American Cinematographer - July 2009 - 16

Top: Rockwell and director Duncan Jones parse the script. Middle: Bell examines the church from a neighborhood model he has painstakingly constructed in his spare time. Bottom: As his three-year lifespan winds down, Sam 1 begins to deteriorate physically. Milo system, and he found the Sprog to be even handier. “Because it’s based on a Panther dolly central column, it’s pretty unique and very quick to use,” he notes. “Operationally, the Sprog seemed very intuitive,” says Clamp. “Gary was able to drive the unit using hand wheels to control the remote pan/tilt/roll head, with the grip performing tracking dolly moves — all recorded for consistent repeat action for the multiple passes necessary for the clone and Gerty shots. The servos made a really cool sound when the unit reset to its start position, so much so that the sound department recorded it to use as an element for the Gerty robot traveling around the moon base.” In scenes with the two Sams, Rockwell would first perform whichever character drove the action. An improvi16 July 2009 sational actor, he was given a loose leash on this first pass. Then, Rockwell would change his makeup, rehearse to playback on a video iPod, and perform the other Sam utilizing marks and precise eyelines. Clamp used Apple Shake on his laptop to create simple, temporary composites for editorial. For the poor man’s motioncontrol, Shaw would mimic the earlier passes manually, looking at a monitor and concentrating on the background rather than the actor when doing the moves. “We had to be very strict about how we moved the cameras, knowing what the consequences might be,” he says. “We didn’t want the effects team to have to do any zooms or changes of perspective.” Clamp notes, “Although [zooms] aren’t impossible to deal with as software improves, it adds huge overheads to postproduction.” To help facilitate visual-effects work, Shaw always shot clean plates. “It takes me a minute to do it, and it can keep [the effects team] from spending days trying to fix something,” he says. “You just need to get everyone off the set for 10 to 15 seconds to shoot a clean plate. You might also shoot an overexposed pass and an underexposed pass, or some light movements. It’s simple to do and can save serious time and money.” “Gary is always thinking ahead,” says Clamp. “He knows I’ll always want a clean pass under exactly the same lighting conditions as the principal plates, and that tiles of the scene are useful. It’s so hard to go back and replicate the lighting at a later stage. Also, we shot HDRI [High Dynamic Range Imaging] and chrome-sphere plates for lighting reference, and Gary never struck the lighting until they had been shot. He also shot lens grids for all the lenses, which helped us put distortion into our CG and helped with tracking calculations.” Several scenes in Moon occur on the moon’s surface, when Bell exits the base to check on the helium harvesters, and the filmmakers used greenscreen and miniatures to realize them. The most important lighting reference for

American Cinematographer - July 2009

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