American Cinematographer - September 2007 - (Page 35)

focus what you think is important, following your own instincts and those of the operator; if I felt a hand in the foreground should be more dominant, I’d focus on that. Oliver is very supportive, and he has so much enthusiasm for the job that it’s contagious. It makes everyone more excited and willing to experiment.” The production’s camera package was supplied by Arri Media in London. The main cameras — Arricam Lites and Arri 235s — were focused remotely with Arri’s LCS-3 wireless remote-focus system. Operators could control the zooms while shooting handheld, and the focus pullers would use their monitors and judgment to control focus. The picture was shot in Super 35mm full frame, without hard mattes. “I like to have everything on the negative,” says Wood. “I reframe things in the digital intermediate [DI] quite often.” The production carried Cooke S4 primes lenses and an Arri LWZ 15.5-45mm zoom, but the crew “mostly used lightweight zooms that I had specially made from two Nikon digital still-photography lenses, a 2870mm and an 80-200mm,” says Wood. “Arri in Munich converted them to lightweight cinema-style zooms, and they work quite well. The Nikon glass is brilliant.” Dierken notes, “We called them the Oliver Lenses, and they helped the operators shoot everything handheld with the documentary approach Oliver and Paul wanted. Unlike other zooms, which are either too heavy or too slow, these zooms opened up to T2.8 and were quite light. Arri made the housings in six weeks, and the lenses turned out to be very sharp and the contrast was quite good. [Stillphotography] lenses turn the opposite of the way cine-style lenses do, which could have been unpleasant if we’d used a normal follow focus, but with the LCS-3 we were able to just reverse the gears. The lenses worked so well that we ended up shooting 70 percent of the movie with them, and now Arri is making more!” Wood shot Bourne Ultimatum on two Kodak Vision2 emulsions, 250D 5205 and 500T 5218. “I used to rate Kodak’s 500-speed stocks at [EI] 320 or 400,” he says, “but with the Vision2 stocks I don’t need to get quite such a thick negative to get the same result, so I actually rated them Above: Steadicam/ B-camera operator Florian Emmerich and a sound man stay in step with Damon. Left: Bourne heads into the London Underground in pursuit of an agent who tried to kill him. American Cinematographer 35

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2007

Contents Editor’s Note Global Village DVD Playback Production Slate Bourne Again Cultural Immersion Baroque Visions Once Upon a Time in Bucharest Short Takes Post Focus Filmmakers’ Forum New Products & Services Points East International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News Wrap Shot

American Cinematographer - September 2007

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