parents always I will never forget coming up to the cinematog-
made it a priority to take a long family vacation rapher and telling him that we had to reshoot all
during the summer, and they loved to take the footage. Of course, the agency decided to
pictures to document our adventures. I would use the footage we exposed incorrectly.
shoot Super 8mm movies on these epic train
trips. By 14 years old, I was making my own What is the best professional advice you’ve
experimental movies and processing them in the bathtub. ever received?
Never feel comfortable, always challenge yourself and never stop
Where did you train and/or study? dreaming.
I graduated from Emerson College in Boston with a bachelor’s degree
in film. What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you?
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, by Timothy Egan; and The
Who were your early teachers or mentors? Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game, both by Carlos Ruiz
First and foremost, my wife, Lydia, has been a leadership mentor to Zafón.
me. As a filmmaker, I had three mentors while training to become a
cinematographer. The first was Daniel Pearl, ASC, who took me If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing
under his wing as his key grip. Kevin Kerslake is a director-cameraman instead?
whom I studied under for six years; he encouraged me to experiment I would be a chef. My hobby is to cook. It’s a passion of mine to
and take things over the edge if it’s best for the story, and he showed create new recipes and share them with our family and friends.
me that failure is essential for the creative process. Herb Ritts taught
me how to light a face, how to make an actor comfortable, and how Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for
to deliver beauty with a unique look and feel. membership?
Fred Murphy, Dave Stump and Michael Goi. Francis Kenny helped
What are some of your key artistic influences? me so much throughout the process as well, in addition to Bob
I love to go to museums, study architecture, and view paintings and Primes, who was influential in my acceptance.
Photo by Dana Phillip Ross.
still photography. The artists who have really influenced me are

Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, Todd Hido, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?
Gregory Crewdson, among others. It has really pushed me as an artist — it’s the gold standard. It is an
amazing community to reach out to for advice and referrals,
How did you get your first break in the business? personally as well as professionally. It has given me the ability to
I was on a Donna Summer music video for the movie Daylight, understand how important it is to share and to educate future
directed by Rob Cohen. His team came down to the set to see how storytellers. ●

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J U LY 2 0 1 6

An International Publication of the ASC

44 The Aliens Strike Back

70 Behind the Bars

An International Publication of the ASC

BEYOND THE FRAME

Visit us online at www.theasc.com

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF and PUBLISHER

Unit photography by Sam Zhang, courtesy of the filmmakers.

12 July 2016 American Cinematographer

14 July 2016 American Cinematographer

the excess muslin past the light, so it doubled

16 July 2016 American Cinematographer

The Shallows photos by Vince Valitutti, courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

18 July 2016 American Cinematographer

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tion shots were lit if the weather necessi-

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origination, making The Neon Demon

decision from the beginning, choosing

www.theasc.com July 2016 31

including its lens inventory, so Braier

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www.theasc.com July 2016 33

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www.theasc.com July 2016 35

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anything with RGB capabilities in a 2-

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angle for Elle’s reflection, Refn actually

40 July 2016 American Cinematographer

tracks backwards, away from Jesse. directional [800-watt Jo-Leko HMI

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The original film (shot by Karl

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www.theasc.com July 2016 49

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cinematographer explains. “This makes

54 July 2016 American Cinematographer

Lanford addresses humankind.

58 July 2016 American Cinematographer

maverick magicians dubbed the “Four

tioning team who use their unique skills

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60 July 2016 American Cinematographer

Top: The magicians

When it came to designing visu-

62 July 2016 American Cinematographer

about different ways to light them, and

www.theasc.com July 2016 63

Top: Lula hits the

priceless encrypted data, from an ultra-

64 July 2016 American Cinematographer