Wow, David Slade is pretty cool about answering camera questions on Twitter.

Whenever a lot of directors are about to shoot digitally they say, “It’ll look just like film.” Your work with the ALEXA goes beyond that. It’s not trying to be film.

ROGER DEAKINS: Yeah, it just looks like what it looks like. I don’t care what it looks like, because I like the look [Laughs]. The thing that got Sam and I the most when we first starting shooting was just the clarity of an actor’s eye. He looked at it side-by-side with film, and we did a lot of comparison tests, and just that slight sharpness and subtlety of color…you’re right, it’s not film, it’s something else. I really like it. I like how it renders the real world.

So, when you’re starting to work with the ALEXA, there is no questioning over whether wanting to make it look like film? 

ROGER DEAKINS: You know, I don’t like doing the comparison thing. I do feel more comfortable with it now. I do love film, but it’s a different look. I think the advantages now definitely outweigh the disadvantages.

I don’t know if you saw the documentary Side-by-Side.

ROGER DEAKINS: Yeah, yeah, it’s a good film, but that documentary is almost out of date already. There’s so many films being shot digitally on the ALEXA and the RED — and I like the ALEXA much better than the RED, but that’s enough of that — since that documentary’s been made. Hugo, for instance, was shot on the ALEXA. So much is being shot on it. [Laughs] The weight of the comparison now is changing, but I know people who absolutely swear by film, and that’s fine. I have no problem, but I don’t see why there’s such a problem when I say I like shooting digitally and probably won’t shoot film again, unless Joel and Ethan [Coen] want to shoot something else. Yeah, it’s just another tool in the paint box, as they say [Laughs].

“Getting light into the eyes of those characters, all of whom are covered except for the eyes, was the single most important illumination task in the entire picture,” says [DP Wally] Pfister.

Gaffer Cory Geryak fashioned a 1X1 snoot for the lamp, and Pfister used it throughout the shoot as an eyelight for the three masked main characters, Batman, Catwoman and the villain, Bane.

DP Wally Pfister on Moneyball: “If you look out at one of these stadiums during a night game, generally all the lights in the stadium are turned on to create a very even light for the television cameras, the fans, and the home viewing audience.  I wanted there to be a little more mood to it, so I shut off half of the stadium lights,” the cinematographer explains.  “That created more of an edge light.  I did it very judiciously and tried to find a formula where I could make it look a little darker, but still within the reality of what baseball looks like at night.  I like using darkness as a tool for the drama and for the mood.” (via)

murmurandshout:

Film Noir Guide to Ominous Lighting

Spot on.

How do you ensure moving the camera is truly part of your storytelling? 

J.J. Abrams: Obviously, the goal is to always to get the coverage that the scene requires. Sometimes the scene requires hyper-kinetic action, and other times it requires absolute stillness.But it’s always about trying to tell the story in the most emotional way possible. So there are some shots where you want to start off with a giant mass of people from 50-feet high, and by the end you want to be right up close with your two leads, moving through a crowd with them. There are other shots where you want to establish the location, and do a medium master before you come in, and by the end of the shot, have a closeup of your hero. These are things that certainly the Technocrane allows.But cutting out of a Technocrane move can feel jarring, unless you’re cutting in to something that has an equal sort of energy, which is what we tried to do. If you can compose and choreograph a shot in such a way that by the time you’re done you’ve done the work of a couple of setups, that’s a great thing.

You introduce energy by moving the camera in different ways. Like pushing the camera in through a busy foreground, right up to your subject. 

J.J. Abrams: The fun of moving through a shot is not just to prove that you got the crane to do it or the dolly track, but that it provides a kind of 3D experience for the audience, without having to do 3D. Having something that is a point of view, and pushing through some foreground to take advantage of the parallax, activates the audience’s brain, because they really feel, “Oh, I’m moving through this space.” And you don’t need glasses for that. It allows you to move through the Z-depth of the shot, not just the X and Y.

The complex set piece was done in two four-day shoots – a “pre-crash,” where the kids can be seen making their own film, and a “post-crash,” after [production designer Martin] Whist re-dressed the set. Production captured many shots, both during and after the crash; for the actual impact, a total of nine cameras were used: four manned, and the remainder unmanned crash cams, such as Eyemos, placed in harm’s way (though all survived undamaged).

The sequence was planned out with Visual Effects Producer Chantal Feghali and Industrial Light Magic Visual Effects Supervisor Kim Libreri (with effects produced under direction of ILM effects legend Dennis Muren). ILM Animation Supervisor Paul Kavanagh created a simple animatic previsualization.

“It was mainly to block out basic action beats,” Libreri explains. “But J.J. had this great idea, given that it was such a large scale environment. Instead of pre-determining everything, he knew what the basic beats were, which he had drawn on little mini-boards. That was our beat sheet, to ensure we were shooting everything in the right order.”

Whist also built a 6-foot by 3-foot model, which enabled the team to envision where things such as cranes, crash cams and explosion events would be set.

“That was where we discussed the best angles for the camera, and where the kids could run,” Libreri recalls. Abrams still added cameras/moves on the actual day, insisting he didn’t want to bleed the scene of its reality through previz and storyboards. And Muren concurs, noting that a lot more was discovered on the day than VFX had anticipated. “You really want to leave directors and cameramen open to what they feel on the set,” Muren says. “Because the movie’s better that way.”

The crash, filmed on the “post-crash”-dressed set, involved capturing the “locomotive” (a green screen vehicle with a headlight, like that of the CG vehicle that would replace it) acting as a ram and smashing through the depot set. The ram was pulled through at a fairly fast clip (about 40 mph) by a cable attached to a crane.

Stationary cameras, of course, were not a part of the equation. In fact, Carr-Forster, shooting from the 50-foot Technocrane on the Maverick, was able to keep the scene’s focus on the kids, despite all the wild mayhem.

“So many other directors would use the explosion as the primary object,” Anderson says. “But J.J. is the kind of storyteller who uses the people as the primary object, and the explosion is almost secondary to the scene.” Anderson’s B-camera was on Steadicam on a dolly track, following both the train ram and the kids, and being pulled by grips moving at the ram’s speed. Libreri says it was like “a Ben Hur chariot Colin was on, to get some high speed motion, following the kids.”

(via Mystery Train : ICG Magazine / Showcasing the members of the International Cinematographers Guild)

“On Star Trek and MI3, I was A-camera and Phil [Carr-Foster] was B-camera, and on this film, he’s A and I’m B,” [Colin] Anderson explains. “It’s great, because there are no egos with us. We try and stay out of the way, and still get something that’s complementary.”

Adds Carr-Forster, “We know each other well. What we do is try and hide the cameras somewhere and talk to each other – ‘Do you see me here? What about if I’m here?’ It’s all done quickly,” though, as Anderson laughs, “We still shoot each other sometimes.”

Abrams’s energetic visual style added another layer of complexity that inspired a mantra for the entire team: “With J.J., the camera is always moving,” notes Anderson. “Anything that makes the shot feel alive, he wants.”

And at the core of each scene is the A-camera master, which Abrams describes as the “hero camera telling the main story.” A hero-cam, that is, of course, never a static, wide master, augmented by close-ups and cut-ins.

“There is always an effort to make sure every shot – from the beginning to the end of the master shot – is very interesting,” [DP Larry] Fong laughs. “And by ‘interesting,’ I mean elaborate and complicated.”

“[The master] is invariably an intricate move, whether we’re on a Steadicam or a Technocrane or a dolly,” Anderson adds. “That’s because J.J. designs these wonderfully elaborate moves that tell so much in one shot.”

The A-camera on the Technocrane often sat on a Chapman-Leonard Maverick™ Mobile Arm Vehicle (M.A.V.), giving Abrams even more flexibility in his shot designs. The rubber-tired Maverick is capable of moving at high speeds, and as Abrams describes, was something that, “in many cases, proved its value in its flexibility and ease of use.” Operating a Panavision® Millennium XL, usually outfitted with an anamorphic 40mm Primo or 60mm close focus lens, Carr-Forster would descend from high above to a mere foot from one of the child actors in a single move. One such example begins with a vista of the train depot as the kids arrive in a car. The crane pushes in over the tracks and, as the wind picks up and script pages fly from the hands of one of the kids, the camera pushes in on his face.

“These [type of] shots are remarkable,” Carr-Forster relates, “because they bring you from well outside the canvas all the way into the scene.” (via Mystery Train : ICG Magazine)

“Someone said to me, early on in film school—I think it might have been Ozzie Morris— if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph. If you can light and photograph the human face to bring out what’s within that human face you can do anything [laughs]. I know it sounds glib, but it is all the same. It’s all the way something affects you. That’s all there is. I really don’t know what to say [laughs].” - Roger Deakins.