American Cinematographer - November 2016 - 68

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A Friend in Need

The Monster sticks close to Conor's side.

while the main unit was off shooting a
different scene.
For the animated stories that
play a part in the narrative, what was
your role, if any, in their design and
execution?
Faura: I had active participation
in the second tale, because at some point
Conor becomes one of the characters in
that tale. The challenge there was how
to integrate the boy into such a fantastic
environment. We defined the scene as a
sunset moment, and shot it entirely
greenscreen. The key light was a 20K
Fresnel playing the sun in a very low
position. The visual-effects crew in
charge of the animation at Glassworks
in Barcelona then followed the reference
of the light [position] to set their digital
sun on top of it. It worked very well,
because the light affecting Conor always
matched the animated light source, and
that was a way to integrate the boy into
the tale.
The other element was color. We
applied the warmth of the tale to Conor,
who for the first time appears wrapped
by a colorful mantle in the movie. The
sunset-sky color spectrum of the scene
varied from a light salmon at the bottom
to a dark red at the highest part - so we
had to equalize the boy with the environment, applying an averaged color on
him. The dialogue between the monster
68

November 2016

and the boy created a very powerful
color jump in the edit. The combination
of close-ups of the boy with a greengrass background with close-ups of the
monster with the red sky behind him
was a challenge for the color grading.
For this particular scene, we did
the color grading partially on a
[Foundry] Nuke station due to the large
amount of layer compositing. After the
render, [colorist Quique Cañadas]
finished the color in [Autodesk] Lustre
at Deluxe Barcelona. Taking advantage
of the sunset scene, I asked the
Glassworks visual-effects guys to add a
flare to the shots where the sun was in
frame, mimicking the particular horizontal flare of the Vintage '74 lenses. I
thought it would be a nice connection
between the tale and the following
scene, where we find Conor surrounded
by naked, flaring bulbs lying on the floor
of the destroyed sitting room. [Cañadas
performed the final grade on the movie
as a whole, as well, employing Autodesk
Lustre at Deluxe Barcelona for a 16-bit
2K DPX final deliverable.]
Regarding
visual
effects
- beyond the Monster himself - the
climactic church/cemetery scene
involved a huge mix of live, digital and
miniature elements. Please explain
how that was put together.
Faura: The Third Floor was in
American Cinematographer

charge of the previs for this scene, and
the previs was the basis of a very detailed
breakdown about how to shoot the
whole piece. We combined three essential elements to complete the scene: a
real location in Manchester, a piece of
the cemetery built on set, and a 1⁄10scale miniature of the church. [The
cemetery set and miniature were built
outdoors, adjacent to the stages.] The
director wanted to shoot the destruction
of the church by using a miniature to get
more realistic behavior of the collapsing
building, so we shot it as an action scene
with different camera angles capturing
the moment. The idea was that the
collapse was also going to appear in
several other moments of the film [as
snippets from Conor's nightmares].
We did a breakdown, and we
ended up placing [a combination of
Alexa XT Studio and Alexa XT Plus
units, eight cameras in all] around the
miniature model to cover all the camera
positions needed. The Alexas were
placed in positions matching the multiple-angle shot we had previously
captured in Manchester. The plan was
to insert the model over the real one. We
used approximately the same [focal
lengths] that we had in Manchester, but
at some moments we had to approximate them to avoid having one camera
blocking the other. Both the miniature
American Cinematographer - November 2016

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