American Cinematographer - July 2011 - 42

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Ring of Power

Fueled by willpower, the power ring can create whatever Jordan can imagine. Much of the interactive light from the ring and energy suit was created with an LED ribbon.

involved Sony PMW-EX3 prosumer cameras that were synced and gen-locked with the film cameras, and would shoot off-angle whenever we had Ryan in his suit or Sinestro [played by Mark Strong] in his suit, which is also virtual. That gave the visual-effects artists the information they needed to build the dimensional suit.” The white LED necklace Reynolds wore for this work — an LED ribbon controlled by 9-volt batteries — was custom-designed for the production by LiteGear. “We needed a light source that was alive on Ryan to help us feel the pulsing energy of the suit,” says Buckley. “The LEDs were perfect because they could move with him. We attached them with Velcro and gelled them with ½ Minus Green. They gave us good interactive light elements.” For shots of the Lantern, Beebe and his camera team had to carefully frame Reynolds’ mid-chest area, where the pulsating Green Lantern logo would be added in post. “[A-camera operator] Peter McCaffrey and I talked constantly about focal lengths,” Misisco recalls. “We had to know if we should be seeing the whole symbol or only half of it. Some close-ups would stop under his chin, and then we would have to get creative about framing the symbol in or, in some shots, out.” As the project rolled on, special motion-capture shoots of Reynolds in his tracking suit became routine. Typically, six witness-camera operators worked in
42 July 2011

concert with Beebe’s camera crew, but took direction on framing, camera position and angles from Berney. Part of their challenge was filming Reynolds’ face and neck so that Imageworks could create what Berney calls “the blend line,” where the suit merges into the character’s neck. “There

“We needed a light source that was alive on Ryan to help us feel the pulsing energy of the suit.”
is no suit collar or hard edge to glom the head onto,” says Berney. “Close to the camera, you see the suit as part of the skin, a natural transition to real skin. To achieve that, we had to come up with a technique to mimic or duplicate all the muscle movements of the neck — and there are more muscle movements and combinations on the neck than in the face. So we put tracking markers on Ryan’s face and neck to get movements where we could do a one-to-one correspondence and extrapolate not only
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facial motion, but also neck motion.” Imageworks tweaked a version of its facial-movement-tracking software to work for neck movement. Eventually, the team shot separate face-capture and neck-capture sessions of Reynolds and later combined that data with data from whole-body shots, tracking the CG suit up the actor’s neck. Green Lantern required a range of other lighting effects and light-capture techniques. The biggest set piece is a giant government lab designed to house a large, mysterious machine that scans aliens. Buckley used a 60' 12-strand rope light configured out of pieces he found in China to build 12 separate but identical circuits that could be set to pulsate in unison with the pounding of the giant scanner. Dimmer-board operator Brian Booth controlled the lights through a Whole Hog 3 during filming. Other techniques were employed to capture real-world light elements to use in various combinations to build interactive light. For wide shots that showed entire environments being impacted by a light blast, Beebe had his crew place lights on poles, controlled by dimmers, so that cameras could track swirling, radiant light around characters to enhance the effect of the Green Lantern. “Actually, the idea got bigger,” Beebe notes. “With the help of key grip Don Reynolds and his crew, we rigged a 10K bulb to the end of a 50-foot Technocrane. That allowed us to reach

American Cinematographer - July 2011

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