American Cinematographer - July 2008 - 48

A Not-So-Super Hero Near right: Bottle of booze in hand, Smith prepares for liftoff. Unlike most superheroes, who protect themselves with respectable alter egos, the homeless Hancock is always on the job, and to take the edge off, he’s prone to flying under the influence. Far right: Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler on location. we were done.” Key grip Michael Anderson, who had worked with Schliessler on Dreamgirls (AC Dec. ’06), created two “pseudo-dollies” to take the load off the operators’ legs during such long takes while maintaining their mobility. “Peter was adamant that he never wanted to see tripods or a dolly on the set, so we came up with a couple of solutions,” explains Anderson. “One, which we called the ‘Silver Bullet,’ was just a low frame about 2 inches off the ground with swivel casters. We put a padded apple box on the frame, and the operators could still handhold the camera. They could use the Silver Bullet as a chair, or we could wheel them around for a kind of handheld dolly move.” The second solution was “a small three-wheeled stool. We attached arms, a back, and a little tray where the operators could put their feet, and we could move them around. Both worked really well.” Usually maintaining a T2.8 on interiors and a T5.6 or T8 on day exteriors, Schliessler shot Hancock with three Kodak Vision2 film stocks, 200T 5217 (day interiors), 500T 5218 (night exteriors and darker interiors), and 50D 5201 (day exteriors). “I really liked 5201 for the daytime work; it had good contrast and finer grain, and it looked sharp with our oversaturated look.” He used a Schneider 1- stop polarizer for day exteriors. “It enhances some colors without losing highlights,” he notes. One day exterior that proved particularly challenging for Schliessler and his crew took four days — spread over two weekends — to shoot. In the scene, Hancock stops a bank robbery that involves hostages and a shootout with police. Schliessler had his hands full dealing with the Southern California sunshine, which he describes as “crazy — it comes in and out of clouds and haze all day long! When it does stay clear, it’s straight up in the sky until about 6 p.m., when it drops very fast. Wherever we could, I tried to bring in diffusion to cut out the natural sunlight and then use a BeBee Night Light to create a lower-angle sunlight.” To execute Schliessler’s plan, Anderson brought in a 40'x30' frame of light gridcloth carried on a Champion driving crane, and gaffer Bob Krattiger brought in two 15-6K BeBees to push through the gridcloth. One was positioned at each end of the block, and either light could move out of the way if the cameras were looking in its direction. “It was a little crazy to coordinate,” recalls Anderson, who also had to worry about removing the gridcloth whenever the sun ducked behind a cloud. “We only had one block closed down, and there was nowhere to put the crane when we weren’t using it. I’d have the driver drop off the frame into these big racks we created and then circle the block with traffic until we needed him again.” The bank interiors were shot in an empty building in downtown Los Angeles, in a 200'x100' lobby surrounded by 25'-tall windows. “It was a big building with a lot of glass, and there was no lighting inside at all,” says Schliessler. “We had to bring in all the practical lighting. [Production designer] Neil Spisak worked with us to design huge practical ceiling fixtures that were beautiful and effective.” Those units, Krattiger explains, “were about 16-by-16 feet, designed around LumaPanels, and we had 60 of them in the location. We had three Lumas in each fixture, which are all DMX-dimmable, so we had complete control over them. “The windows were too wide to gel, so we had to balance all the interior lighting to daylight,” he continues. “Outside, I had a 15-light BeBee out front and another out back. Because of sightlines, the BeBee in back was 150 to 200 feet away, so we had to add a couple of Condors with 18K HMIs to get equal punch and hide them in the courtyard 48 July 2008

American Cinematographer - July 2008

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