American Cinematographer - August 2016 - 36

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Hostile Planet

Jaylah works alongside Kirk and his crew to come up with a plan for defeating Krall.

Star Trek Beyond was shot primarily in and around Vancouver. Remote
dailies systems - with John Hart serving as dailies colorist - were set up in
Vancouver and Dubai, the latter location having been used to shoot exterior
and stage sequences for scenes set
aboard the immense space station
Yorktown. Dailies were timed with
Colorfront On-Set Dailies.
Opting for a constantly moving
camera, the filmmakers shot most of the
movie via handheld, Steadicam and
cranes, making use of specially rigged
remote heads. "We used cranes for big
36

August 2016

sweeping moves through and around
sets, but there is a ton of Steadicam in
this movie," Windon says. "Justin and
I agreed that the operator should not
just be someone running a camera; he
needs to be a real storyteller." The
cinematographer makes special note of
the filmmakers' collaboration with
Steadicam/A-camera operator Geoffrey
Haley, whose expertise they enlisted
while blocking scenes and framing.
From the beginning, the production's moving-camera style meant that
Irwin's focus pulling would be
performed with the help of small 7.7"
American Cinematographer

SmallHD OLED monitors. Thus,
when the 1st AC broke his leg on the
second day of production, he never lost
a step. "Everything was on one little
stand and I was able to sit right in front
of it," Irwin says.
In a pivotal sequence, the
Enterprise comes under surprise attack
by Krall's forces, who then board the
vessel, forcing the crew to abandon ship.
Among the most technically complex
endeavors on the project, the scene
inspired Lin to introduce another new
element to this Star Trek series:
gimbaled and rotating sets. Such
dynamic environments granted the
director his wish to realistically portray
the unfolding disaster and its physical
impact on the characters.
These "shaker decks," as key grip
Kim Olsen calls them, were housed on
stages at Vancouver Film Studios. The
decks were built by the production's
special-effects team, led by Cameron
Waldbauer, and sometimes rotated a full
360 degrees. "To facilitate the ability to
mount cameras and secure dollies to the
deck area on the bridge set, we had
construction
place
steel-backed
receivers into the floor in a pattern that
fit the overall aesthetic of the set," Olsen
explains. "When mounting cameras to
the set wasn't on the agenda, we would
poke a 50-foot Technocrane through
the view-screen area."
In other cases, the operators
themselves were strapped down to the
spinning sets. "A lot of these sets were
[employed] for frenetic fights, chases or
evacuations," Haley notes. "The challenge we had was to build camera rigs
that were energetic and dynamic, but
also [functional on] a set that was going
to literally be challenged gravitationally.
For some of it, we did a fair amount of
old-school handheld by just strapping
ourselves in, putting the cameras on our
shoulders, and essentially going with the
flow as action was happening around us.
But that was not physically going to
work for certain shots, and for those we
had to go more high tech."
The high-tech rig that Haley
refers to was a tracking system built into
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