American Cinematographer - June 2012 - 53

ment at the ready,” he continues. “We used two cranes, a 44-foot Moviebird and a 50-foot SuperTechnocrane, for almost the entire shoot, but we mostly used them as a very quick way to put the camera where we wanted it. We wanted to avoid the sweeping crane moves audiences have come to expect from a story like this, and instead keep the camera much more centered in the moment.” After testing several camera systems in prep, the filmmakers decided to shoot most of the picture in anamorphic 35mm, and use Super 35mm for some visual-effects work and 65mm for select shots. “Shooting 65mm goes against the idea of keeping it simple,” Fraser acknowledges, “but the grandeur of the format really lent itself to this story. The 65mm material looks absolutely beautiful, and I wish we’d been able to shoot more of it. Panavision’s System 65 was a bit bulkier and noisier than our lightweight XL package, so we mostly used it for wide shots and establishing shots, because I would often find that [35mm] wide lenses didn’t resolve the fine detail in those shots as much as I liked.” He composed the 65mm material in 2.40:1 common center, with a top and bottom crop. Fraser shot Snow White on three Kodak negatives, Vision2 50D 5201, Vision3 250D 5207 and the recently introduced Vision3 500T 5230. He typically rates his stocks at 2⁄3 of a stop overexposed, “but for some scenes set in snow, I would pull that back to just 1⁄3 of a stop over.” The camera package, provided by Panavision London, included anamorphic lenses in the G-series, Eseries and Primo lines, in addition to spherical Primos and System 65 lenses. “The G-series lenses are great on skin,” notes Fraser. “They’re sharp, but not pin sharp. They have a nice falloff that really works for a kind of glamorous feel. With Charlize and Kristen, they looked fantastic, and I didn’t need any filtration at all. “When I was framing up with

Unit photography by Alex Bailey. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Opposite: The Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) apprehends Snow White (Kristen Stewart) in the Dark Forest. This page, top to bottom: Firelight keys Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) as she schemes to outwit her enemies; the Huntsman is called before the queen for a grim assignment; director of photography Greig Fraser preps a scene in Ravenna’s throne room.

the System 65 lenses, I was regularly reminded of the image quality of some of my own Hasselblad and Mamiya lenses on my medium-format cameras,” he adds. In addition to lending Snow White’s adventure “a great sense of scale,” Fraser found that anamorphic was “really useful for pulling our actors out of the background, especially in the forest,” thanks to its shallow depth-offield. “Natural forests are visually busy, and they can look pretty to the eye but less so on camera. A limited depth-offield can help a lot.” The film’s story spans more than 20 years, and two different forest looks were required: an Enchanted Forest and a Dark Forest. After watching a number of movies that involved forest
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American Cinematographer - June 2012

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