American Cinematographer - December 2007 - (Page 66)

Fantastic Voyage various stages of Lyra’s journey, which was important to Weitz. The director explains, “Her beginning in Oxford leans towards gold and yellow, representing the halcyon childhood period before she heads off into the world. The next stage is London, which is at first very sparkly and a little bit diffuse, but then, when she comes to the underbelly of the city and its villainous culture, the look moves to this greenish tinge. For me, it represents jealousy and anger, so whenever green pops up you know something bad is going to happen.” Braham tended to light from above in order to give the multiple cameras as much freedom of movement as possible. “Henry lights in a kind of 360-degree manner, often with [helium] balloons from above, so there’s not a lot of tweaking and flagging of lights,” says Weitz. “We had storyboards, of course, but we were able to move around within sets and scenes a lot more than I expected.” Onstage at Shepperton Studios, where the production was based, Braham often used a huge grid of soft light suspended above the floor. “We used a fluorescent unit called a Highlight that was made for us by Panalux — it’s similar to an Image 80,” recalls White. “We had hundreds and hundreds of them coming through 50by-50 silks to give an overall soft fill with no shadows. I also had some boats built up in the air all around the stage that we put Dinos on, so we could quickly change to be sidelit, frontlit or backlit. They were on dimmers, so we could flicker them to give them the ‘anbaric’ look.” For greenscreen work onstage, Braham positioned FloBank lights along the top and bottom edges of a 360° greenscreen. These, as well as the fluorescents above, were DMX-dimmable and all went back to a Hog III control board, manned by a full-time desk Soft sources illuminate a building and the atmosphere. running up and down the room on either side. Following Braham’s suggestion of how these “anbaric” practicals should look, White had to find a way to make them move: “I came up with the idea of using nine 150-watt pea bulbs in each lamp on three separate circuits, so there were three bulbs on each circuit. Then we made up a pattern through the dimmer board for the different circuits; that gave us a nice flicker.” The setup required a huge amount of wiring, more than Braham envisioned when he proposed the concept. He notes wryly, “This is a lovely job — you kind of come up with these ideas and people say, ‘Yes, we can make that,’ and the ideas evolve. That was the last I thought of it until we came to shoot that scene, and I had to go downstairs to the vaults underneath the hall. I was shocked to find 100 feet of dimmer racks humming away! I wondered what on earth they were for, and suddenly I realized they were for my ‘anbaric’ practicals!” In the scene, as Kidman approaches the lens she walks into more light (provided by Kino Flos positioned around the camera) that gives her face an extraordinary luminosity for its first close-up. “Nicole has fantastic skin and is such a wonderful-looking woman that it’s not difficult to play to her strengths,” says Braham. “I got the makeup people to make her up quite flat because I was putting so much light on her. If you weren’t using that [lighting] technique you’d do the makeup in a shinier, more naturalistic way, but the makeup artists totally got it, and Nicole understood what we wanted to do.” While planning the film’s many night scenes, Braham decided to create a subtle, greenish hue with lighting gels. “I felt green represented the ether ‘anbaric’ light gives off in streetlight, and it’s also a great color for underscoring fear,” he notes. This choice of color helped visually differentiate the 66 December 2007

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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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