American Cinematographer - May 2015 - 22

Top: Born in
1900, Adaline
remains a
youthful 29year-old
throughout the
decades.
Bottom: In the
present day,
Adaline runs
into a man
from her past,
William Jones
(Harrison Ford),
and his family.

then. We opted instead for [Bausch &
Lomb] Super Baltar spherical lenses [ranging
from 20mm to 100mm]." With a laugh,
Lanzenberg confesses, "We actually
cheated a bit with the Kowas, since they
didn't come out until the early Sixties."
The cinematographer was especially
pleased with how the Baltars looked with
the Epic Dragon. "Due to the Red Dragon's
larger sensor, the outer edges [of the image]
would vignette in a sort of blur and a fall-off
in exposure that produced a portrait-like
quality and a very turn-of-the-century feeling," he explains.
First AC Doug Lavender was tasked
with keeping the three generations of
22

May 2015

lenses at the ready. Lavender, in turn, has
high praise for Clairmont Camera Vancouver, which supplied the entire package and
"did a great job of getting all the lenses to
work on the Red Dragon."
Additional gear from Clairmont
included an Angenieux HR 50-500mm T5.6
anamorphic zoom and a Cooke 25-250mm
MK III T3.7 spherical zoom, both for aerials,
as well as a hand-cranked Arri 16 SR3 Super
16mm camera outfitted with a 1.85:1
ground glass and an Angenieux 9.5-57mm
T1.9-2.8 zoom. The 16 SR3 was loaded
with Kodak Tri-X 7266 black-and-white
reversal stock to capture newsreel-like
footage of Adaline's birth in 1900; this
American Cinematographer

footage was combined with archival film of
early 20th-century San Francisco. (The Tri-X
footage was processed at Yale Film and
Video in Valencia and scanned at Company
3 in Santa Monica.)
Although a number of present-day
exteriors were shot in San Francisco, the
movie was predominantly shot in and
around Vancouver, and almost entirely on
practical locations. The 39-day production
was augmented by two pre-shoot days,
when the most logistically complicated
sequence in the picture - the car accident
that leaves Adaline immortal - was scheduled. In the sequence, Adaline is driving her
Model A along a winding forest road late at
night when the car skids off the path,
crashes through a wooden fence, tumbles
down a ravine and lands in a frigid pond.
"We had three crews working all night in
the forest, dealing with stunts and a huge
lighting and grip setup," says Lavender.
The production found a perfect
stretch of road in a forest on the outskirts of
Vancouver. "It felt desolate but also had
beautiful twists and turns - we wanted
the Model A to come in and out of frame,"
details Lanzenberg. "Rigging gaffer Jarrod
Tiffin and his team did a great job of prerigging the day before we shot. [They laid]
thousands of feet of cable in the woods and
along a ridge, and had some 20 Arri T12
tungsten Fresnels pushing light through the
trees to give a sense of separation between
the car and the woods." Additionally, a 10K
tungsten balloon was floated over the crash
site.
Five Epic Dragons rolled on the
crash, including one on a 50' Technocrane
that sat atop a Taurus base off to the side of
the road; this camera captured high-angle
shots of the Model A in the distance. For
another setup the crane arm was lowered
so that the camera was just a few feet off
the ground, looking directly down the road
as the Model A rounds a bend and heads
straight toward the lens; the crane then
booms up and over as the car speeds
directly underneath.
"The stunt car had two [Epic Dragons] in steel crash housings," relates Acamera/Steadicam
operator
Dean
Heselden. "One was inside the vehicle, over
the stuntwoman's shoulder. The other was
mounted behind the car's rear bumper,
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