American Cinematographer - December 2007 - (Page 42)

Irretrievable Deeds frame, and we could just dial it in. For instance, when Robbie walks into the room, we shot with the Hylen dialed out — everything’s sharp in the frame. But when he turns around and sees his mother, we dialed it in on cue with the flash of an explosion outside the window. I had the explosion coming up on a dimmer at the same time I dialed in the Hylen, creating this vignette around his face so his surroundings kind of ebb away.” Such subjectivity was reinforced by the filmmakers’ decision to shoot Atonement in Super 1.85:1, which utilizes more of the negative by letting the image take up space traditionally reserved for the soundtrack. “The close-up was very important in this film,” says McGarvey. “It’s about the characters’ interior worlds, and the format enabled us to really fill the frame with a face, like a portrait. This aspect ratio also has a reticence, more modesty compared to the perceived grandeur of 2.40:1.” Among the final images of Dunkirk is a brief scene in which Robbie looks at a postcard from Cecilia in a dark shelter that is packed with soldiers. During rehearsal, McAvoy struck a match to view the postcard, and Wright and McGarvey were struck by the beauty and simplicity of the effect. “At the high point of the match, it was just underexposed, but there was enough light there that we could light the shot with just the match,” says the cinematographer. “It was such a release to actually have an actor do the action exactly as he did it in the rehearsal with no [movie] lighting, no artifice. If we’d lit it, we would have destroyed the sense of dying light we were trying to create. You can see the dying light reflected in his eyes, and it really grips you.” This section of the film also follows Briony (now 18) as she works as a nurse in London and tries to reconnect with Cecilia. The art department built the hospital interi- Exhausted and demoralized, Robbie stumbles into a movie theater where he is dwarfed by the glamorous images onscreen. McGarvey used a Mac 2000 to simulate the projector’s beam and a Barco digital projector to project a DVD image onto the screen. enough transmission to allow us to see the image from the other side, so we tested various materials and found a type of silk that worked,” recalls McGarvey. “It was thin enough that we could see the point of light from the projector beam so we’d understand where we were.” To give McAvoy some additional light, “Perry handheld a 350-watt Arri that we bounced into some foamcore. In the end, we still had to push the 5218 42 December 2007 one stop in order to get a good exposure.” Robbie is in poor health when he arrives in Dunkirk, and before long he slips into delirium and imagines that his mother is washing his feet. To represent this hallucination, McGarvey turned to a tool he’d used to similar effect in World Trade Center (AC Aug. ’06): Panavision’s Hylen lens system. “It allowed us to selectively defocus areas of the

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American Cinematgrapher - December 2007 Contents Editor's Note DVD Playback Production Slate Irretrievable Deeds Blood on the Streets Fantastic Voyage Promise Fulfilled Short Takes Post Focus Tomorrow's Technology New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index 2007 AC Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up

American Cinematographer - December 2007

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