American Cinematographer - March 2014 - 18
Top to bottom: Andrew waits while his aunt (Charlotte Bradley) and her son, James (Sean Stewart), say
their goodbyes during the film's opening sequence; James shares in the misery of the front line;
cinematographer Stephen Murphy utilized filtration to create different time-of-day looks in the trench;
Capt. Montague (Nick Moran) shouts orders during battle.
18
March 2014
American Cinematographer
had a stellar special-effects crew, led by
Steve Warner. Steve would set up huge
smoke machines with black smoke in the
deep background and then use portable
trucks with white smoke. I could ask him to
block out the sun or parts of the background, and then we'd have snow or rain in
the foreground.
"Because the trench was quite deep,
and because we were shooting in winter,
when we only had light from about 9:30
a.m. to 3 p.m., we had big lights burning all
the time," Murphy continues. He and gaffer
Mark Rickett lit the 200' trench with two
12K HMI Pars in the background and two 6K
Pars and two 4K Pars in the mid ground. "I
would then use 12-by-12 UltraBounces
closer to the action to provide soft fill,"
Murphy adds. "I was exposing the fill a stop
or two under and using that as my key. I'd
read in American Cinematographer that Don
Peterman [ASC] did that for Flashdance
[May '83], and it's a style I love."
Perhaps the biggest challenge at the
location was simply navigating the terrain.
"We collected rainwater in the trench exceptionally quickly, even though we pumped
it," says Murphy. "That changed how we
were able to move in the trench; we had to
work harder on blocking and let the actors
do the staging for us, using the depth of the
trench and the width of the frame. We were
able to get a couple of camera moves by
laying 8-by-4-foot pieces of track and doing
conventional dolly moves, but in one
instance it was raining so hard the track
began to float away!"
One camera move the team
managed to make was a long dolly shot that
plays out in an uncut take, tracking parallel
to Andrew and James as they wend through
a fiery, debris-filled no man's land. "No man's
land was so sodden with mud and water it
was almost unwalkable," Murphy recalls.
Key grip Philip Murphy and his crew "had to
bring in an excavator the day before to carve
out the track area that we'd spotted with a
lens on a pentafinder," he adds. "The excavator dug out a swath of land, and then the
grips could lay 120 feet of track."
Murphy operated the A camera, a
Panaflex Millennium XL, throughout the
production, and there was an Arri 435 on
hand for two days as the B camera. "[Cinematographer] Ed Moore came out to do one
American Cinematographer - March 2014
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 2014
Table of Contents
American Cinematographer - March 2014 - Cover1
American Cinematographer - March 2014 - Cover2
American Cinematographer - March 2014 - 1
American Cinematographer - March 2014 - 2
American Cinematographer - March 2014 - Table of Contents
American Cinematographer - March 2014 - 4
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American Cinematographer - March 2014 - Cover3
American Cinematographer - March 2014 - Cover4
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