American Cinematographer - April 2015 - 48

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Electric Hero

Chappie breaks through a window to help his friends.

and C Series primes. Opaloch credits
Taylor Matheson, his 1st AC on
Elysium and The Winter Soldier, for
providing valuable intel. (1st AC duties
on Chappie were handled by Justin
Hawkins.) "Taylor has a little black
book with info on every Panavision lens
he's ever used," the cinematographer
explains. "You may have a 35mm that's
funky if you try to shoot under T4, but
it might clean up at T4.5, so we would
switch to whichever series was the best
at the focal length we wanted." Opaloch
primarily shot at T2.81⁄2 or T2.82⁄3.
When it comes to shooting
actors, Blomkamp says, "I typically don't
like short lenses. The resulting distortion feels like I'm manipulating the
audience. I gravitate towards a sweet
spot in the middle - 30mm to 40mm
[in spherical, or 60mm to 80mm in
anamorphic] is around the range of
perspective the human eye is used to
seeing."
The crew sparingly used an ATZ
70-200mm T3.5 anamorphic zoom for
longer focal lengths, as well as an
AWZ2 40-80mm T2.8. "If we're on a
48

April 2015

Technocrane, it saves so much time to
throw a wide zoom up there," Opaloch
notes. "You don't have to bring down
the arm, change the lens and rebalance
the head. If the sun's going down, you
can get a lot more footage."
The cinematographer used
Tiffen IRND and Schneider True-Pol
filters, as well as Schneider ND grads to
hold sky detail, but nothing to provide
an overall look. "I appreciate what can
be done in post so much that it's never
been my approach to lock something
into the image that is going to restrict
you later," he says.
For scenes inside the robotmanufacturing facility, the production
shot in a large factory that makes Denel
Rooivalk attack helicopters. A number
of dialogue scenes transpire in the space,
where Moore's massive killing machine
looms ominously in the background.
The room's existing light consisted of
many banks of Cool White florescent
tubes, which Blomkamp wanted to
keep to convey the look of the everyday
workplace. "Those lights gave us a sense
of scale for the room," Opaloch elaboAmerican Cinematographer

rates. "We would just kill some of the
off-camera sources and we would do
what we could with the actual circuit
box. We would also send guys up in scissor lifts to apply negative fill so there
was a little falloff on the white wall,
adding depth."
The crew rigged 1.2K HMI
fixtures in the ceiling for backlight as
well as a corrected 20K tungsten light
for the scene in which the roof opens
and Moore sends his killer robot
airborne. Celebs were used for closeups.
One of the movie's largest-scale
scenes occurs at night, when the police
scouts are shut down and a number of
citizens take to the streets to protest and
riot. For aerial views of the angry throng
running rampant in a downtown square,
the crew employed an Epic MX on a
bungee rig, mounted in a helicopter and
operated by C-camera operator Lars
Cox, who was shooting over an actor's
shoulder. The crew ran three more Epics
on the ground, along with multiple
Sony PMW-EX3s for news coverage.
Some illumination was provided
American Cinematographer - April 2015

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