American Cinematographer - March 2011 - 35

Thompson and Steve Carter then designed and built as much of the stairwell and exterior rooftops as was possible.” This build comprised a stairwell with one complete side, an open top, and a partial side that would later be extended with CGI. “We spent a day rehearsing the shot with stand-ins,” Toll continues. “For the rehearsal, we used a 30-foot Technocrane and positioned it perpendicular to the stairs so we could reach both rooftops by swinging the arm along the length of the stairway, which was about 20 feet long with an 8-foot rise from bottom to top. The total length of the move was about 40 feet when we included the actors’ movements on the rooftops. The chassis remained fixed in position, and the key to the whole shot was keeping the camera very close to the actors and rapidly moving in a straight line by constantly extending and retracting the arm as it swung in an arc up and down the stairs. Camera operator Bruce McCallum worked with grips Rick Marroquin, Dana Hook and Kevin Lowry and crane technician Paul McKenna to work out the shot step-bystep.It’s one of those shots that looks fairly straightforward onscreen but was very complicated to execute.” On the day of shooting, the team switched to a 50' SuperTechnocrane “to give us a little help in keeping the move straight by minimizing the angle of the arc,” says Toll, and Russell’s crew placed tracking dots all over the greenscreen, as well as mock Empire State Buildings and Central Park cards for eyelines. Visual-effects artists at Phosphene (supervised by John Bair) created the digital portion of the shot. Russell explains, “Phosphene took the photographed greenscreen element and tracked the movement of the camera in 3-D, and we used that data to shoot live-action background plates from the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, using a Zebra motion-control crane, which barely fit in the elevator. The crane was able to match the camera position for the chosen take, but because the speed

of the camera during the plate with the actors was so fast, we had to shoot the background plates at a much slower frame rate, 6 fps, in order for the Zebra to match the move.” The color correction of the Escher Stairs was the focus of many hours in the DI suite, and this work was expedited by Technicolor’s Tech-2Tech service, which enabled Russell and Nolfi to participate from New York,

where the editing, sound and visual effects came together, while Toll worked with Hatzer and Jensen in Hollywood. (Nolfi later joined Toll in Hollywood to sign off on the final.) “We originally intended to do the DI in New York, but then that schedule changed, and I had commitments in L.A. that would have interfered with my ability to be in New York continuously for that process,” says Toll. “With Tech-2-Tech, I was able to

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American Cinematographer - March 2011

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