American Cinematographer - March 2012 - 28

A 12'x12' cube balloon with sodium-vapor bulbs provided fill light for the party. Visible at top right is a box-truss rig fitted with spotlights to simulate a police helicopter’s searchlight.

film as closely as possible. “When so many decision makers are looking at dailies, you don’t want to get their eyes used to one look, only to change it later,” Seng observes. “If you do, you’re fighting what they already have in their heads, and that’s not easy.” When AC visited the set at Warner Bros. Ranch, in August 2010, Seng demonstrated his on-set color-correction setup, toggling between the raw image coming from the F23s and the image while applying a look-up table that had been devised for that particular setup. His mobile FilmLight Truelight system communicated directly with the Baselight system colorist Jan Yarbrough would be using in the final color correction at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging. “Jan set it all up and made sure our production monitors were calibrated to match his in the DI suite,” says Seng. To ensure that the recorded images would give the filmmakers as much flexibility as possible in post, “we designed the lighting so we could pull faces out of the darkness whenever necessary,” adds the cinematographer. “If someone thought something was too dark, we always had the picture information we needed [to brighten it].” Working with gaffer George Maxwell, Seng devised lighting for the party that
28 March 2012

comprised concentric circles. “We had lighting for the house and the yard, and then we had what we called ‘flare lights,’ which were located just past the property, shooting through trees and right down the lens,” says Seng. “Uplighting the trees in the distance was another layer of lights gelled with a blend of Rosco Urban Vaporand a sodiumvapor pack [Lee 103 and 147] to mix color temperatures. Beyond that, we lit up some of the other houses in the neighborhood. We were constantly looking to create depth. “To give the entire party a constant, subtle edgelight, we used Condors that usually each had two 12-light Maxi-Brutes going through our sodium-vapor gel pack and a 12-by-12-foot frame of Light Grid with a control grid in front of that,” he continues. “Underslung on each Condor was an Arri MaxMover mounted with a 20K and a Chimera that had its diffusion fabric removed to control spill from the 20K in the lightest possible way. The falloff of the big sources was critical to give the party depth, but the center areas, where most of the action took place, were slightly under.” Seng credits Maxwell and key grip Brady Majors with effectively wrangling these big sources throughout the shoot. “At one point, our producer, Todd Phillips, gave me the nickname ‘Flight of the Condors,’ because we had six of them going during the last two weeks of the shoot,” he says. “It may have looked like overkill, but shooting 360 degrees with up to eight cameras at a time called for it.” Also hanging over the party was a 12'x12' cube balloon lamped with sodiumvapor bulbs “that we used just to fill things in,” says Seng. “At any given time, we could be shooting in the front yard with six cameras while we had a thousand extras in the background with the second unit working at the rear of the house, so being able to quickly float the cube over was a time saver.” He adds that a longtime collaborator, Joseph Aguirre, was the second-unit cinematographer. Throughout much of the third act, a police helicopter flies overhead and moves its searchlight through the crowd, and TVnews crews capture the action from their own choppers. “George Maxwell and Brady Majors devised an amazing box-truss rig that held a Libra head/F23 rig and two spotlights,
American Cinematographer

a VL3500 and a ClayPaky Alpha Spot 1500, and we hung it from a construction crane,” says Seng. “It gave the party so much production value and scale.” Creating more separation and depth were practicals “that were slightly cool, which worked well with the sodium-vapor look edging out the party,” he continues. “The Condors and the balloon were just giving us this back edge, while these practicals, as well as our on-camera lights, went a bit blue. A lot of the practicals were Husky Cool White-type CFL lights that you can get from Home Depot.” To shoot some of the party coverage at 60 fps, Seng had to boost his light level. He notes, “I rate the F23 at about 250 ASA, and to get a stop of T2.8 at 60 fps, you need quite a bit of light. For the high-speed work, we’d sometimes mount a Par can right on top of the F23 as our ‘on-camera light.’” While shooting with F23s and EX3s, Seng used Codex digital recorders. “I knew I’d have a better image to work with [in post] if we recorded 4:4:4 rather than compressing and recording to SR tape,” he says. “Also,because we were shooting with so many formats on so many different cameras, bringing all of the material into Codex simplified the data management.” Toby Gallo, the production’s data-acquisition supervisor, designed the workflow, which involved “the equivalent of about 2 million feet of film, and the application of all our pre-set looks to the dailies footage,” says Seng. “Catching reality between the moments when people were acting for the camera added so much to this movie,” Nourizadeh concludes. “The time is just right for a movie like this.”

TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:1 Digital Capture Sony F23, PMW-EX3; Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 7D; Iconix Studio 2K; Research in Motion Blackberry; Apple iPhone; Flip HD Canon HJ11x4.7B KLL-SC 11x ●

American Cinematographer - March 2012

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