American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 57

bit softer and gentler and take some of
the hardness off the digital [image] but
still look super crisp." E Series lenses
were called upon for occasional shooting
at 135mm and 180mm, while the second
unit made use of the G Series. "Each one
of those lenses is hand-built and handtweaked by Panavision," the cinematographer continues. "It's a lot of fun to have
that much control over the optics. You
don't have as much control over the digital sensor as one might have had with a
photochemical process, but you can now
focus on how the light is shaped and
texture is created optically."
He adds that they shot mostly at
T4. "The C Series looked best there," he
notes. "The resolution gets trickier if [the
aperture gets much wider]." The crew
chose Panavision AWZ2 40-80mm
T2.8 and ATZ 70-200mm T3.5 zooms
when using camera cars and the
Supertechno 30 crane. "They're great on
cranes when you don't always have time
to change lenses," Morgenthau says.
He jokes that Taylor sees the world
through a 40mm lens. "The 40mm feels
like a normal point of view and the
50mm is slightly more elegant," the
director responds. "For anamorphic I
mostly use the 50mm. That's partly
because I came up through a certain kind
of storytelling on The Sopranos and Mad
Men. It's not like a Michael Bay style
with super-long lenses and lots of moving
camera."
Double Negative and the Moving
Picture Company were the movie's main
visual-effects vendors, with Industrial
Light & Magic chipping in shots of San
Francisco getting nuked. Academy
Award winner Janek Sirrs (The Matrix)
served as visual-effects supervisor. Taylor
says Sirrs was "very proactive with
suggestions about story and the way
action sequences might be handled." The
filmmakers opted for in-camera effects
where possible, but the digital component was large, in part due to the production's altering of New Orleans to look like
Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Seventy-seven days of main-unit
principal photography got underway in
April 2014. Production designer Neil

Top: A T-800
guards the
labor camp.
Bottom: The
camp's human
captives are
freed.

Spisak built massive sets, including 1984
and 2029 versions of the TDD.
Approximately 15 percent of the eggshaped 2029 room with its raised central
TDD platform - which the resistance
discovers after a battle - was
constructed at NASA's Michoud
Assembly Facility, and the rest was digitally extended over greenscreen by
Double Negative.
Morgenthau had eight to 12
practical work lights and four 2K halogen bulbs custom-fabricated by the setdecorating department and installed
around the TDD to illuminate the set
and actors and to produce flares. Fill
lights for actor close-ups included a pair
of Kino Flo Celeb 200 DMX LEDs, a
pair of Celeb 400s and a 400Q; these
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fills, diffused with Magic Cloth, were
operated by lighting-console programmer Kevin Matz. Additionally, 60
checker-boarded DMX Image 80s on
an overhead truss behind a 60'x100' silk
provided ambience. On these fixtures,
five tubes were 3,200K and three were
5,500K so the crew could always find the
appropriate day/night color mix without
gelling.
After Reese apprehensively enters
the TDD platform, he is raised by a
hydraulic lift, then floats in the antigravity chamber as the time-travel
process begins. The crew filled the
wedged, circular ceiling of the TDD
with strips of LiteGear LED
LiteRibbon plugged into separate
circuits and programmed to different
August 2015

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