American Cinematographer - January 2011 - 14

To create the impression of the singer’s scarf blowing in the wind, the scarf was puppeteered with monofilament as Lovett walked on a treadmill. Electric fans were also used in conjunction with the monofilament.

reacted powerfully in the red channel. That left blue, which we used for the background and treated like regular bluescreen.” While shooting, Kief used a Sony BVM-L230 HD reference monitor, which allowed him to view one color at a time, giving him a preview of what the individual luma keys were going to look like. (The filmmakers also monitored an RGB composite for keying white elements.) “When you look at the different channels, the most saturated colors become bright white, and everything else falls pretty close to black,” says Kief. “My primary goal was to give each color as much separation as possible.” Kief and Alender are aware of the similarities between their process and the photochemical bluescreen process, where composites were achieved by taking shots with bluescreen elements and rephotographing them through a blue filter in black and white so only those elements are
14 January 2011

exposed. This creates the holdout matte that cuts out the area of the background plate dedicated to the foreground when the two are combined. “We did a lot of experimenting,” says Kief. “We weren’t 100percent sure what the shot was going to look like in the end, particularly the backgrounds, but Chris was meticulous about storyboarding every single shot, and we followed those boards exactly.” The airship set, which was placed in a corner of Soapbox Films’ 10,000-squarefoot soundstage in Burbank, Calif., comprised little more than a ship’s wheel, a captain’s chair and a treadmill (for walking shots). The skeleton crew included producer/puppeteer Kris Eber, who hides in plain sight, puppeteering Lovett’s scarf with filament from atop stepladders or crouching behind flags, catching the books he tosses into a furnace. (The furnace is CG.) The team didn’t shy away from dramatic camera moves, despite the extra
American Cinematographer

work required to track the shots in post. Creating digital moves in post was briefly considered, but, Kief notes, “Chris and I prefer to create a move in-camera because a move created in post never looks as good — the three-dimensional perspective doesn’t change.” The Digi Blue background was lit with Kino Flo bluescreen tubes, and the foreground was lit with a pair of 4x4 Kino Flo heads outfitted with black-light tubes. Kief brought the black-light Kinos as close and flat to the lens plane as possible for the cleanest reflectance; if the lights were even slightly off axis, he’d get shadows on the fluorescent tape. In the shots where Kief wanted to pull some detail out of Lovett’s face, he’d use tungsten lights. Two 2K Mighty Moles were outfitted with Mole Shutters for lightning effects, a couple of 1K nook lights on dimmers provided the illumination from the roaring fire in the airship’s furnace, and various tungsten sources were placed at strategic angles to bring out reflective highlights on bits of metal in Lovett’s costume and the props. “The black light was actually strong enough that we were also getting a lot of fill directly from the fluorescent tape,” recalls Kief. In some scenes, the reflectance is so bright, the collar almost serves as a bounce surface. The production’s Red One MX was provided by Keslow Camera in Culver City, Calif. “It’s a real step forward and a real joy to be able to work with the Red at 500

American Cinematographer - January 2011

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