American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 56

◗

Time Travelers

Top: John
Connor (Jason
Clarke, left)
and Kyle Reese
(Jai Courtney)
lead an attack
on one of
Skynet's labor
camps in the
year 2029.
Bottom:
The crew
captures the
exterior action
against large
bluescreens.

Game of Thrones - one of which, "The
North Remembers," won Morgenthau
an ASC Award. They then took their
world-building credentials to the big
screen with 2013's Thor: The Dark World
(AC Dec. '13).
"It's a nice collaboration," Taylor
says. "I feel strongly about composition
and camera movement. I don't have the
eye Kramer has for lighting, so I'm
happy to have him do it his way.
Sometimes there might be an image he
likes but I don't think will work, and
we'll arm-wrestle. It's a fun process."
In a separate interview,
Morgenthau adds, "We share a similar
aesthetic, and having done this much
work together, we know each other's
strengths and weaknesses and comple56

August 2015

ment each other well."
The cinematographer had three
months of preproduction, during which
he and his collaborators steeped themselves in the visual style of The
Terminator (AC April '85) and
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (AC July
'91). "We broke down the work that
[Adam Greenberg, ASC] and Cameron
did on those," Morgenthau says. "We
revisit the 1984 time period of The
Terminator and re-create part of that
movie nearly shot-for-shot. We were
inspired by iconic science-fiction films
such as Blade Runner, 2001: A Space
Odyssey, La Jetée and Children of Men."
Terminator Genisys' three chief
time periods are each marked by a
unique look. "Film noir influences many
American Cinematographer

things that I do, and it's definitely here,"
the cinematographer says. "The battle
between man and machine and the fear
of a technological singularity and a
nuclear holocaust lends itself to extremes
of shadow and light, contrast and expressionism. When we go to 1984, the palette
is magenta-blue with hard light, inspired
by the lighting of Adam Greenberg,
ASC in The Terminator. The future war
has a strong cyan and blue quality with
heavy red accents from the Terminator
technology, and the look of 2017 is
cleaner, more restrained, and not colorbiased in any way."
Taylor was most inspired by T2.
"There wasn't a lot of moving camera in
that," the director notes. "There are some
great sequences of super-wide shots
cutting to intense close-ups and then
super-wide again. And Cameron's wide
shots are beautifully composed. Kramer
and I looked at a bunch of stills from T2
in trying to come up with a look for this
one."
But Terminator Genisys differs
from its predecessors in that it was
captured digitally. The crew ran two Arri
Alexa XT cameras, shooting ArriRaw in
4:3 sensor mode onto Codex XR
Capture Drives to capture a squeezed 2x
anamorphic image at a resolution of
2880x2160. This 1.33:1 squeezed information was de-squeezed in post to a
5760x2160 image (a 2.66:1 aspect ratio)
for a later 2.39:1 extraction and delivery.
"This is a visual-effects-driven
movie, and it just seemed best to shoot
digitally," Morgenthau says. "It would
have been cool to shoot flashback
sequences and the 1984 section on film,
but to build a shoot on multiple formats
would have meant carrying multiple
camera packages. For simplicity's sake we
shot everything on the Alexa XT, which
is a beautiful camera. It didn't feel like
compromising."
The movie was shot with anamorphic lenses for a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. "The
anamorphic look gave us a lot of texture
and added a more nuanced, imaginative
quality to the digital [image],"
Morgenthau notes. "We mostly used
Panavision C Series primes, which are a



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2015

Contents
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - Cover1
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - Cover2
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 1
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 2
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - Contents
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 4
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 5
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 6
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 7
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 8
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 9
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American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 14
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American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 17
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 18
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 19
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 20
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 21
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