American Cinematographer - August 2012 - 33

Bane’s terror
campaign continues
during a Gotham
Rogues football
game, where he and
his cohorts have
buried bombs
beneath the field.
The sequence was
staged at Heinz Field,
home of the National
Football League’s
Pittsburgh Steelers,
and features actual
NFL players. Practical
pyrotechnics staged
by special-effects
supervisor Chris
Corbould and his
crew were enhanced
with digital visual
effects created by
artists at Double
Negative.
During filming, the MSM’s size
presented a few challenges for key grip
Ray Garcia and his crew, notably set
grip Mark Wojciechowski, best boy
Rod Farley and best boy grip Charlie
Ehrlinger. “It was difficult just getting
those monsters inside cars for driving
scenes,” Garcia recalls. “We were always
cutting pieces out of or adding [mounting]
brackets to the picture cars to get
the cameras where they needed to be.”
The team rigged 1'x1' and 2'x2'
aluminum plates to speed-rail supports
to create level platforms for the camera
mount. “Sometimes we mounted the
camera to a friction head, but our
typical approach was to lock it down to
the platform with a dovetail plate, with
5⁄8-inch rods and clamps for support,”
says Garcia.
For one Imax setup, the camera
had to pan between two actors in the
front seat of a moving armored military
vehicle. To achieve this, the crew hung a
remote head from cantilevered truss
bolted to the vehicle’s roof rack. “The
only remote system that was truly able
to support the MSM was the Lev
Head,” Garcia notes. “Other heads
could accommodate it, but they weren’t
accustomed to working with that much
weight, which amounted to 95-100
pounds with the mag and accessories, so
they never functioned at 100 percent.”
One of three Imax technicians —
Wayne Baker, Doug Lavender or Stuart
MacFarlane — was always on set to
assist Pfister’s camera crew with troubleshooting
and occasional repairs.
“The MSM is like any other camera in
terms of the threading and operation,”
says Hall, “but a lot of things can
happen during a reload that will result
in a jam, and if the jam is severe enough,
it will slip the timing belt. When that
happens, you have to strip the camera
down on a bench to reset the belt. The
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MSM tolerances are so tight that a
single snowflake can cause the film to
swell and jam the camera, and at the
end of the shoot, we had to film on
location on Wall Street with an enormous
number of extras in the middle of
a snowstorm. People were holding bags
over the camera while I reloaded, but
every once in a while, a flake would get
on the film. On that day, all three bodies
were in constant rotation! Wayne would
be replacing the timing belt on one, and
another would be waiting for repairs
while we were shooting with the third,
hoping a backup would be ready before
we needed it. Fortunately, our crew was
so prepared we were able to shoot
August 2012
33
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American Cinematographer - August 2012

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