American Cinematographer - February 2020 - 30

This Is the Way

TECH SPECS

2.39:1 Anamorphic
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa LF

LF Open Gate, ArriRaw, 4.5K

Panavision Ultra Vista, 1.65x squeeze

Idoine readies the camera for a scene.

continues. "But when most of your
lighting comes from the environment, you have to shape that environment carefully. We sometimes
have to add a practical or a window
into the design, which provides our
key light even though we never see
that [element] on camera."
There were, of course, limitations. Although LEDs are bright and
capable of emitting a good deal of
light, they cannot re-create the intensity and quality of direct, natural
daylight. "The sun on the LED screen
looks perfect because it's been
photographed, but it doesn't look
good on the subjects - they look like
they're in a studio," Fraser attests.
"It's workable for close-ups, but not
really for wide shots. For moments
with real, direct sunlight, we headed
out to the backlot as much as possible." That "backlot" was an open
field near the Manhattan Beach
Studios stages, where the art department built various sets. (Several
stages were used for creating traditional sets as well.)
Overcast
skies,
however,
proved a great source in the Volume.
The skies for each "load" - the term
given for each new environment
loaded onto the LED walls - were
based on real, photographed skies.
February 2020

While shooting a location, the
photogrammetry team shot multiple
stills at different times of day to
create "sky domes." This enabled the
director and cinematographer to
choose the sun position and sky quality for each set. "We can create a
perfect environment where you have
two minutes to sunset frozen in time
for an entire 10-hour day," Idoine
notes. "If we need to do a turnaround, we merely rotate the sky and
background, and we're ready to
shoot!"
During prep, Fraser and Idoine
spent a lot of time in the virtual art
department, whose crew created the
virtual backgrounds for the LED
loads. They spent many hours going
through each load to set sky-dome
choices and pick the perfect time of
day and sun position for each
moment. They could select the sky
condition they wanted, adjust the
scale and the orientation, and finesse
all of these attributes to find the best
lighting for the scene. Basic, real-time
ray tracing helped them see the
effects of their choices on the virtual
actors in the previs scene. These
choices would then be saved and sent
off to ILM, whose artists would use
these rougher assets for reference and
build the high-resolution digital
American Cinematographer - 100 Years

assets. They sometimes used
photogrammetry as the basis, but
always relied upon the same visualeffects artists who create environments for the Star Wars films to realize these real-time worlds - "baking
in" lighting choices established
earlier in the pipeline with high-end,
ray-traced rendering.
"I chose the sky domes that
worked best for all the shots we
needed for each sequence on the
Volume," Fraser notes. "After they
were chosen and ILM had done their
work, I couldn't raise or lower the
sun because the lighting and shadows
would be baked in, but I could turn
the whole world to adjust where the
hot spot was."
The Volume could incorporate
virtual lighting, too, via the "Brain
Bar," a NASA Mission Control-like
section of the soundstage where as
many as a dozen artists from ILM,
Unreal and Profile sat at workstations
and made the technology of the
Volume function. Their work was
able to incorporate on-the-fly colorcorrection adjustments and virtuallighting tools, among other tweaks.
Matt Madden, president of
Profile and a member of the Brain Bar
team, worked closely with Fraser,
Idoine and gaffer Jeff Webster to
incorporate virtual-lighting tools via
an iPad that communicated back to
the Bar. He could create shapes of
light on the wall of any size, color and
intensity. If the cinematographer
wanted a large, soft source offcamera, Madden was able to create a

American Cinematographer - February 2020

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