American Cinematographer - March 2017 - 21

trial Light & Magic team.
Interiors were shot at Beijing's China
Film Group (CFG) Studios, while a back-lot
location was set up near the town of
Huangdao, where Myhre's team built the
Great Wall set in four sections. The longest
stretched nearly 500' and was backed by
greenscreen, which key rigging grip Oscar
Gomez's crew hung from shipping containers piled 43' high, for set extension and
backgrounds. No images of the actual
Great Wall appear in the movie; in addition
to practical concerns, the production likely
wouldn't have gotten permission to shoot
on the historic structure.
The story reimagines the wall as
hollow, with complicated machinery and a
lift system inside. "We over-scaled it to
allow for larger concentrations of people
and horses," Dryburgh explains. "And we
wanted it to look brand-new. It's carefully
researched. A lot of the landscape is
mapped from real environments. In an early
visit, I went out to an area of the Great Wall
with John Myhre and his crew, and they
measured bricks and took photographs of
texture and color."
At Dryburgh's suggestion, the
production shot with Arri's Alexa 65 camera
paired with the company's Prime 65 and
Vintage 765 lenses. The crew treated the
Prime 65s and Vintage 765s as one set,
choosing between them based on available
focal lengths; Dryburgh found the differences in contrast and color between them
negligible. The resulting large-format
images are well-suited to the movie's Imax
3D release, which is the product of a postconversion process.
"We used the Alexa 65 whenever
possible, both for extreme wide shots of
our many huge crowd scenes and extreme
close-ups of the principal cast," says
Dryburgh. "We shot at close to 6K [resolution], cropped the top and bottom to the
[2.39:1] release format, then archived to
LTO at 4K.
"The 65 has such a high-resolution
sensor that it doesn't have any of the aliasing or compression typical in digital
cameras that often result in unpleasant
edges on things and lines on people's faces
they don't actually have," Dryburgh continues. He thus found diffusion filters unnecessary. Only occasionally did the crew

Above: The crew
readies an interior
scene shot at
Beijing's China
Film Group
Studios. Left:
Cinematographer
Stuart Dryburgh,
ASC, NZCS mans
the camera for a
scene with
strategist Wang
(Andy Lau, third
from right) and
Cmdr. Lin Mei
(Tian Jing, far
right).

employ a polarizing filter or soft-edge graduated ND filter to deal with a hot sky.
Dryburgh notes, however, that the
Alexa 65 couldn't shoot the off-speed,
slow-motion work that is an important part
of the movie's language. So in addition to
Alexa 65 A and B cameras - operated by
Peter McCaffrey and Saba Mazloum,
respectively - an Arri Alexa XT manned by
Danny Chen functioned as the C camera,
with an additional XT periodically operated
by Dryburgh. The production shot with the
XTs in the 4:3 Cropped format - at a resolution of 2578x2160 - which allowed
them to shoot at up to 96 fps.
"We didn't want too noticeable a
jump between the Alexa 65 and Alexa XT,"
the cinematographer says, "so we shot the
XTs with [Arri/Zeiss] Master Anamorphic
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prime lenses, which are very good, clean
lenses with similar depth-of-field characteristics to [their respective analogous focal
lengths] in the 65mm format.
"Zhang's preference was to use at
least two cameras and often three or four,
even in dramatic scenes," he continues,
"which meant mixing up focal lengths just
to get all the cameras in there. We used a
mix of quite wide anamorphic lenses - the
28mm T1.9 and 35mm T1.9 - and then
often a 135mm or 180mm to extract the
closer shot. I like the wide-and-tight juxtaposition."
For use with the XTs, the crew also
carried Angenieux's Optimo Anamorphic
56-152mm A2S (T4) and the company's
spherical Optimo 48-580mm (T5.6), the
latter of which was a 24-290mm (T2.8)
March 2017

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