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1982. Once again, face-replacement was employed to capture Bridges’ facial movements and map them onto a body double. “The CLU character could only exist post- Benjamin Button ,” says Kosinski. “With other digital creatures, you can get away with a lot, but with a digital human being, 99 percent isn’t good enough. It’s a gut reaction when something’s not right in a shot of a digital human — it could be an eyeline, a lighting match or lip sync. The actors all understood we were pushing the envelope with this process.” CLU 2.0 keeps his command center on the bridge of the Rectifier, a huge, floating battle cruiser. The bridge set incorporated extensive practical LEDs covered with orange-tinted film and milk Plexiglas over which heads-up display graphics were placed in post. “We placed a big soft box with Image 80s overhead and had LED ribbons in the floors and walls,” Miranda details. “There were literally miles of LED lighting strung all over the place. We also installed 4-foot and 2-foot single Kinos in the walls, and we had sheens of light everywhere.” After he receives his “digital duds,” Sam is taken to the Disc Arena, where he is forced into a deadly game in which players fling light discs at one another. Being hit by a disc is fatal. In anticipation of the sequence’s extensive visual effects, the Disc Arena footage was shot almost entirely against bluescreen, which Miranda lit with overhead soft boxes fitted with Image 80s with KF55 tubes. During AC’s set visit, Miranda deployed the 3-D-linked Phantom HD camera rig to capture shots of martial artist Anis Cheurfa as Rinzler, CLU’s main enforcer. Miranda and Kosinski asked for a few extra takes to enable Cheurfa, hurtling through the air on a wire harness, to time his flying kick perfectly into the Phantom’s Lexan-protected lenses. Gilford explains the various lighting setups: “Depending on the shot requirements, we used different floor surfaces to get the interactions right. At certain angles, we’d use mirrored floors to see the

The set for Kevin’s safehouse recalls the “alien zoo” from 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a low ceiling and a glass floor lit from underneath with Kino Flo Image 80s controlled by a GrandMA dimmer board.

complete reflections of the actors, which would later be mapped onto the virtual set extensions. If the angle got too high, we’d switch to pure glass floors for more muted reflectivity.” Once he survives the games in the Disc Arena, Sam meets Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who takes him to a safe house, where, at last, he meets his father. The minimalist abode is reminiscent of the “alien zoo” from the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Davidson recalls, “Most of the other sets were built with high ceilings, but the safe house had a low ceiling, along with a floor consisting entirely of 6-by-6-foot glass panels. We used Image 80s to light each panel from
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below.” Each Image 80 was individually connected to a GrandMA dimmer board, which enabled Miranda to create geometric chase patterns for various effects. “Once the floor panels were going, the safe house didn’t need much augmentation,” says Miranda. “We shot one of my favorite scenes in there, when Sam speaks with Quorra and their suits are actually lighting and interacting with each other.” Sam and Kevin unite to escape the Grid and return to the real world, a journey that leads them to the End of Line nightclub,which was still under construction when AC visited the production. Eschewing the trend of
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American Cinematographer - January 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2011