American Cinematographer - May 2008 - (Page 49)

These shots show another angle in the Driver’s Club and the filming of one of its elements. sures — from 3 stops under to 3 stops over —to create super-highdynamic-range images that captured every detail of the locations. (Most bubbles ended up being about 12,000 pixels wide in resolution, and some were twice that size and larger if more detail was needed.) Matte painter Lubo Hristov used digital tools to “paint” over the stitched bubbles, accentuating some elements. “Lubo took the existing natural details, colors and textures, and exaggerated them in very striking and unique ways that lend extraordinary richness to every bubble,” says Glass. One of the film’s locations, the Drivers’ Club, took the bubble unit to a perfectly preserved castle just outside Berlin. Public access was limited, and Martin and an assistant entered the castle with only a still camera and a tripod; standing in the middle of a room, they took their photos without disturbing any of the centuries-old structure. “In post, we took that amazing environment and filled it with 60 actors,” says Gaeta. “We would never have been able to bring that many people into that room, let alone cameras, lighting and everything else that comes with a movie production.” Because the bubble unit finished most of its work before principal photography began, Tattersall and the Wachowskis could preview the environments and rough composites while they were shooting on the greenscreen stage. Using Sparky, a proprietary system designed by Digital Domain, they could see realtime rough composites of the actors in the bubbles, enabling them to match interactive lighting and camera moves. Most audiences associate the Wachowskis with the brooding style of the Matrix trilogy (AC April ’99, June ’03, Nov. ’03), but Speed Racer takes a sharp turn into a candycoated world. “Speed Racer is lightweight, bright and funny, with outrageous contact-rally sequences and monkey kung-fu,” says Tattersall. “It’s quite the polar opposite of the Matrix films. It’s very, very colorful; the sets and costumes feature unusually bright colors, and I was often gelling the lights with deep Congo blues or fuchsias or Chrome Yellow. Once the photography was done, we passed the baton to the visual-effects artists, and they used digital filters and gamma-warping to heighten and exaggerate the colors even more.” Glass notes that Speed Racer’s hyper-saturated color palette “was another significant motivator to go with an all-digital pipeline.” He continues, “One of the important benefits of the F23 was its considerable dynamic color range. We learned our lesson on other HD projects, where we ran into all sorts of colorspace problems in the post pipeline. Most HD cameras have their own American Cinematographer 49

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2008

American Cinematographer - May 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Global Village: The Fall Short Takes: ASC Laszlo Kovacs Short Takes: Heritage Award Winners Production Slate: Anamorph Production Slate: Fugitive Pieces Heavy-Metal Hero A Need for Speed Kink and the City Beautiful Minds A Hollywood Homecoming Post Focus: Paramount Restores The Godfather Filmmakers’ Forum: Levie Isaacks, ASC Teaches Marines to Shoot Movies New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Antonio Calvache

American Cinematographer - May 2008

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