American Cinematographer - May 2016 - 42

◗

Welcome to the Jungle

Left: Mowgli keeps a safe distance. Right: Pope mans the controls for the camera crane.

these tools, he was able to approach the
live-action shoot understanding how a
10-foot bear might sit next to a 4-foot
kid."
Important
interfaces
that
enabled Pope and others to interact
with the virtual world included iPad
lighting controls, MIDI controllers,
and pan-tilt wheels originally used by
Legato in real time for previs on The
Aviator (AC Jan. '05). According to
Balakrishnan, the pan-tilt wheel was
important because it provided "an
analog feeling of operating a camera
head on a computer-controlled dolly
track.
"Each tool was carefully tuned to
give Bill an accurate hand-operated feel
in an otherwise digital world,"
Balakrishnan continues. "The workflow
grew to be so natural that Bill would
occasionally even bring in his
Steadicam operator, Roberto De
Angelis, to operate certain shots in the
virtual-camera volume. Then, as shots
were captured, we had an editor on set
ingesting the live feed and live-cutting
the material straight into an Avid,
giving the camera operator and director
real-time feedback on how a shot
would influence the edit."
"The idea," Pope adds, "was to
42

May 2016

make sure we did not make moves that
could not be done by human beings
working in a real jungle. So we limited
ourselves to small crane moves, dolly
moves, handheld and some Steadicam."
The live-action shoot - during
which the filmmakers shot Sethi
performing as Mowgli - took place on
two adjacent 100'x50' stages at Los
Angeles Center Studios. Pope's team
shot the action in native 3D in the
1.85:1 aspect ratio using dual Arri
Alexa XT M cameras, which were set
to open-gate mode and mounted in
Cameron Pace 3D stereoscopic rigs. A
flexible SimulCam volume was also
incorporated into each live-action
stage, allowing Pope to see - via a
headset, iPad or computer screen -
Sethi's performance in concert with the
digital characters as the actor interacted
with puppeteers on the physical set.
The Alexa XT M cameras
recorded to onboard 512GB Codex
drives, and were outfitted primarily
with Panavision Primo zoom lenses.
Pope also carried Primo primes, but he
notes, "On the 3D side, you don't want
to change primes too much. In the
virtual environment, to mimic the quality of those lenses on the animatic, we
mimicked the millimeters of the Primo
American Cinematographer

lenses - lining a scene up and choosing
the same marks we would choose on
that lens [for live-action shooting]."
Fiber-optic cable linked the 3D
camera rigs to dual 3D engineering
racks - one for each camera. Pope and
3D camera engineer/digital-imaging
technician Robin Charters created looks
for each scene by building LUTs using
Framewright's LinkColor software,
connected to Blackmagic Design's
HDLink Pro for on-set color correction.
The filmmakers could also view 3D
imagery on set using 42" Sony LMD4251TD 3D broadcast monitors.
Complementing the filmmakers'
insistence that their camera movements
be based in reality was their desire to
incorporate subtle aberrations that a
location shoot in the jungles of India
would have introduced. "We wanted
imperfect skies, lens flares, sky flares,"
Pope explains. "We wanted all the things
you would really run into if you were
shooting in the jungle and trying to
maneuver there - all the things those
hardships would cause. So we built that
into the photography. We wanted to put
into [the viewers'] minds that we really
went there and did this."
Lighting-wise, this required careful tracking of lighting data back and
American Cinematographer - May 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2016
