American Cinematographer - April 2018 - 62

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Animal Kingdom

Left, top and bottom: An animator works
through the sequence in which Atari arrives
on Trash Island and befriends a pack of dogs.
Above: Oliver and gaffer Toby Farrar examine
tiny practical lights.

that sequence to give him all the options
he wanted for the lighting effects. So,
whereas the animator would typically
press the button, capture the frame and
then move on to animate the next
frame, in this case the animator would
press the button, the camera would fire,
and then the lights would change and
the animator would capture the other
15 options [for that same frame]. After
viewing all the options, Wes would
decide what flash rate or explosion point
he wanted.
That process sounds like it
would lengthen your schedule, but 87
weeks is fairly typical for a stopmotion feature, isn't it?
62

April 2018

Oliver: Yes. It did take longer to
set up all the iterations, and the animator had several minutes of wait time, but
this film is less cutty than a lot of
movies. Several shots run over a minute.
ParaNorman took about 85 weeks, and
this film has two-thirds of the shots that
film had. We were generating a vast
amount of data on the set, and Wes was
on top of it all. After shooting two films
for him, I've come to understand that
viewing material on a flat screen,
removed from the geography and logistics of the set, is somehow essential to
his process.
How did you ensure consistency
across all the monitoring devices?
American Cinematographer

Oliver: We shot with the Canon
[EOS] 1D X [see sidebar, page 54], and
[visual-effects supervisor] Lev Kolobov
built a LUT for us that worked on the
floor, in our projection area, and in the
DI. On the floor, we mostly worked to
calibrated Eizo flat-screen monitors.
Wes worked with a large iMac at home.
How did you arrive at the look
of the animal-testing facility where the
climactic action occurs?
Oliver: I sent Wes some of
Christopher Payne's photos of North
Brother Island [from North Brother
Island: The Last Unknown Place in New
York City], the site of an old tuberculosis
hospital that's now totally overgrown
with vines, and some photos of St.
Peter's Seminary in Scotland, a masterpiece of Brutalist concrete architecture
that was built in the 1960s and is now
also totally overgrown. Wes liked these
references, so that's what we worked
towards.
The sequence begins with a shot
of our hero pack of dogs, and once the
boy steps into frame, the camera starts
moving and reveals the rest of the facility with a tracking shot that lasts about
50 seconds. Each room is bigger than



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2018

Contents
American Cinematographer - April 2018 - Cover1
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