American Cinematographer - August 2008 - (Page 42) Fathers of the Bride Much of the movie’s action is set in a mountainside café that combined a real location and sets built at Pinewood Studios in England. Haris Zambarloukos, BSC used cranes to capture wider, sweeping shots of the setting and handheld cameras to follow the characters and their emotional arcs. The planning process went on for six months, and the first thing I did was work with models of the sets, planning where rooms should go. We created buildings in which we could hide a crane; we built a set with loadbearing walls so we could put a crane on top of it.” Key grip Adrian McCarthy was tasked with overseeing the positioning and operation of these cranes, 50' and 30' Technocranes, which were on set throughout the shoot. “You’d think it would have been a breeze on the 007 Stage,” he says, “but we filled it from one end to the other. We didn’t have access to tackles because the set went so high, they wouldn’t slide the full length. It really was a multi-departmental effort to fit these cranes on the set and achieve all the movement we needed. I worked very closely with Biggles [gaffer John Higgins], and we were regularly on set with our teams at 5:15 in the morning for an 8 a.m. call to get everything in position.” Because the musical sequences often contained important plot points, the coverage had to be precisely worked out. “An example is the song ‘Voulez-Vous,’ which is used for the bachelorette party on the night before the wedding,” says Zambarloukos. “Within the madness of that night, lots of important bits of the story come out about the relationship between Sophie and her various fathers. We decided to first tackle the crane shots: wide, sweeping shots that give a general impression of the scene. After that, we wanted to go in and do handheld stuff, following particular characters and their emotional stories; for those shots, the dancing became background, but we needed to create links to take us back to the dancers and carry us to other characters. We broke it down into what was best suited to Steadicam, handheld, crane and tracking shots, taking on board every implication for the choreography and lighting. The musical sequences were not just a case of pointing three cameras at the actors and letting them go; almost every musical number had a narrative thread running through it.” The café set had to appear as though it was located on the side of a mountain that faced a sweeping panorama of sky, sea and neighboring islands. “We had to create about 400 feet of backdrop,” says Zambarloukos. “It could have been scenic backing, a TransLite or a greenscreen, but whatever we did, it couldn’t be just one of these; it would have to be a combination. To 42 August 2008
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