American Cinematographer - February 2020 - 41

Evans flew two 40'x40' shades on
cranes to help control the sunlight
during intensely hot days; these were
a mix of solids, diffusion and camo
nets.
In Star Wars movies, cockpit-interior
sequences always play an important
role. Mindel tackled these hallmark
shots with his usual enthusiasm. "It's

kind of my thing to work in confined
spaces," he says. "For the heritage
spacecraft - the ships that appeared
in the previous movies - we didn't
really change anything; we shot and
lit them like they did back in the day.
We just upgraded the technology of
the practical light fixtures. But the
Falcon cockpit is the Falcon cockpit."
And although the production of

Rogue One (shot by Greig Fraser, ASC,
ACS; AC Feb. '17) saw LED screens
employed for cockpit scenes, with
pre-built effects sequences for interactive lighting, Mindel opted for a more
traditional approach with greenscreens.
And though originally created
with wooden sticks, and rotoscoped
animation in post, the lightsabers of

Game Changing
The ASC recently stepped into
the gaming world, as Society
member Dan Mindel and Society
President Kees van Oostrum visited
the Vancouver campus of gamedevelopment company Electronic
Arts to discuss techniques in cinematography and how they may be
applied to the design of EA's projects.
For the event - hosted by Noah
Klabunde, lighting director for EA
Create, the central art team for
Electronic Arts - lighters, world
artists, FX artists and art directors
were flown in from EA Studios from
around the globe to attend this oneday Master Class seminar. AC spoke
with Mindel, van Oostrum and
Klabunde about the experience.
Noah Klabunde: In the last five
years, the visual quality of games has
increased exponentially, and as
'lighters' within EA, our responsibilities are [shifting] from just placing
lights [to serving as] virtual cinematographers. We are using physically based materials and real-world
absolute light values - and we're
shooting the games with a camera
model [that's based on physical
cameras], and using an HDR colorgrading pipeline [based on those
used for modern cinema]. As artists,
we need to build core cinematographic, artistic and storytelling
skills to visually [advance] our
games. As we approach parity with
the real-world cinematic workflows,

we believe that the next step for our
lighting artists is a deeper understanding of those workflows.
Dan Mindel, ASC, BSC, SASC:
EA wanted to talk about photo-realism in their arena, and how the visual
aesthetic that we create in our business can translate, and make their
games, in design and structure, seem
a bit more realistic.
The most useful time there was
the Q&A, where we had a room full
of game artists asking cinematographers questions about real-world
filmmaking, which they could then
apply to the lighting, lensing, and all
of the other in-computer work that
they do. I suppose the conversation
that sticks with me the most from the
Q&A is the one we had about the
way light reacts on surfaces - the
textures of the walls, ground, and
components of the environments that
the artists were putting the [games]
in. In my response, I noted that
taking into account the refraction,
bounce and atmosphere (i.e., dust,
smoke or moisture in the air), and
angle of the sun (i.e., time of day,
which affects the way everything
looks), we should then - [with
regard to] the virtual lenses being
employed - use the mapping of
real-world lenses to ingest all the
aberrations, and translate them into
the virtual space, and bring another
layer of texture to the game universe.
Kees van Oostrum, ASC: [EA's
games] are designed by an art direcwww.ascmag.com

tor, and then the work gets spread out
to various domain leads and
computer-graphic artists. [These
skilled professionals] have observed
very closely the cinematic decisions
and design of Dan's work on Star
Wars, and they were very interested
in his lens choices, in terms of both
focal length and the character of the
lens. They were fascinated by his
approach to lighting the big studio
sets - with a sense of reality and
drama. This appeals to [the lighting
and world artists], since a movie set is
a creation from the ground up, much
like what they face in their world.
Mindel: To me, bringing traditional cinematography into gaming
seems totally logical. The more CG
animation that we use in cinema, the
more it becomes accessible and
cheaper, and the more they are going
to use that in the universes that they
set the games in. I also think that the
future of CG animation for visual
effects in live-action movies is going
to get better, stronger, and more
creative. The more we - the [traditional] filmmakers, who use cameras
and lights and people - cross into
the gaming world and share our
knowledge, the better the games are
going to look. And the more we, as
cinematographers, learn from the
game artists, the better the CG in
movies will be.
- Andrew Fish and
Samantha Dillard
February 2020

http://www.ascmag.com

American Cinematographer - February 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2020