American Cinematographer - August 2008 - (Page 65) brighter area lit by underwater Kino Flos, and when they surface, we cut to a different stage, in an indoor tank that was only 4 feet deep.” As the movie goes on, the fantastic aspects of the adventure increase, and Schuman’s lighting reflects that by gradually increasing color saturation and stylization. But meanwhile, the characters are also traveling deeper underground, making natural light sources increasingly unlikely. “Erik and I became masters at justifying underground sources,” he notes wryly. “We said there might be electrostatic discharge or bioluminescent glow, for example. Because this is a fantasy adventure, we gave ourselves license to break away from realism. The lighting comes from the same place as the music: we don’t have an orchestra, but we do have music, and we don’t have light sources, so we had to invent some.” The recording chain began on the set, where the two optical block and lens assemblies in each Pace rig were usually on a crane, dolly or Steadicam. From the rig, copper-wire cables ran to the rest of the cameras’ bodies at an intermediate station. More fiber-optic cables ran from there to an engineering station, where the output from each rig was recorded onto three decks simultaneously: the left eye and right eye were recorded separately onto two Sony SRW5500 decks in HDCam SRW 4:4:4 format to create the masters for each eye, and the signal from each camera was also fed into a single Sony SRW1 deck, which recorded the two eyes simultaneously in 4:2:2 for editorial and instant in-sync stereo playback. That made it possible to check the stereo values in real time in an onset dual-projector booth. The interaxial distance and convergence could be changed on the fly as the cameras were shooting, and convergence was pulled constantly along with focus. The cam- To achieve the aggression director Eric Brevig wanted the creatures to have, the animators did some limited sculpting, and a low-level swimming motion was integrated into the fish. The animators could add more specific movement on top of that. American Cinematographer 65
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.