American Cinematographer - December 2015 - 48

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Wide Wide West

Top, from left:
Leigh, Russell,
executive
producer
Richard
Gladstein,
Dern and
actor Walton
Goggins
discuss a
scene. Bottom:
First AC Gregor
Tavenner
(bottom right)
assists
Richardson
with the GF-16.

Richardson notes that the set also
had a low ceiling, and emphasizes that
"the lenses would handicap my ability to
put lights where I would ordinarily want
them.
"We did hard-gel the windows to
try to keep them matching from shot to
shot," he adds. "That wasn't always the
easiest thing, but as the weather
changed so radically with cloud cover
blowing in and out, we would have [key
grip] Herb Ault and his [crew] moving
rapidly to put gels up in the windows as
we needed them."
Options were easier on the L.A.
stage, thanks to its removable posts,
48

December 2015

beams, walls and ceiling sections. For
the stage and the Colorado location,
Kincaid's team built identical overhead
lighting rigs that consisted of six 6K soft
boxes and strands of household bulbs
stapled between the ceiling rafters and
covered with bleached muslin. "Fifty
300-watt Teflon-wrapped bulbs and six
of our 6K soft boxes provided a beautiful, warm and quiet glow," Kincaid says.
These rigs frequently had to
come down - if they couldn't be
disguised - for low-angle shots that
included the ceiling. For this reason,
Kincaid explains, LEDs played a central
role in maintaining the appropriate
American Cinematographer

ambience for Minnie's Haberdashery.
"We built 4-foot-long LiteGear
LiteRibbon strips, [which were] about 4
inches wide, and crammed as many
LEDs as we could into various small
spaces - both tungsten- and daylightbalanced ones," the gaffer says. "The
haberdashery is constructed of beams,
so we hid them behind upright horizontal beams, and often used them in
wider shots because traditional motionpicture lights would have been [visible
in the frame]. LEDs were also used in
the traveling-stagecoach sequences."
Exteriors were a constant challenge given the remote location, snow
on the ground, shifting skies, and the
unique format. "We couldn't get
Condors to the location with the snow
so deep, so we had to use [Gradall and
Pettibone telescopic construction forklifts] to lift equipment, and they were
our shadow-makers [on and around the
cabin]," Kincaid says. "Whenever there
was sunlight hitting the windows, Herb
Ault would run one of those vehicles
out to put a big shadow around the
cabin."
For night exteriors, Kincaid says
the production relied on two large
moon boxes - each containing 16 6K
space lights and filtered through a Full
Blue Grid Cloth - which the filmmakers used for a gentle overhead
ambience. These units were suspended
from large construction cranes around
the cabin structure, as needed.
Besides Minnie's Haberdashery,
the only other significant interior was
the stagecoach, where many of the characters first meet each other early in the
story. The production used both a practical stagecoach as well as a stagecoach
rig on a gimbal system designed by Ault
and stunt driver/vehicle designer Allan
Padelford. The latter set was necessary
to accommodate the actors, operator
and oversized camera, while maintaining the width necessary for both front
and side angles.
"The [rig] had removable sides,
and the camera was positioned outside
the coach on its own gimbal, matching
the coach's movements," Ault details.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2015
