American Cinematographer - June 2011 - 18

Left: Bruegel’s metaphorical mill sits atop a rock that was inspired by the artist’s journey through the Alps to Italy. Right: Majewski works with the actors on a bluescreen set in Katowice, Poland. “There are so many green details in Bruegel’s painting that we had to use b luescreen instead of greenscreen,” notes the director.

that this broken perspective allowed him to select from sketches, choosing what was most useful for building this theatrum and packing more clarity in the distribution of characters.” Accordingly, the filmmakers categorized their landscape components into seven sections, and Majewski photographed corresponding landscapes in the Jura. “When we were compositing the landscape later on, we were using a little bit of Bruegel and a little bit of reality, and finding the invisible point at which one goes into the other.” Cloud formations were a trickier matter. Bruegel’s static clouds would not do, but when shooting on location, the filmmakers encountered blue skies, which were useless, or clouds of the wrong size. “Also, it sounds strange, but the real clouds didn’t look real,” adds Majewski. The solution was found halfway around the world. After principal photography, Majewski happened to go to New Zealand, and while traveling on the southern island, he noticed some remarkable cloud formations. “In Maori, they call this ‘the island of the long clouds,’” he says. “The clouds were endless, like a piece of polished marble with rivulets and tiny streams going through it. It’s an endless metamorphosis, a real show. You could basically pull out a chair, sit down and watch it.” Majewski asked a local cinematographer, John Chrisstoffels, to film these cloud formations in various light conditions. “With
18 June 2011

those images, we almost had it, but there was a little too much reality,” says the director. So the team went back to the Bruegel digital library and extracted some skyscapes. In the final, about 80 percent of the clouds moving across the frame are New Zealand clouds. “But in order to combine those with [the CG clouds] in the right way, we had to extend the cloud formation in the Bruegel painting,” says Majewski. “That’s where my painting background came into play!” The village and mill interior were filmed mainly at historic sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. These included two windmills and a 600-year-old salt mine, whose cavernous rock walls helped create the mill interior. The mine’s huge, wood wheels and cogs were set in motion for the first time in centuries “after a lot of negotiation,” says Majewski. The final piece of the jigsaw was the actors, who were filmed in a bluescreen environment onstage in Katowice. “All the technicians were very unhappy that we couldn’t use greenscreen, because it’s easier to extract images from greenscreen than bluescreen,” notes the director. “But there are so many green details in Bruegel’s painting that we had to use blue.” Principal photography was accomplished with a Red One, which recorded onto 8GB Compact Flash cards. 24Media in Katowice supplied the camera package, which included a 24mm Zeiss Super Speed lens and an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm
American Cinematographer

zoom lens. “The Red was a saving grace in terms of playing with various layers because of the amount of pixels it provides,” notes Majewski. To evoke the atmospheric haze of Bruegel’s landscapes, he considered filtration, but he eventually decided to use only ND filters on the lens. “I rejected other filtration because I felt it removed me from the human beings,” he explains. “I knew we had to get inside the aesthetics of Bruegel another way.” In post, most of the Red’s RAW data was converted to DPX files, “but for big shots involving many people, like the one in which Bruegel walks around the characters in the painting, we didn’t convert the Red data at all because we didn’t want to lose any information captured by the camera’s sensor,” says visual-effects supervisor Pawel Tybora of Odeon. After receiving the shots, the effects artists would decide whether to use 2-D or 3-D compositing, and then pick the best platform for specific shots. “It’s easy to shoot all the elements but hard to assemble them as one, to create a unity that has a significant and recognizable aesthetic,” observes Majewski. Tybora notes, “It took us many hours to find the right atmosphere for each shot because we had about a hundred different shots of clouds, Bruegel paintings, actors on bluescreen and shots of fields, hills and rocks to choose from. It was trial-and-error to find the right elements that would fit together,

American Cinematographer - June 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2011