American Cinematographer - August 2007 - 47

It’s worth it to spend the extra money pre-rigging so you can save time on your $300,000 days.” The action transitions to the present with the mysterious crash landings of objects that appear to be meteorites. Curious teenager Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) investigates one crash site with his girlfriend, Mikaela (Megan Fox). The couple quickly discovers the Transformers have arrived and begun wreaking havoc. The mayhem continues as a rogue helicopter approaches an airbase in Qatar at dusk and is ordered to land. (Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico provided the location.) As the helicopter lands, it transforms and reveals itself as Blackout, a nasty Decepticon who proceeds to make short work of soldiers and military hardware alike. Capt. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sgt. Epps (Tyrese Gibson) fend off the robot, but not before he launches Scorponok, a burrowing Decepticon, who takes the form of a scorpion. “We used three BeBee Night Lights for the broad strokes, with nine or 15 6K Pars on their remote heads,” says Ryan. “With Michael, you have to figure out ways to light so it’s not going to take an incredible amount of time to re-light, and so you can photograph the units if necessary. So we incorporated the lighting into the scene. We put little Honda generators in the backs of jeeps and then mounted four 1K Par cans and 1,200-watt HMIs on them. When they drive up, they’re actually lighting the shot, and you buy them as military vehicles.” Bay adds, “When Andy told me that idea, I thought it was brilliant. We had to shoot right as the sun was going down, two days in a row. Also, you don’t get military equipment for long, just a day or two.” Aerial cinematographer David B. Nowell, ASC helped capture the action using a gyrostabi- lized SpaceCam mounted to the nose of an A-Star helicopter. “The SpaceCam uses a modified Mitchell Mark II pin-registered camera, typically with a Panavision-mount Angenieux HR 10:1 zoom with an anamorphic back end,” says Nowell. “For the nighttime battles we switched the 10:1 back to spherical and pushed the 5218 one stop so we could shoot at around a T4. For some daytime desert scenes, we covered an A-10 Thunderbolt air strike and also brought in some V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.” A subsequent scene takes place the next morning at a desert Bedouin camp and garrison; this was filmed at the White Sands Missile Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico. “The week before we got there, two of the construction guys were sent to the hospital with sunburn,” says Amundsen. “It’s all white sand, and the reflected light is incredibly powerful. And we had to wrap our cameras carefully because the sand went everywhere.” Ryan recalls, “We were out in 115-degree heat for four days. The sky was blue, the sun was out and the sand was white, so there wasn’t a lot of extra lighting there! Michael rarely let us put up a diffusion frame to take an actor out of direct sun because that would have taken too much time. So we decided to go with the toplight and use bounce cards to add fill on the actors’ closeups. It ended up making for a better look.” The scene features a centerpiece shot of Scorponok bursting out of the sand in slow motion to ambush Lennox and Epps. “It was done in three passes at 360 fps on a Photo-Sonics 4ER [with a spherical Primo 4:1 zoom],” says Amundsen. “First, we had the actors run at us in slow motion. Then we did a second pass with a big explosion in the sand, and finally we shot a clean pass. ILM added Scorponok flying out of the sand. We figured out that shot in a previz animatic long Above: Human soldiers attempt to fend off the powerful robots amid the sandscapes of Qatar. These scenes were shot at Halloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where the temperature reached 115°F. Below: Director Michael Bay (right) leads his troops through the desert. American Cinematographer 47

American Cinematographer - August 2007

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