American Cinematographer - January 2013 - 72

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A Musical Revolution
selves. “Because we shot three cameras the whole time, we were often getting in each other’s shots,” says Byrne. “We’d be halfway through the shot, and Tom would say, ‘We can see the B camera. Maybe you should just put a costume on.’ From that moment on, the wardrobe department would bring us our long coats and hats in the morning, and when we were outside, we’d use a roll of brown waxed cotton to cover the camera instead of plastic.” Though these tactics helped hide the cameras and crew during long takes on sequences like a melee involving several hundred extras, the costumes occasionally caused some confusion. “Halfway through take two, when the students were throwing tables and chairs out of windows and everyone was running around shouting, I suddenly realized the man I was running next to wasn’t my operator,” says Byrne, who was using a Preston remote focus system. “We were all dressed up so well that I’d lost him! There was nothing to do but put the lens at 6 feet and hope for the best.” The production was a roughly 5050 split between stages at Pinewood Studios and locations in England. “We ended up doing just a week’s shoot in France,” says Cohen. “There are almost no medieval buildings left in Paris.” The filmmakers also wanted the control the studio would facilitate, particularly for large-scale setpieces like soldiers storming the barricades erected by students in the streets. That climactic sequence, along with much of the other studio work, was shot on the brand-new T stage at Pinewood, a 200'-long, 50'-high space that was filled with production designer Eve Stewart’s detailed 19th-century Parisian street set. “It was built diagonally across the studio and went all the way up to the ceiling,” says Cohen. “It was redressed for different periods and lit for every possible lighting situation.” Lighting was facilitated by Café de Lumiere (formerly Light by Numbers), a remotely operated lighting-control system that was used to control 350 overhead space lights and at least a

the A camera generally stayed wide. “It’s weird, in a sense, not to be back on long lenses making everything feel fantastically beautiful, with soft backgrounds, when people are singing,” says Cohen. “But it just felt like the way to tell this story was to be right there in people’s faces, getting every bit of emotion and energy in frame.” A-camera focus puller Peter Byrne notes that the close-in camera style was sometimes problematic because camera noise could interfere with the live recordings of the songs. He recalls, “I asked the tech at Arri, Andy Taylor, to go through all the LTs and STs to find the quietest ones. Once they did, they tweaked them to make them
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even quieter. In testing, we went a step further and covered the camera bodies in Tesa foam tape. Our sound recordist, Simon Hayes, is a double black belt in Jiu-Jitsu, so I knew it was in my interest to do so!” The problem was amplified during shooting of “On My Own,” sung by Éponine (Samantha Barks) in the rain. There was polyethylene covering the camera and plastic rain gear on the crew. “All they could hear was the sound of the rain on our waterproofs,” says Nicholson. “We ended up wearing white sheets, and Danny used us for a bit of bounce as well!” The crew became quite adept at disguising the cameras, as well as themAmerican Cinematographer

Top image courtesy of Double Negative and Universal Pictures. Bottom photo courtesy of Zac Nicholson.

Above: The Greenwich Naval College doubled for the Place de la Bastille. Right: Nicholson and Byrne show off some of the period garb they wore in case they were caught in another camera’s frame.

American Cinematographer - January 2013

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