Robert Primes: Chimera Soft Light

From American Cinematographer, Big City Girl by Stephanie Argy (February 1999)

In spite of these difficulties, Primes has managed to carefully maintain the photographic approach that Reeves wants for the show.

"Almost all of the light is soft, and it's very often shining through Chimeras, or frames of 1000H, Chimera cloth, 216, 250 or opal. Those are the diffusion materials we use... One of the nice things about hard light is that you can really shape it. But how do you cut soft light?"

In recent years, the cinematographer has found the answer in Chimera's honeycomb grids, which attach in front of the company's flexible softboxes to concentrate the light, rather than letting it scatter. The grids come in 30-, 60- and 90-degree increments, referring to the angles to which the light is allowed to spread.

"In the past, I was using the 60s most of the time, the 90s some of the time, and the 30s not very much. Marshall [gaffer Marshall Adams] started using the 30-degree grid, which takes a tremendous amount of light. You need 10,000 watts to get anything out of it, and by golly, there it is, just a soft little spotlight. You can have someone in a little glow, and light nowhere else... Our extra smallest Chimeras use 650W tweenies, while our largest use 20Ks."

- Robert Primes, ASC

Janusz Kaminski: Directional & Diffused Exterior Lighting

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August 1998)

Kaminski was also able to modify the sunlight to his liking for some shots by utilizing Rosco #3004 Half Soft Frost diffusion in place of an overhead silk.

"For some of the exteriors, we chose to use Half Soft because it allows the light to have some direction while still softening it," Devlin explains. "Whereas with a silk, you create an overall soft ambiance, but you then have to compete with the much-brighter backgrounds. A lot of times there’s really no difference between having a silk or a solid up. One nice thing about Half Soft Frost is that it allows the sun to have a strong direction, and yet the light will wrap enough to fill people’s eyes."

- David Devlin (Gaffer for Janusz Kaminski on Saving Private Ryan)

John Mathieson: Film Destruction Techniques

From American Cinematographer, Brush With the Gutter by Holly Willis (Sept. 1998)

Mathieson tried to toy with his equipment and lights in order to alter or distort the images he was getting much in the manner that Bacon warped and stretched his own imagery. His description of techniques is a tour through the don’ts of filmmaking, and yet the results are extraordinary.

Mathieson shot some scenes using a 5x4 Sinar plate camera, which he would place in front of the Arri without its plate. Where the plate would normally go, he positioned a piece of tracing paper. "The image would be soft, sort of blurred," he attests, and this effect not only framed the subject like a still camera would, but made images that approximated the blurriness of many of Bacon’s paintings. Another technique involved removing the shutter from the Arri 435.

"We disconnected the shutter, keeping it open. Then we’d use a domestic drill with a handmade shutter in front of the camera. It would run asynchronously, and we’d rev it at different speeds to make the image flutter. If you moved it away from the camera, you’d get these great flash-frames that would stretch and tear from top to bottom, creating images that jumped at you. We did our own fogging in the camera as well, using the Arri VariCon, which enables one to fog the film using different colors. We also tried putting red gel on the side of the camera, then opening up while we were shooting to make a more ’brutal’ fogging effect."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also did a lot of double exposures in the camera. One of the film’s final scenes shows Bacon in a bathroom, where Dyer appears as a ghostlike presence. Similar images abound throughout the film, and while budget may have been one of the reasons for doing this and many of the other effects in the camera, Mathieson and Maybury felt that the old-fashioned technique lent the film a certain ambiance.

"When you double-expose [a shot], there’s something about the way it sits on the negative, with the light passing through and hitting the emulsion it just sits better than if you mix it or do CGI to it. It’s also a lot more fun, and you can relight things for different exposures or use different colors. Anyway, John would get so excited about the rushes you’d see the shot right away."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Yet another approach utilized to distort images was to shoot through large chunks of glass. "I’ve been dragging bits of glass around for years," concedes the cameraman. "Alan [Macdonald] would find these lovely pieces of glass to shoot through." Some of the glass pieces were old, heavy ashtrays, but all were simply held in front of the camera for the shot. Mathieson also used an assortment of old lenses.

"We had this odd collection. We had an old Angenieux, for example, which we did terrible things to with Vaseline. We also took the elements out of some of the lenses, and we also used a Frazier lens once. With the Frazier you have to use the Panavision camera, but the lens system has its own peculiar kind of optics. It does extreme close-ups."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also used a boroscope lens for close-ups.

"The optical quality of a boroscope is terrible, really. But what you can do with them is amazing. They are very good for doing close-ups of things like white mice building nests they’re used by natural history people for studying nature. But we used them for snooping around and looking at bad skin or stained fingers."

- John Mathieson, BSC

The boroscope is unusual in that it can both do close-ups and wide-angle shots; the image is distorted at either setting, and Mathieson used this warping effect to lend a repulsive quality to the faces of the people who hung around Bacon, making them appear as they would have had they been rendered by the artist on canvas.

The cinematographer also employed an array of gels to augment his subjects’ more hideous qualities.

"We got that Bacon dead-flesh look using old gels. They were strange correction gels for lamps that people don’t use anymore. They have very weird colors, and most have been discontinued. We also used a lot of cosmetic gels, but in a very uncosmetic way. There’s an LCT Yellow, for example, which is a weird, horrible color that makes everyone look ill or dead. Usually when you put a gel in front of a light, it looks very intense and strong, and we didn’t want that. We wanted something more subtle, something dirty, and we found that these old gels really gave us the desired waxy, dead-meat look."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Antonio Calvache: 'Negative Diffusion' & Flashbacks

From American Cinematographer, Industry Town Embraces the Indies by Holly Willis (July 1998)

The flashbacks were originally slated to be shot in Pennsylvania (the location of Tom's hometown), but the film's budget prohibited the production from moving to the East Coast.

"Because there is nothing nearby L.A. that looks like Pennsylvania, we had to forget the realistic approach and substitute the lack of information in the landscape with the increasing emotional effect of the scene, achieved by a visual approach unique to these flashback scenes. I had experimented in still photography with a technique I term 'negative diffusion', which is using diffusion in the printing process from negative to positive, as opposed to diffusion used in the camera during exposure of the negative. I had used it for music videos during telecine, but it gets more complicated with film. We had to use an optical printer, and place a diffusion filter in front of its lens for that same footage. We increased the contrast by using a mix of interpositive and release stocks in the duplicate process."

- Antonio Calvache

The resulting effect is a series of images that seem simultaneously brilliant and washed-out, like an overwhelming memory that is being painstakingly repressed.

Antonio Calvache: 'Negative Diffusion' & Flashbacks

From American Cinematographer, Industry Town Embraces the Indies by Holly Willis (July 1998)

The flashbacks were originally slated to be shot in Pennsylvania (the location of Tom's hometown), but the film's budget prohibited the production from moving to the East Coast.

"Because there is nothing nearby L.A. that looks like Pennsylvania, we had to forget the realistic approach and substitute the lack of information in the landscape with the increasing emotional effect of the scene, achieved by a visual approach unique to these flashback scenes. I had experimented in still photography with a technique I term 'negative diffusion', which is using diffusion in the printing process from negative to positive, as opposed to diffusion used in the camera during exposure of the negative. I had used it for music videos during telecine, but it gets more complicated with film. We had to use an optical printer, and place a diffusion filter in front of its lens for that same footage. We increased the contrast by using a mix of interpositive and release stocks in the duplicate process."

- Antonio Calvache

The resulting effect is a series of images that seem simultaneously brilliant and washed-out, like an overwhelming memory that is being painstakingly repressed.

Emmanuel Lubezki: Large Soft Boxes

From American Cinematographer, Galloping Ghost by Stephen Pizzello (December 1999)

The crew's grim slog was brightened a bit by Lubezki's lighting setup, which comprised three giant softboxes suspended from a trio of 250-ton construction cranes. The roof of each unit contained six 24-light (Par 64) Dinos aimed downward, while three of the sides contained a trio of 9-light Maxi-Brutes angled at 45 degrees. According to gaffer John Higgins,

"Our initial idea for that set was to have a tank-track road ringing the set, and we did tests with various lighting rigs at positions we could access from the tracks. That idea proved to be impractical for many reasons. Instead, we decided to suspend these very large soft sources on rotating bases that could be positioned at any point above the set and still be kept hidden. The art department built a fantastic scale model of the set, and when we studied it we though there might be three points where we could position our supports. We eventually located a company that had three 250-ton telescoping cranes with a reach of 67 meters [approximately 220 feet]. The art department then made working scale models of these cranes, which we positioned around the model. This test confirmed that the only way to reach all points on the set was to use three cranes. We then did a test with a half-size version of our rig, which confirmed that our theory would work."

- John Higgins, gaffer for Lubezki on Sleepy Hollow

Each of the completed soft-boxes consisted of a 20' x 20' base with sides 12' high built from scaffolding. The units had to be strong enough to be suspended safely with the lights attached, and the set''s roads also had to be reinforced to support the cranes' weight. Each box could provide 250k of light, and full gridcloth was affixed to the bottom and sides of each. Long black ropes were attached to the corners of the rigs so the crew could control their rotation from the ground. The last lamp mounted on the base of each rig was a 70k Lighting Strikes unit, and the power to the rigs was provided by twin 200k generators. The rest of the power for the set was provided by three other generators, while a complete cabling system was wired and then buried during construction of the set. The system enabled the lighting crew to deliver large amounts of power to any part of the set very quickly.

..."In a funny way, using the cranes was cheaper than lighting the sets any other way. When you rig immense softlights up on cranes, you can move them really quickly. Each rig has only one light, and you can put it anywhere you want, which allowed us to do more setups a day. We also didn't have to use much supplemental lighting at all-- almost none, in fact. Sometimes from the ground we'd add a bit of fill light just to see the actors' eyes and so forth. Any extra lights we used on the ground were always aimed through diffusion grids. Bu the time the light reached the subjects it was simply a 20' by 20' gird of light, so it almost didn't matter whether we were using 10ks or Mini-Brutes. A cinematography purist might not agree with that statement, but once you put the light through so many layers, it really doesn't matter what kind of fixture you're using. I would basically tell the crew which stop I wanted, and John Higgins would pick a light and use it to fill a 20' by 20' frame."

- Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC

Edward Lachman: Cooke Panchro Primes I

From American Cinematographer, Mad-Dog Englishman by David E. Williams (November 1999)

Lachman used Moviecam Compacts on The Limey, generally fitted with his personal set of Series II and III Cooke Speed Panchro primes.

"Those lenses were made 30 years ago, which contributed to the look of the film. The Cookes don't have the contrast, definition, or multicoatings that a modern lens like a Primo has. They're softer and more forgiving, so we didn't use any diffusion. Steven also liked the lens flares we'd sometimes get with them. At night, though, I'd use Zeiss Superspeeds."

- Edward Lachman, ASC

Bill Pope: Large Sets and Par Cans

Australian Gaffer Reg Garside, working with Bill Pope, ASC on the film The Matrix, discusses the lighting needs for the Matrix highspeed shooting sequences.

"The high speed lighting requirements were a big concern, because on the big sets-- such as the subway and the government building exterior and lobby-- we needed a massive amount of light to be able to shoot between Bill's T2.8 base and the T16 needed for high-speed filming. On some stages, in fact, we had to rig more than 1,000 Par cans in the permanents [to produce the needed levels of light]. I used Par cans a lot because I could easily control the ambeince from T2.8 to T16 just by turning additional units on and off.

Also, Par cans are much cheaper than Maxi-Brutes, adn although they use the same sort of bulb [a Par 64], I've found that I can rig them in much more weird or difficult places than I can put a Maxi. Having 1,000 Par cans is actually like having 80 Maxis, but we don't even have 80 Maxi-Brutes in Australia!

For speed and maximum control, every single light ran through a dimmer rack, so if Bill told me tol give him a T8, I could give him a T8 by adjusting a lever on the controls. For a T2.8, you may only use one lamp, but for a T16 you may need 32 lamps. You're really dealing with an exponential doubling up effect to get the extra stops. Bill actually used a lot of over-head lights through light grid cloth diffusion to create an ambiance. So I had [rigging gaffer] Craig Bryant pre-rig Par cans in the roof for an ambiance that could get me up to a T16. We then had to build a lot of custom overhead cloths, which we call sails, and virtually hand-fit them into position on the sets."

-Red Garside

"We shot most of this movie with tungsten lights. Also, by using Par cans, we could change the light level without changing the color temperature, simply by turning units on or off. However, I do like to use Kino Flos on faces for interiors. In fact, I prefer to have Kinos around the actors, because they're a lot cooler. We used truckloads of Wall-O-Lites and 4' by 4' Kinos on this film."

-Bill Pope, ASC

Matthew Leonetti: "Croney Cones" and "Phoney Cones"

Pat Blymer served as Chief Lighting Technician (gaffer) for Matthew Leonetti on Star Trek Insurrection.

"Above the Bridge set, there were 12 pie shaped ceiling pieces made out of muslin, and we had a 5k senior hitting into each one of them-- this gave us about 12 foot candles of ambient light throughout the entire set. We then hung lights as needed to accentuate the actors, usually tweenies with special diffusion cones on them. Jordan Cronenweth [ASC], who shot Blade Runner, had these devices called 'Croney Cones'. They were 5' long and made out of tinfoil, and he put them on the front of seniors and 10Ks. The paper diffusion on the front, either 216 or 250, softened up the light. Through the years, we made our own version of them out of showcard, which we call 'phoney cones.'"

-Pat Blymer