American Cinematographer - March 2014 - 28

MacPherson (left) confers with Anderson between takes.

suspended from a construction crane and
three 30'x30' blacks on telehandlers help
block the actual sun. For later scenes, when
Mount Vesuvius' ash darkens the sky, the
crew will lower the solids further.
It is a basic lighting scheme. "The
grittier, the better," says MacPherson. "We
want the men to look real. Milo has to look
good and strong but also weathered, so I'm
not lighting him classically. Wherever the
light comes from, if it works on his face, we
let it go. The women, of course, always
have to look great."
For a scene in which Milo and Cassia
embrace in a doorway amidst the volcanic
violence, Browning had to look glamorous
despite being covered with dust. To
augment the period practicals used in the
film, including torches, candles and oil
lamps, gaffer Michael L. Hall suggested
using Aurasoft lights in a flicker box, and he
rewired each of the six bulbs in each unit.
For this romantic scene, the crew aimed
two units down onto a 12'x12' UltraBounce on the floor to light the actors from
below. "The Aurasofts are soft yet directional, so when all six lights in each unit
flicker at different intervals, you see a nose
shadow moving around a face as opposed
to just changing brightness," MacPherson
says. "It was a great solution."
The production built a number of
exterior sets indoors at Cinespace Film
Studios, including a large street that was redressed as different locations. Two 100K
SoftSuns served as the sun source for day
28

March 2014

street scenes. For ambience, the crew
directed 30 Arri T-12s into a 30'x200' overhead bounce. MacPherson explains, "We
put them all on full blast to shoot the day
scenes. In the scenes after the volcano
erupts, we put on every second or third one
and had them on a dimmer because there's
supposed to be ash rolling through the
daylight sky."
On-set workflow supervisor Vinit
Borrison of Toronto's Redlab Digital would
often begin the day by adjusting color and
contrast levels. "Dialing looks into the
camera bodies helped match sensors
between cameras and between the rigs,"
he says. "This helped with viewing the 3-D
footage on the LG set monitors, so one eye
did not feel more saturated than the other."
He also did basic color correction to still
frames and then uploaded them for
MacPherson's approval on an iPad, and,
with the look-up table they established in
prep, prepared dailies using Redcine-X on a
Mac Pro. Redlab presented the dailies to
MacPherson in H.264/QuickTime format on
a LaCie hard drive and output DNX files for
editor Michelle Conroy and DPX files for the
visual-effects work.
The grand scale of Pompeii could
only have been achieved with extensive
CGI, and this work was done by Toronto
shop Mr. X and collaborators Scanline VFX
and Soho VFX. Mr. X contributed to 475
shots, all of which were previsualized by a
team that included visual-effects supervisor
Dennis Berardi, MacPherson, production
American Cinematographer

designer Paul Austerberry and art director
Nigel Churcher. "Glen made sure the liveaction pieces could be shot, and in some
cases we would have to change the previz
to accommodate what was practically
possible on set," Berardi explains.
Mr. X created a historically accurate
Pompeii that could play in medium shots,
and its artists also animated an opening
montage of the famous plaster casts of
Vesuvius' victims, who were flash-heated to
death. All shots of the volcano were
animated, along with its pyroclastic flow
and the resulting giant waves and crumbling cliffs.
Berardi accompanied aerial cinematographer Jeremy Braben of London's
Helicopter Film Services on a two-day shoot
in Pompeii to capture reference images and
background plates. They shot in 5K with an
Epic, using a Super G head for stabilization.
Braben also shot one day on the ground in
the Pompeii ruins.
When MacPherson spoke to AC
again, he was in Redlab's DI suite with
colorist Walt Biljan, working on an
Autodesk Lustre with a 2K RedLogFilm
workflow. "We don't want a super-clean
digital feel," the cinematographer notes.
"Walt is giving it a feel that suggests the
period but is also strong and modern, which
is a fine line." Biljan adds, "We're not going
desaturated and monochromatic. We're
using the full P3 color space to make it as
rich as possible but adding subtle touches,
such as slight cyan in the black, and we're
moving really high-end magenta skin tones
and making sure they fall in a yellower
palette. There were a lot of blues in this era,
and we're making them vibrant."
Naturally, Pompeii's showstopper is
the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a multilayered mix of live-action and digital elements.
"We did as much research as we possibly
could, and what you see of the eruption is
what it was really like coming at the people
of Pompeii," says MacPherson.

TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
3-D Digital Capture
Red Epic
Zeiss Ultra Prime
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American Cinematographer - March 2014

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