American Cinematographer - February 2015 - 38

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High-Flying Heroics

A ramp was installed for a practical stunt inside London's Natural History Museum's Hintze Hall,
which Toll and his crew primarily lit with 5K HMI balloons.

camera array provided a 140-degrees
horizontal by 60-degrees vertical field of
view.
"The whole concept for this
sequence was to do as much of it as we
could practically," says Toll. "We wanted
live-action plates, as opposed to CG
plates, to make it look as real as possible."
Mitchell adds, "The idea with the
Panocam was that we've only got so
much time to be up in the air, so how do
we shoot as much as we can and give
38

February 2015

ourselves the flexibility in post to put
this sequence together? It was critical to
get Pictorvision involved. Working with
[Pictorvision President] Tom Hallman
and engineer Grant Bieman, we ultimately decided on six cameras, which
was the limit given the physical size [of
the rig].
"The Epic was the most practical
camera for what we wanted," Mitchell
adds. "Each camera had its own 512GB
RedMag [SSD and recorded] 5K with
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5:1 compression." The six cameras in the
Panocam rig were slaved to a seventh
Epic, which provided master control to
Pictorvision tech Eric Dvorsky inside
the helicopter.
Each camera was fitted with a
Canon EF 24mm f1.4 L II USM lens.
"Once you stitch [the six frames]
together, you have [the equivalent of ] a
12,000-pixel-wide by 5,000-pixelvertical 5mm lens," Mitchell notes.
"You can push in to 4K, which gives you
about an 18mm; that was great for flexibility in post."
The Panocam "was a huge timesaver," Pastuhov enthuses. "It allowed us
to capture these plates in one or two
passes in real time, and in the same light
so it would match the live action. We
could do the whole run we wanted, turn
around and do it again; we did in 15
minutes what would normally take us
well over an hour."
Mitchell was also tasked with
shooting panoramic plates from atop
buildings within the pre-dawn shooting
window. For these plates, he explains, "I
had a couple Canon 6D [DSLRs] and a
computer-controlled nodal head called a
GigaPan, which could basically tile all
these high-resolution stills together."
Mitchell shot with Canon EF primes,
mostly the 24mm "or, if I needed to
shoot something closer, the 100mm or
135mm."
Another crucial participant in
realizing the Shadow Chase was stunt
coordinator R.A. Rondell, whose contributions included a rig for "flying" Caine
and Jupiter at street level. Toll explains,
"R.A. built a pipe rig on a pickup truck,
and by extending it out, he could get the
pipe far enough from the body of the
truck so we could hang Mila and
Channing on wires 2 or 3 feet off the
ground. It worked great."
Glass praises the rig for providing
"a really amazing body language. We
used the truck on location and also on
the greenscreen stage. Channing could
physically skate along the ground, and
then there's a sort of pendulum movement when the truck turns a corner and
picks him up."
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American Cinematographer - February 2015

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