American Cinematographer - August 2008 - (Page 35) To light an operating bay in the villain’s compound, Roe used a mix of genuine surgical practicals and Kino Flo tubes gelled to resemble heating lamps. because I hate toplight — hate it! The scene turned out great, but it was difficult, and on top of everything else, we were shooting it at 3 a.m. David and Gillian were real troupers.” Carter’s mandate that the stars look their best led Roe to “take a little extra time” to wrap light, which he accomplished with frames of 216 or 250. “Sometimes I’d double them up, and when I wanted to make it really soft, I’d use an Opal and a 250. Our hours were terrible, and you have to be careful with your actors when you’re shooting at 4 a.m. But we didn’t do anything fancy.” In need of snowy terrain that could double for rural Virginia, the production also shot at locations north of Vancouver, in Pemberton and Whistler. Scouting this area absorbed much of Roe’s prep time, and in some cases, winter weather precluded scouting at all. He recalls, “It took almost a full day to get to and from Pemberton [from Vancouver], and we couldn’t even scout Whistler because there was too much snow on the day we were going to do it, so we just showed up on the day [of the shoot]. We scouted in November, and when we arrived to shoot in February, there was 3 feet of snow on the ground! Our locations were huge, and we’re lucky so many of our crew were very good at what they do. And fortunately, working in television trains you to think on your feet.” Bartley’s second-unit work, directed by E.J. Foerster, also took place in this region. In addition to shooting some night plates for driving scenes, Bartley filmed two daytime action sequences, both car accidents. In one, Mulder’s car is forced off the road and sent over a cliff. “We had three film cameras and two P2s, and at the cliff, we put a P2 on a 50-foot Technocrane to get plates looking down the steep rock face,” says Bartley. “We also grabbed some shots with the P2 as we went; to get a shot from a tow truck as a car came up alongside it, we strapped the operator to the passenger side of the truck, and he shot out over the truck’s lights as the car approached. It would’ve taken a lot to rig a film camera for that shot, but we did it really quickly.” In the other accident, a woman is forced off the road into a snowy field and barrels into a large bale of hay. “The hard thing about filming stunts like that is you can’t know exactly what the car will do when it hits the snow — or what the snow will do,” says Bartley. “We put three cameras on it, two tracking with her car and one on the other side of the hay.” He pushed 5218 to 620 ASA and used an 85 filter. The FBI agents’ investigation leads them to a large, snowy field, where they mount a nighttime search using more than a hundred people. “It’s a crime scene, so to make it look like the FBI is lighting it, we set up ten 20Ks at the far end of the field and had 15 Dinos along one side,” says Roe. Even when lighting snow, he found a way to carry out the X-Files mantra of “lighting for darkness”: “We kept the lights down low to the ground so they would rake the snow, creating shadows on the ground. It’s ¢ all about texture.” American Cinematographer 35
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.