American Cinematographer - August 2018 - 33

Exterior
elements for a
raucous thirdact car chase
were shot on
location by the
2nd unit -
while the main
unit shot
vehicle
interiors with
the cast, on
stage in front
of greenscreen.

While Reed is not a fan of zooming in-shot, Spinotti convinced the
director that he would only use the
zooms as variable primes. "I would go
with a prime [often a 35mm] for wide
shots with a lot of detail," the cinematographer explains. "We could use
zooms at 75mm or 100mm when covering actors in close-ups and mediumclose shots - a long lens on a face can
be extraordinary. And these days, especially with the large format, the sharpness is so high that you can rely on
zooms. But you've got to be more careful
with a waist or knee shot. And for an
exterior when we wanted to see city
lights, we would use a prime at T2.8."
Colombera credits Arri Rental for
color-matching the different lenses, and
adds that the crew employed the
cameras' internal full-spectrum ND
filters and occasionally used Mitomo
True NDs in front of the lens. "That
gave us terrific color consistency even at
high ND values," he adds.
As had been done on Ant-Man,
Panavision's Frazier Lens System
- which achieves vast depth of field
with a rotatable wide-angle taking lens
that can be positioned extremely close to
surfaces - was used extensively for
scenes in which characters are shrunken.
Rebecca Baehler, a veteran of the previous feature, returned as macro-unit
director of photography, and this time

worked with Alexa SXT and Panavision
Millennium DXL cameras - the latter
of which recorded 8K Redcode Raw
files - to capture macro-environment
plates.
Spinotti explains, "When the
characters become tiny, we wanted the
audience to experience that with them.
If you are a micro-character 21⁄2 inches
high, you would see with a lot of depth
of field. We shot several tests, and I
found that when shooting small things
like miniaturized cars, if we used a
17mm [taking lens on the] Frazier on
the DXL, we could replicate the depth
of field, feel and eye-height of shooting
from the perspective of a normal-sized
human with a 24mm lens." The cinematographer adds that ASC associate
Dan Sasaki, Panavision's vice president
www.ascmag.com

of optical engineering, "prepared a set of
lenses for us to use with the Frazier that
could stop down to T45. Their performance was extraordinary."
For such scenes, the actors were
shot against greenscreen and composited into the plate photography or CG
backgrounds. Some action called for the
characters to be CG, and in those cases
the actors' facial performances would be
composited onto their digital bodies.
Those facial performances were
captured with the actors seated,
surrounded by a rig of five Alexa SXT
cameras - shooting at 48 fps in portrait
mode - and about the same number of
Arri SkyPanel S60-Cs for soft, even
lighting that would allow the digital
artists to select whichever angle was
required.
➣
August 2018

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2018