American Cinematographer - May 2017 - 33

The filmmakers
sought to honor the
style of the manga
and anime tellings of
Ghost in the Shell
that preceded this
live-action version.
"In the anime, there's
a certain painterly
quality," says Hall.
"The compositions
are so beautiful, and
they tend to flatten
the perspective, but
they often employ a
wide-angle lens, thus
creating layers of
depth in the
background."

was also about perspective," Hall continues. "The optical compression [achieved
by using longer focal lengths with a
larger format] means you're effectively
flattening the perspective, which was
perfect for the aesthetic that I was pursuing. It meant that we could construct
some wide-angle lenses that had a flatter,
more compressed perspective. Dan built
a unique 29mm that could accommodate the 65mm format, and this lens, the
only one of its type in the world, became
very effective for us. The 35 and the 40
were also great lenses, but the 29mm
became the lens that really created what,
for me, are the signature shots.
"We built an entire set of prime
lenses - 24mm, 29mm, 35mm, 40mm,
50mm, 75mm, 100mm, 135mm and
135mm macro," Hall details. "There
were also three high-speed lenses: a
50mm, 75mm and 100mm that all had
T-stops below T2. We experimented
with a couple of zoom lenses in testing,
but these were never used, and the entire
film was shot on the custom-built
primes."
In regard to combining CG
artistry with footage from the Alexa 65,
visual-effects supervisor Guillaume
Rocheron notes that the camera's sharp,

detailed image leaves little place to hide.
"It has been especially challenging on
the shots in the film that we dubbed
'ghost cam,' which are long, continuous
floating shots traveling through
cityscapes," he notes. "The first one in
the film is our first look at the world. It's
about a minute and a half long, mostly
CG, and it connects to a shot of Major
on a rooftop. The viewer has plenty of
time to study the details and the image
definition, and the quality had to be on
par with the practical 65mm photography. The larger sensor proved to be challenging as well for some exterior
sequences shot on a greenscreen stage,
because we had to work around the shallow depth of field and cheat a bit in
order to make our composites look more
like an f11 and provide a sense of scale."
Hall developed a specific, coordinated color palette of 28 hues to be used
prominently in the lighting and design.
"You can take almost any frame in the
original anime and see that color is used
in a very harmonious way," he says. "If it's
not, there's a reason. I wanted to bring a
detailed, analytical approach to color
without necessarily attaching obvious
meaning to each color."
Hall extracted colors from the
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anime and from stills he took on the
Hong Kong scout, which were captured
mostly at night. He noticed that the
neon and LED lighting was mediated
by the humid atmosphere, which creates
an ambience and contributes to the
watercolor feel.
"I became interested in using
colored light and trapping and mixing it
in the atmosphere to create other colors,"
the cinematographer says. "The colors I
was seeing were very subtle. In moments
of the anime, the Major has an extraordinary skin tone that I called a warm
gray. It's something I've never really seen
before on film, and one question was
how to go about actually producing this
color on Scarlett's skin."
With his 28-color palette, Hall set
about tweaking the RGB values on
LED lamps and seeing how the camera
would interpret them. He had success
with Digital Sputnik fixtures that offer
16-bit, four-channel control, but he
knew those lamps wouldn't serve every
function, especially in practically lit interiors with integrated lighting. Those
situations would require smaller fixtures,
and other RGBW systems weren't
giving him the nuances and secondary
colors he wanted, especially in the yellow
May 2017

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2017