American Cinematographer - February 2009 - (Page 43)

Left: A 20'x20' section of floor was constructed for The Spirit’s lair beneath Wildwood Cemetery, and the shadow from the overhead window frame was achieved practically using a 20K Fresnel and a massive frame with adjustable slats. Below: While most of the film was shot against greenscreen, certain scenes — such as those set inside Sand Saref’s (Eva Mendes) hotel room — were shot against black. guy, and he’s very careful about making sure both eyes are lit. We used the Kino Flo BarFly quite a bit; it’s a small fixture with a lot of punch that works as a really nice eyelight.” Pope took his “glamour work” even further in the digital grade, which he describes as “a bodacious, stylistic leap into the Miller and Eisner world. They romanticize women to a major degree, so we decided to go with the MGM-circa-1934 look — the women are diffused and everything else is sharp. People will either hate us or laugh with us.” Stage Plays “With digital technology, I feel we can recapture what filmmakers like Orson Welles and Fritz Lang did — we can create very stark work that is not based on the way things really look,” says Miller. “Instead, it’s based on what’s inside the director’s and animators’ heads.” As was done on Sin City and 300 (AC April ’07), two recent adaptations of his comic-book work, Miller decided to craft The Spirit’s look by shooting largely against greenscreen and creating environments in post. The Spirit’s green world spilled across stages 7 and 8 at Albuquerque Studios, with the largest of the greenscreens running the length of a stage and reaching up some 40' toward the perms. To light the screens, Sandau’s crew set up top and bottom rows of Kino Flo Image 80s, plus a row of Kino Flo ParaBeam 400s and 200s to fill in a green “cove” that obscured the bottom row of Image 80s from the camera’s view. “I think we ultimately ended up with about 260 fix- tures,” says the gaffer. All the Kino Flos illuminating the greenscreen were fitted with green tubes and run through a dimmer board. Sandau explains, “At times we would just need two tubes on each fixture to get a correct level on the green, but when we did off-speed stuff, we could bring up eight tubes top and bottom to get a higher level of exposure.” “It’s almost like a stage play, where you do weeks of rehearsal American Cinematographer 43

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2009

American Cinematographer - February 2009 Contents Editor's Note Short Takes: Circus Production Slate: The International Reverte 2 Worlds in 3 Dimensions Dead Reckoning Embracing Anamorphic Citizen of the World Post Focus: Restoring Manhatta New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Peter Suschitzky

American Cinematographer - February 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.