American Cinematographer - December 2016 - 56

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Love and War

A street scene in
London before
(bottom) and
after (top)
visual-effects
work.

but the Weapon camera software wasn't
ready for that just yet, so in the end I
created versions as CDLs that we used
on set and for all dailies."
Burgess reports that the lengthy
process to create the LUTs in preproduction was sometimes difficult, but
that the process was worth the effort.
"They were very good representations
of what the film was going to look like
when we released it," he explains. "That
helped every department, from makeup
to wardrobe to production design to
visual effects." The cinematographer
adds that the process reduced the
amount of details he and Light Iron
colorists Corinne Bogdanowicz and Ian
Vertovec were going to have to wrangle
later during the color grade.
At press time, the color grade was
56

December 2016

being performed in the EXR format at
4K resolution with a Quantel Rio colorcorrection system. Final deliverables
would include a 4K DCP, as well as a
UHD version for home release.
Once production was underway
on the Canary Islands, A-camera operator Peter Cavaciuti, Libra head technician Joe Buxton, dolly grip Simon Muir
and crane technician George Powell
were called on to execute some delicate
Technocrane work for action sequences
such as the lead characters' frantic night
escape from the German embassy. The
Technocrane was placed on a Scarab
base in the middle of the street,
Cavaciuti explains, "so we could get to
the start and the finish of the move.
This meant the grip team had to track
in the crane in a straight line as they
American Cinematographer

armed right at speed, keeping just ahead
of the actors and keeping an exploded
car nicely positioned in the background
as they ran across the road. Then we did
a really fast but smooth track-out, again
in a straight line; we stayed ahead of
them across the road as Max and
Marianne jumped into the car and the
camera and crane circled around them;
the car then drove under the crane arm.
All that time, I shouted 'faster' or
'slower' down the comms to help the
guys keep the camera in the right position while I operated the Libra head,
since due to the speed of the move and
positioning of the crane, the grips had
limited line-of-sight access to the
camera."
On shooting in the U.K., Burgess
offers, "The biggest challenge on this
movie was the fact that London was so
busy with other productions that we
didn't get [access to major motionpicture studio facilities] like Pinewood.
We had to shoot in modified buildings
and warehouses, and those create their
own challenges. Ours was height.
Because we had designed [six different
looks for the movie], we had a lot of
color-temperature changes, so we
needed units that could give us that
ability, but we had height limitations on
the stages we were using. Therefore, we
relied heavily on Arri [S30 and S60]
SkyPanels. Those units gave us the abil-

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