American Cinematographer - February 2009 - (Page 49)

treads pop in select scenes. Sandau used the UV-and-fluorescent trick on Sin City. “Altman, a theatrical-lighting company, makes a couple of UV fixtures that have nice projection, but they burn an HMI-type globe and don’t have a flicker-free mode, so when we did high-speed, we put 4-foot UV tubes into standard Kino Flo four-bank fixtures. The second unit used the Kinos almost exclusively.” (Bob Finley, a longtime collaborator of Pope’s, was the 2nd-unit director of photography.) The filmmakers did not create CG actors and shot all stunts incamera. According to Pope, there was also a hard-and-fast rule for physical elements shot onstage: “If somebody touches it, it’s got to be real. That’s something Stu learned on Sin City, and it was something I really wanted. “We had a movable swamp on rollers with grass all over it, and we rolled it from stage to stage,” he continues. The set piece makes an important appearance when Dolan meets The Spirit on Central City’s outskirts. A corpse lies in the grass, visible behind the two characters, whose conversation grows in volume as tempers flare. The scene is “basically lit with one light,” says Pope. “The cops have pulled up and turned on their headlights [simulated with Mole-Richardson Single Pars]. I told the actors, ‘Here’s your light. When you turn your face away, it looks like you’re brooding, and when you turn toward the light, it looks like you’re opening up.’ I look at that scene now and think it’s the best scene in the movie, and it’s because the actors ran with it. There was nothing there, just that little patch of grass in the distance with a body on it. But Dan and Gabriel made it very special.” A handful of scenes incorporated black or white backdrops. “Well-planned rotoscoping is sometimes more efficient than less-than- perfect greenscreen, and greenscreens are always less than perfect,” says Maschwitz. “Diaphanous material — which appears in a lot of Eva’s wardrobe — gets exponentially more complicated when you’re trying to extract it from 12 different shades of green. So occasionally, we shot on black — sometimes black-for-black, sometimes black to replace later.” After waking from the dead, The Spirit makes his home in Wildwood Cemetery, and Pope recalls shooting inside the hero’s lair with almost no greenscreen. “We had a 20-by-20-foot floor because we wanted that texture, and we hung black drapes all around,” he says. As The Spirit crosses the floor, he walks through a shadow cast by a window frame far overhead. To achieve the effect practically, Sandau’s crew “hung a 20K with a Fresnel lens in it almost to the perms, and then we had a cookie as close to the actor as we could get it,” says the gaffer. “The frame was probably 30-by-20 and hung by chain motors from the ceiling. We could move these big pieces of wood around and adjust the angle of the slats running through it.” Another example of a practical solution employed onstage involves the lead-in to a flashback that unravels the history between Denny Colt and Sand Saref. As The Spirit walks along the waterfront, a A series of flashbacks reveal the history between Denny Colt (a.k.a. The Spirit, played in his youth by Johnny Simmons) and Sand Saref (played here by Seychelle Gabriel). ½ Straw and an amber gel were combined to create a sunset effect that Sandau and Pope called the “Miller Time” look, referring to the classic beer commercials. American Cinematographer 49

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

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