American Cinematographer - June 2014 - 22

Though he appears to be the main attraction, Pados stays focused on the task at hand while filming on location in India.
The cinematographer's operating skills made him director Craig Gillespie's top choice for the project.

was released around this time, and that
created a huge demand for anamorphic
lenses worldwide. Thus, at the time, Pados
simply couldn't find two separate packages
that met his specs within the project's
narrow time window. Next, he considered
shooting the entire picture with C Series
lenses and using film for India and digital
capture for the U.S. Still, he wasn't satisfied
he could obtain a set of anamorphic lenses
that would meet his expectations before he
needed to get to work.
The filmmakers finally decided to
shoot the India sequences on 3-perf Super
35mm and the U.S. sequences digitally.
Pados selected an all-Arri camera package,
choosing the Arricam System and Arri 235
and 435 models for film work, and the Arri
Alexa XT and Studio XT for digital capture.
Though the same lenses were used for film
and digital capture - Cooke S4 primes and
Angenieux Optimo 15-40mm T2.6, 1780mm T2.2, 28-76mm T2.6 and 24290mm T2.8 zooms - "separating the two
worlds" remained very much the plan,
22

June 2014

according to Gillespie. "We had a lot of day
exteriors in India, and we wanted the extra
texture you can capture on film because we
wanted India to be more layered visually,"
says the director. "In the U.S., things are
more settled, there are larger and emptier
spaces, and everything feels a little colder.
The sharpness of digital reinforces that.
Also, we ended up shooting a lot of night
scenes in the U.S., and the Alexa was, of
course, great for that."
The filmmakers also achieved visual
separation by highlighting warm, earthy
colors in India, says Pados. "We tried hard to
use locations that were muted because we
wanted to get away from that kind of colorful Indian thing you often see in movies," he
says. "All our choices were about earth
colors - lots of browns and deep reds -
and different kinds of sunsets. We tried to
catch dusty sunsets!"
The production was well prepared
for being far from home in many ways,
having organized and shipped more than
160 cases of gear to India, including six ArriAmerican Cinematographer

cams and the Kodak Vision3 film stocks
Pados planned to use (50D 5203, 250D
5207 and 500T 5219). On the other hand,
Pados chuckles that "we didn't exactly get
to see dailies in an efficient way," and "we
would sometimes arrive at a location and
find out the Condors we requested weren't
going to be there." He notes that the choice
to shoot film proved to be a blessing
because it allowed the filmmakers to work
entirely untethered, which conditions in the
streets demanded. "If you need to shoot
handheld running around on crowded
streets, then film is much faster than video
- you don't have to worry about cables or
hard drives. It's a system that worked well
for over a hundred years, and in those
conditions, it was the best way to go."
However, the production often
found it difficult to get equipment even
close to some locations. This was such an
issue, in fact, that film loader Jessica Ramos
worked with local designers to configure
camera trucks that could better navigate
the streets, according to 1st AC Daniel

American Cinematographer - June 2014

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