American Cinematographer - August 2008 - 43

do that over 400 feet would require incredible rigging and time. Also, no matter what we did in terms of a scenic backing, we were forever looking out to sea on a multi-level set, and sea level is always at eye level, so the height of the camera dictates where the horizon has to be. If we’d made a TransLite, we would have been endlessly lifting it up and down according to the camera height. “On my previous film, Sleuth [AC Nov. ’07], I’d experimented with LED light and color mixing, and we got some fantastic results, so I thought that because a seascape is essentially a sea, the sky, some clouds and water effects, maybe we could use these colors to make a changeable backdrop. Biggles and I started experimenting with that quite early on, then we tried a back-projection material, and then we moved onto a combination of back-projected Martin lights, Mac 2000s and 700s.” After a relatively crude initial test at Pinewood, executive producer Mark Huffam was sufficiently impressed to encourage further testing. “A week or two later, we built a 30-by-20-foot backing with denser material,” recalls Higgins. “We put maybe 60 moving lights behind it — Mac 2000s, which have a lot of built-in features — with a selection of gobos. We photographed this test and programmed the moving lights to run through a slide show of each different look with the camera running. This was still on a relatively small scale, but when the studio saw it, they realized we were going in the right direction and they committed to it. Finding the right material to back-project onto was important; we were worried we might see hot spots from the lights behind [the backing], so we needed something that was quite dense but still translucent. In the end, we found a material with the perfect balance.” About 350 moving lights were eventually used, but that was still insufficient to light the entire backdrop. “We couldn’t do the whole thing because there just weren’t enough lights available in England or Europe!” says Zambarloukos. “So we did another part of the backing with a combination of AFM fluorescents that we could DMX-control. We used blue and green gels and mixed those tubes to [approximate] the color of the sky we got with Macs. We used Chris Gilbertson’s Light by Numbers dimming system and brought in an additional operator, Chris Craig, to man a separate dimming console just for the backing. “We had custom gobos made for the moon, for twinkling stars, and for a wave or water-ripple effect,” he continues. “We used various photographic images of clouds, and we could also program moving Above: Sophie enjoys a boisterous dance number staged on a wooden pier in scenic Greece. Below left: Zambarloukos takes a meter reading near the sparkling sea. Below right: Sophie and her friends discover a few surprises in her mother’s diary. American Cinematographer 43

American Cinematographer - August 2008

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