American Cinematographer - April 2010 - 22

Clockwise from top left: Bejach used green and yellow gels to give the tank interior a green tinge; built on a soundstage, the tank interior comprised eight modular sections that could be separated to accommodate camera placement; a 6K HMI was bounced into a mirror to create a shaft of blinding “daylight” through the tank’s hatch.

visual direction with a few words at one of their first meetings about the project: “He said, ‘Please make it bleeding to black.’ From there, everything was very easy.” For Bejach, the first step was to work with production designer Ariel Roshko to create a somber tank interior. “The inside of real tanks are white because you need light in there, but we went with dark brown. There are two scenes in the tank when you see red blood, and you can’t miss it.” The tank was built by combining eight modular constructions on a soundstage, and it could be split apart to arrange for different viewpoints. Maoz also told Bejach that he wanted the tank interior to have a green tinge. “We could have achieved that in post, but I preferred to do it with the lighting, so we did it with yellow and green gels,” says the cinematographer. “We changed them from time to time, only because I wanted to give each lighting setup a slightly different look. I didn’t want it all to look the same.”
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Bejach created variety in the dark tank interior with a few small practicals and gels, and by providing brief glimpses of the world outside. Day and night inside the tank are evoked by the presence or absence of glowing bright light spilling in through small openings. To light the interior, Bejach wanted sources that fell off quickly, without being too soft. “I didn’t want to use soft lights because they don’t describe the situation. They’re gentle, and the situation is not gentle. But I don’t like hard lights, so I decided to use an old light, the Zip light. That was the main source inside the tank.” The Zip light is an old-fashioned fixture with a 1K or 2K bulb aimed at a builtin, curved, reflective surface. Inside the tank, “it gave us the right feeling,” says Bejach. “If you move a bit too far from the lamp, it starts to be hard, and if you come closer, it gets softer. It falls off quickly, so it won’t hit the walls, which was very good, because we had no way to cut the light in there.” Sometimes Bejach also bounced 650-watt Tweenies off reflectors with wrinAmerican Cinematographer

kled silver foil to add “a metallic feeling” to diffused light on the actors. He sometimes used this bounce with a small source to create fill for day interiors, and at other times he used the silver foil by itself for fill on dark interiors. To create the sensation of daylight outside, Bejach hung Nine-light Maxi-Brutes with narrow-beam bulbs (through ¼ White diffusion) and aimed them down at the tank set. For a scene in which a corpse is brought into the tank, Bejach pointed a 6K HMI on the ground up at a mirror above the tank’s open hatch, creating a blinding downward shaft of light, which he defined with a smoke machine. Smoke is also an important component of battle scenes seen through the tank’s periscope; these were shot as day exteriors. Bejach added burning tires and smoke machines to generate “a hell of a lot” of thick, dark smoke that helped to lower the contrast of the strong Israeli sunlight and create the feeling of a war zone. ➣

American Cinematographer - April 2010

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