American Cinematographer - November 2015 - 68

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Thinking Different

A row of gelled HMIs bolster the daylight ambience outside the War Memorial Opera House
in San Francisco.

"We couldn't reach to focus on
stage, so we hung our [DMXcontrolled Vari-Lites] again," Levine
continues. "We had to light the entire
lobby, backstage, 500 feet of hallways
and corridors, an elevator, multiple
stairwells, the entire downstairs café,
and a makeup room complete with
dimmable fluorescents and 20 makeup
tables. The setup would have been
impossible without incredible rigging
by John Lacy and his crew, networking
of the house ETC lighting-control
system with ours by DMX tech Stacey
Cobalt, adept control by lightingconsole programmer Stephanie Parry,
and the Opera House staff."
Act three is the film's most
modern sequence, set in 1998 at Davies
Symphony Hall, and follows a reinstated Jobs preparing to debut the iMac
computer, which would ultimately
restore Apple to prominence in the
computer industry. "Act three is about
launching the future, and we are
propelled into the sleek world of the
Alexa," notes Boyle. "It's a world of
precision and infinite possibility,
[emphasized by] the crisper, more
neutral colors of LEDs."
"Lighting-wise, Davies was very
much about the architecture and a
68

November 2015

cascade of flashes that really were an
event in themselves," says Levine.
"[Assistant chief lighting technician]
Sophie Shellenberger augmented the
computers using LiteGear ribbon and
controllers tied into the lighting
console. The house lighting covered
most of the architecture, and a combination of Chroma-Q Studio Force D
XT 12s and Lightning Strikes 250Ks
spread throughout all three tiers of the
hall gave us our flashes.
"Jim Jacobs, DSH's tech director,
had an incredibly detailed plan of the
venue already drafted in Vectorworks, so
plotting was quite simple and our
proposal was easily overlaid on his,
[which made it easier] for him to
approve our plan," continues Levine.
"Everything came together quite
quickly thanks to Dropbox and to
meetings with Jacobs, Lacy, Cobalt and
Parry to once again mesh our two
control systems. Davies also had two
Gladiator III 3K Xenon spotlights that
saved a ton of work for us."
As each act featured a projected
product presentation, Küchler also gave
consideration to the onstage projection
formats. "We did 1984 with a pair of 4:3
screens," he says. "In 1988 we switched
to 16:9 projection, and 1998 was in 2.35
American Cinematographer

to look the most advanced and cinematic. It's not quite based on period
accuracy, but we did it to enhance the
camera formats. We also added Tiffen
White Pro-Mist filters onto the front of
the projectors to get a little more light
bleed."
The eras divided neatly into the
different camera formats, but the script
occasionally prompted the filmmakers
to break those rules. As an example,
Küchler shot a flashback to appear
during the 1998 sequence that depicted
a moment set before 1984, and they
shot it with the Alexa rather than going
back to Super 16mm. "We used
uncoated Cooke Panchro primes on the
Alexa to get more flared highlights and
knock down the sharpness, but we
didn't want to go too far in jumping
radically between the formats and
become too pretentious," Küchler
comments.
Although Steadicam was the
primary camera platform, Steve Jobs also
deployed dollies, Technocranes, a
Hydrascope arm, and even a drone for a
shot during the 1988 era at the Opera
House. "We hired a Hot Gears Remote
Systems MR-14 Octocopter drone for a
huge crowd scene," reveals Irwin. "It was
a continuous shot going from the top
balcony, over the full audience, past the
chandeliers and the orchestra pit, and
finally into a medium close-up of Jobs
preparing onstage."
"The drone crew was a selfcontained unit supervised by cinematographer Mehran Salamati," Irwin
adds. "It came complete with a Red
[Epic] Dragon shooting with [Zeiss]
Compact Prime lenses, and I pulled
focus for it. It wouldn't have been possible to get that kind of shot any other
way, given the physical restrictions of
the location." According to Salamati,
the unit's wheel controller was custommade for this project.
Küchler supervised the movie's
2K DI at Technicolor in London with
colorist Jean-Clément Soret, using
FilmLight's Baselight, for a 2K DCP
final deliverable. "Danny was popping
in and out of the sessions, and we

American Cinematographer - November 2015

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