American Cinematographer - July 2009 - 50

Risk andValor see where they’re going,” he notes. “Those things are being fired off around Baghdad all the time, and we thought we could use that kind of light to give the scene an ethereal glow.” When military flares proved impossible to get, the production obtained some signal flares — not an exact match. To better emulate the roving, overhead light he had in mind, Ackroyd and his gaffer, Matt Moffatt, devised a low-cost solution, filming the signal flares only for effect. “I’m almost embarrassed to tell you,” Ackroyd says with a laugh, “but we got some silver shiny board, like a 4-by-4, and put it on the end of a long pole or lighting stand, then pointed a powerful Xenon [flashlight] up into the shiny board. It was just enough to create that very soft glow. What’s more, we could fade that light in and out just by waving the board over our heads, and move it around like it was a floating light up in the sky that drifted away into darkness. Sometimes you just improvise things!” When James decides the bomb could have been detonated by someone just outside the Green Zone, he takes his men to hunt for suspects, and they switch off their flashlights as they leave the bomb site. “When soldiers go into battle, they switch off their flashlights,” notes Ackroyd. Instead of using any of the standard tricks for suggesting total darkness, the filmmakers allow the image to go completely black for several beats. “Black is something that gets out of your control, really,” says Ackroyd, who notes that a key component of his night strategy was shooting on Fuji Eterna 500T 8673. “When I push Eterna 500 to its limits — i.e., at night, when you cannot or do not want to bring in too much light — the image will go somewhere that’s a little bit crazy, and that’s sometimes what we wanted on this film. If you feel you’re in control of the situation, you might lose the sense of danger you’re trying to establish. I’ve been using Fuji for 10 years now, and I feel I can mess around with it.” Once they leave the site of the bomb blast, the soldiers search for suspects by scouring some urban alleyways. (This sequence was shot in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman.) “In that location, we could use some justified light and play people against silhouettes,” says Ackroyd. They pre-rigged one alleyway, but at the last minute, Bigelow decided to have the soldiers split up and go down three separate alleys, and she wanted to film them simultaneously. Ackroyd determined he would need 360-degree lighting in the added locations, and his crew rummaged through the lighting truck and came back with a mixed bag of units. “They have very wacky lightbulbs there, really high-intensity bulbs,” he notes. “There’s sodium, mercury and all kinds of other things. The color temperature could be 6000°K with extra green in it! But that’s life, so we used those things. Of course, we also used some Kino Flos and standard fluorescent tubes. Though we had done tests on all the available lights, quality control was completely out of the window! We just knew that if we mixed it all together, we’d have a sense of reality, and that’s what we wanted.” I Ackroyd and 1st AC Oliver Driscoll find a rare bit of shade on location in Jordan. tends to be my secret weapon to get the small stuff in a scene.” Tubos were among the fixtures used in a long night sequence that required a combination of sources. In the scene, the EOD squad is called in to investigate a deadly explosion in the Green Zone moments after it has occurred. The men arrive to find a huge crater surrounded by fires, mounds of rubble and survivors wailing over the dead. “Nights were tricky because we were trying to portray cities that were blacked out either because of curfew or because they’d lost power,” notes Ackroyd. “But we did have this great special effect, the fire, that we kept burning throughout the night. We just filled in and built around that.” Ackroyd’s 4' Tubos and flame bars backlit and silhouetted the soldiers and special-effects fires, while military-grade flashlights carried by some soldiers provided additional sources. Ackroyd wanted to add one more element: flares. “They light up a whole war zone so the soldiers can TECHNICAL SPECS Super 16mm and High-Definition Video Super 16mm: Aaton XTR-Prod, A-Minima HD: Phantom HD Canon lenses Fuji Eterna 250D 8663, 500T 8673 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383 50 July 2009

American Cinematographer - July 2009

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