American Cinematographer - December 2016 - 68

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Universal Translator

Top: Thirty-two Mac Tech 960LS LED Sled fixtures were positioned on trusses behind a 72'x40'
sheet of seamless bleached muslin to create a massive single source in the alien ship and to
serve as the screen behind which the extraterrestrials appear. Bottom: The crew works onstage.

shooting, however, it became apparent
that these memory sequences were
falling short. "Denis and I came out of a
dailies screening and it was eerily silent,"
the cameraman recalls. "The next morning, I get on the camera truck and Denis
is there getting an espresso, and I'm
thinking, 'Something's not right.' He
said, 'Let's talk, man.' We had a heartto-heart. 'This collaboration means so
much to us, and this film has so much
potential to be special. Let's be honest,
this [approach] isn't working.' We
decided that those scenes had to be
treated very specifically, so we went back
and made adjustments. Maybe we
needed to be on one lens and get superclose."
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December 2016

Taking the latter notion to heart,
"I got so close to Amy on some shots
that she was bumping her head on the
matte box," Young says with a laugh.
"But she was so cool about it. She
understood what we were doing."
Young decided to work with
older Zeiss Super Speed lenses to create
a soft, retro look for these home-moviestyle sequences. He wound up using a
35mm at T1.3, allowing things to fall
out of focus and, as he says, "embracing
the imperfect." The only lens filters used
throughout the production were NDs.
The memory vignettes were
exposed two stops under, while Young
was at least a stop under for the rest of
the production. "With the Alexa,
American Cinematographer

underexpose as much as you can," he
advises with a chuckle. "It's super-hard
to make that camera go to where you
can't get back information."
Vermette constructed a massive
set for much of the spaceship's interior
"in the old Dominion Bridge Company
factory in Lachine [Quebec, Canada],
commonly referred to as ADF," reports
Rivers-Moore. The set included an
enclosed 150' tunnel - which, in the
movie, extends vertically from the
bottom of the ship to its center. Weber's
team enters via scissor-lift and then
scales the tunnel's anti-gravity walls,
which then open out into an 80'x70'
chamber. It is here that the aliens, semishrouded in atmosphere behind the
main chamber's large enclosure screen,
greet the humans. Bluescreen was
placed only at the tunnel opening for
extension and to show the ground
beneath the vessel. "It was a dream to
have an actual ceiling on a set that huge,
with real movable walls and floors that
had the scraped texture of pumice
stone," Young says. Additional spaceship
interiors were captured at Mels Studios
in Montreal.
It was decided early on that no
lights would be built into the ship walls.
All illumination for the chamber and
tunnel came from the screen, behind
which the CG aliens appear. "It was a
wonderful opportunity for me to keep
doing what I'm doing, which is trying to
figure out ways to make single-source
lighting bigger, softer and better," Young
says.
The chamber's source lighting
was provided by 32 Mac Tech 960LS
LED Sled fixtures - each containing
24 4' daylight tubes - positioned on
trusses behind the screen. "In prep we
talked about the fact that it's a spaceship,
so we should try futuristic, cutting-edge
lighting," explains gaffer Eames
Gagnon. "So we said, 'Why don't we use
LEDs?' It's the new generation of lighting."
The screen was formed from a
massive 72'x40' seamless bleached
muslin infused with fire-retardant
cotton that functioned as both a

American Cinematographer - December 2016

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