American Cinematographer - February 2010 - 14

Right: An early CG effect reveals ominous clouds converging around a pair of towers. Below: Smit enhanced abandoned streets — which were captured in camera by shooting early in the morning — with CG rubble. floor of a laboratory, disoriented and sporting a bloody nose. Rushing to a window, he sees ominous clouds converging on a pair of nearby towers. He retrieves a small, black box with a pulsing red ring and aims it toward the towers, and it emits a surge of energy that causes the towers to explode. Retreating from the window, he dons his Computer Brain Interface (a headband that provides an informative heads-up display, as in a first-person-shooter video game), grabs a few accoutrements and, still carrying the box, exits the building. In addition to the SR5, which Smit mounted to a skate helmet, the filmmaker captured some shots with a handheld Sony HDR-HC1. He kept both cameras at their widest zoom setting for maximum depth-of-field, and set the 14 February 2010 shutters to 1⁄250 for outdoor scenes and 1⁄50 for indoor scenes. In the opening sequence in the lab, Smit operated the HC1 while Niels provided the main character’s hands. “I needed to have total control over the camera,” says Smit. “We tried using the helmet camera at first, but I wasn’t fully able to see what the camera was seeing, so I ended up [handholding] the camera over Thibaut’s shoulder.” He used only the location’s existing fixtures to light the scene. Outside, cars, bicycles and personal effects litter the street, their owners strangely absent. A futuristic cityscape looms in the distance. The earth trembles, and fiery debris rains down from the sky. No sooner does the scientist take refuge in an abandoned bus than armed soldiers in protective white suits American Cinematographer flank the vehicle, their electronically filtered voices cutting the silence. For this sequence, Smit wore the SR5 helmet rig, freeing his hands to work with props; he was able to work completely on his own until the soldiers appear. Smit designed and animated all of the visual effects in Adobe After Effects (which he also used to color correct the short) and Autodesk 3ds Max. “My main interests are environmental effects and explosions, but I’m not a professional digital artist, so the most difficult stuff — like the towers exploding, and the sky and clouds — required a lot of trial and error,” he says. He did, however, capture the empty streets entirely in camera, which “was quite tricky to do,” he recalls. “We shot most of our stuff very early on, between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., when the majority of pedestrians were still at home. For the scene inside the bus, we looked for a street that wasn’t a major road and had a dead end. We found an industrial area of Nijmegen and asked the businesses nearby if it would be okay to film there, and then we dressed it up with cars and the bus, which we got for free for an hour if we promised to show the logo of the bus company.” When two of the soldiers enter the bus, the scientist straps a strangelooking gadget to his hand and points it at the nearest soldier. A thrumming

American Cinematographer - February 2010

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