American Cinematographer - April 2010 - 18

Clockwise from above: The girl studies a distant cliff where an aviator is about to attempt a doomed flight; cinematographer Mátyás Erdély (on crane) and 1st AC Gergely Csepregi prepare a crane shot; (left to right) director Bálint Kenyeres, dolly grip János Tóth, Erdély and Csepregi ready a dolly move near the water.

the sea. The shot lingers on that frame for a moment before slowly zooming out and swinging back around, ending with a closeup of the girl. “We spent months planning that shot, and it was so stressful and scary that we did it first to get it out of the way,” Erdély recalls. “We previsualized 20 versions of it with our visual-effects supervisor, Máté Birkás, using our location-scout photos and Google Earth to build a 3-D model of the location, along with the lens and crane. It’s the most expensive shot I’ve ever done!” The location for the shot was only accessible by a tiny, rocky path about 200 steps from the beach, making it extremely difficult to transport equipment, particularly the 650-pound Super Scorpio Telescoping Crane. At first, some crewmembers joked about needing a helicopter, but as time went on, it became clear that they would, in fact, need one. The crane was disassembled, strapped into a custom18 April 2010

made harness and flown to the location. Another unique aspect of the shot is the airplane, a CG element added by visual-effects artists at Buf in France. Erdély had to follow the plane’s movements while there was nothing actually there. “I didn’t know how I was going to work the timing of the plane’s flight,” he says, “so I took an old video mixer and ran the live feed from the camera’s video tap and the previs animatics into a single monitor so that Christophe Moreau, one of our effects supervisors at Buf, could call out a verbal description of the scene for me.” To counteract the heavy winds and smooth out the camera’s movement while shooting at the long end of the lens, Erdély had the camera mounted to a three-axis Stabilized Scorpio head. “But there were serious issues with the gyro — it wouldn’t adjust with the horizon,” recalls Kenyeres. “We were losing time and light, so we decided to split that one shot into two. We split it right before the crash, while we were still
American Cinematographer

on the blue sky.” Some additional stabilization work was done in post at Buf. The negative was processed at Scanlab in Paris, and the 4K digital intermediate was carried out at Hungarian Film Lab. “We spent a lot of time in the DI, exploring the negative,” explains Erdély. “There were so many directions we could take it in that I wasn’t sure where to start. The more we explored, the more we felt we should go back to a very raw image, like when you scan the image and it’s washed out and milky. We wanted to create a look that was natural and organic, and tried to stay away from everything that’s polished and trendy, so we fine-tuned the raw image to make it as pristine as possible but didn’t add anything to it.” He retained the full 2.40:1 frame in the video master. He notes, “When I do photography, I believe in the Henri CartierBresson style: once you take a picture, that’s it. You don’t crop it. I took that to the extreme and used the entire negative.” ●

American Cinematographer - April 2010

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