American Cinematographer - February 2021 - 26

CHILLING FUTURE

" George didn't want to use the typical industrial
vocabulary you see in most sci-fi movies today. "

" Because the conditions were rough, we worked mostly with natural light, " recalls Ruhe, who adds that the production supplemented the
crew with a local team when on location, as well as with a DJI Inspire
drone crew. " I remember often looking down at a frozen light meter. We
had to stop shooting George whenever we couldn't see his eyes because
they were covered with ice. In many of the shots, his beard looks frozen,
and it really was. "
On the Virtual Stage
The production then moved to Shepperton Studios in the U.K. for the
majority of its visual-effects scenes. To depict the frozen tundra visible through the arctic interiors' windows, the production deployed the
StageCraft LED wall in-camera visual-effects process pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) on the Disney Plus series The Mandalorian
(AC Feb. '20). For the background imagery, Kasmir oversaw the capture
of live-action footage from an array of five Alexa Minis in Iceland. " We
shot various times of day and various weather conditions, " Kasmir says,
" and as luck would have it, we captured the only snowfall that occurred
on the glacier during the production. We also did photogrammetry and
Lidar surveys of the environment, which provided data essential to
generating a dynamic 3D re-creation of the environment onstage. After
stitching everything together, we ended up with about 270 degrees of
imagery. Then ILM used Unreal Engine to [display] that material onto
26 / FEBRUARY 2021

an LED wall that was approximately 130' long and 30' high outside the
windows of our sets. "
Ruhe agrees that the StageCraft process brought yet another layer
of realism to the cinematography. " There's a shot when Lofthouse is in
the control room drinking coffee in the morning and looking out the
window. All those reflections in his eyes and on the set are in-camera
and real. We used the LED wall to achieve those reflections and basically
light the set itself. "
" The wall was amazing, " Clooney says. " I'd never seen anything like
it. We had witness cameras every 8 feet or so on the stage to monitor
and track our camera. If we were on a dolly and boomed up, it would
immediately read that and change the perspective outside on the wall
to match. You were lighting by the actual scenery, which allowed us to
move much quicker and saved us a lot of work we would have had to do
in postproduction. It was a great luxury to have that incredible setup. "
Classic Technique
Although The Midnight Sky production team embraced many stateof-the-art virtual-production techniques, it also deployed traditional
methods when appropriate. Examples included arctic exteriors captured
onstage that often involved underwater work and elaborate stunts. To
create a believable sky indoors, White surrounded the set with an enormous gray Rosco rear-projection screen - a technique, he says, that

American Cinematographer - February 2021

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