American Cinematographer - February 2016 - 61

◗ A Space Opera's High Notes
from other ships, their guns firing and
enemy guns firing - and all of that
interactive light plays on them - as well
as fire and smoke and explosions. I had
lights on cranes moving around, but
mostly the bluescreen ship elements
were to make sure that we never violated
the physical constraints of the cockpit
with the camera; we always maintained
the integrity of that space."
On the subject of bluescreen
versus greenscreen, McCleery asserts, "I
really let Roger dictate that, but generally
when you're working in a low-light environment, where the screen has to be
close to the actors, there's less contamination from blue than there is from
green, and it's easier to key off blue at
lower light levels."
Other sequences that McCleery
and his team handled included Rey
(Daisy Ridley) scavenging from a
wrecked Star Destroyer at the top of the
film, as well as a flashback sequence -
lovingly dubbed a "Force-back" -
where Rey's Force powers allow her to
see different times and places.
"The Force is taking hold of her
and she's connecting with it, and as she
does that she goes into different environments - places she's never been,"
explains McCleery. "We did a lot of that,
because much of it is entirely virtual
space.
"Second unit is a challenging and
fun world to work in," he concludes.
"You have to step into the mind of the
main-unit cinematographer and director. You have to combine a certain level
of intuitive detective work, to ascertain
what they wanted, with knowing where
the point of departure exists - where
you're allowed to input your own creativity and stamp. You have to understand
the reasons why they made decisions and
expand on those decisions. It's a hard
concept to articulate, but it's the important aspect that makes the job challenging and worthwhile. It's a true team
effort and I am very lucky to get to work
with inspired colleagues who entrust so
much to me."
- Jay Holben

back-lot sets was for a Jakku night exterior in which Kylo Ren's shuttle and
First Order transporter ships descend
upon a desert village, where stormtroopers proceed to burn buildings and
massacre inhabitants. Mindel had
wanted to film the scene in Abu Dhabi,
but couldn't due to the scale of the
action.
Instead, Mindel explains, "We
made our own dunes on this multi-acre
set, built into an indent of ridges, and
relied on the fact that the village was
going to get torched, so a lot of the
lighting is just firelight." A Wendy light
was positioned in each corner of the set
as an ambient moonlight for whatever
direction the camera was facing, while
the special-effects department provided
flame bars for firelight effects. Clay Paky
Sharpy moving fixtures provided the
oscillating searchlights of the First
Order ships.
Exterior plates for the First
Order's Starkiller Base - a Death Starinspired mega-weapon carved into the
heart of a far-flung snow planet - were
filmed by McCleery in Iceland. Fake
snow was shoveled onto the Pinewood
back lots for certain snow-planet exteriors, but the lightsaber showdown
between Kylo Ren, Finn and Rey that
takes place in a dark forest on the
planet's surface was actually filmed on
Pinewood's Q Stage, "probably the
biggest stage I've ever worked on," says
Mindel. "We took real trees [felled in] a
hurricane and installed them on a
contoured floor, then we hung a rail of
bluescreen, a rail of black, and a painted
forest backing all the way around the set
so we could shoot in any direction."
Digital replacement was necessary when the camera saw up into the
lighting grid, where Mindel and Evans
had hung 5K space lights for a soft
nighttime ambience. Thousand-watt
Par cans, clustered in banks of 12, cast
pools of light onto the forest floor, and
20Ks diffused with Lee 129 could be
lowered as a soft overhead source. All
tungsten sources were cooled with 1⁄2
CTB.
"The idea was that you would
www.theasc.com

never have enough light or depth of
field to see what was happening through
the space between the trees, and that
was the beauty of doing it in-camera,"
Mindel remarks. "We actually got away
with not using the blue- and greenscreen backdrops very often."
Lightsaber props, though later
embellished with computer graphics,
utilized RGB LED strips and were
robust enough to employ in stunt fights.
Their color, intensity and effects -
such as the bright flash of two sabers
striking one another - could be
remotely controlled by dimmer operators Will Burns with the 1st unit and
Eliot Coulter with the 2nd.
"We tried to provide enough
ambient light that you could see the
action, and every time the lightsabers
moved around they would throw
enough light to make it a bit more interesting to look at," Mindel offers. "The
film stock allowed us to see a couple of
stops over and under, and as long as
there was a sheen on John's skin, you'd
see the sabers working."
Interiors for Starkiller Base and
the First Order's Star Destroyer capital
ships are slick, black and metallic, an
homage to the Empire of old. Corridor
and room sets were modular in design,
allowing them to be reconfigured without necessitating new construction.
Working closely with Gilford and the
art department, Mindel incorporated
practical lighting inspired by that used
for Imperial interiors in the original trilogy; dubbed "pills," these are oblong
fluorescent sources built into the set to
give off a soft white light. Close-ups
were lit with 2K Blondes and Lee 129.
By contrast, the ships and environs of the Resistance have the lived-in,
used-universe look that A New Hope
popularized. The settings are functional
and at times grubby, and the Resistance
is further delineated by a predominantly
earth-tone color palette, as opposed to
the First Order's black-and-white
aesthetic.
A particularly "awe-inspiring" set,
Mindel notes, was "the full-sized
Millennium Falcon." For the ship's inteFebruary 2016

61
http://www.theasc.com
American Cinematographer - February 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2016
