Janusz Kaminski: Exterior Lighting, Negative Fill & Smoke

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August '98)

"For the most part, we really didn’t light much on the invasion. When the actors were in the Higgins boats, we did add some light with white and silver bounce cards to up-light the actors a little so we could see their eyes under their helmets. The ’lighting’ was more about how the negative was being exposed, the lenses and the use of the ENR. The great thing about war movies is that almost everything is drab, dark and dirty, so we weren’t fighting those elements. In fact, the actors’ eyes become [comparatively] bright because their faces are so dark and dirtied."

- David Devlin, Gaffer on Saving Private Ryan.

Kaminski determined that with constant overcast light, he could suitably control the film’s look with the aid of the Panaflasher and the ENR process. Additionally, he incorporated the heavy use of smoke which obviously was a key component in selling the "war" visually as an essential ingredient in his photography. Dense black smoke also offered the added benefit of blocking out any unwanted sunlight that might have sneaked through the cloud cover.

"One of the most amazing and awful things I’ve ever seen were these big drums of diesel fuel that the special effects guys were burning to create huge clouds of black smoke. They also designed a system for making white smoke that was mounted in the bed of a pickup, which was attached to a trailer with a 200-gallon tank of diesel fuel. They had about six of these pickup trucks that could drive up and down the beach as a self-contained unit. The lighting for that whole sequence was more about taking the light away, and when they turned those smoke machines on, it would cut down three or four stops of exposure."

"For closer shots, we’d sometimes bring in a bounce card or solid for negative fill. One of the things I’ve learned over the years while working outside is that if the cinematographer wants to control the sunlight — and the production can afford it — you should have a crane and a large frame standing by. That way you can cover a large area and get the lines [of the overhead’s coverage] out of the shot. Because we used a 30’ by 30’ silk and smoke on Private Ryan, the smoke would cover any of the lines made by the silk. Between those two elements, the ’lighting’ was consistent and it worked great."

-Key grip Jim Kwiatkowski

Joe Viskocil: Fire, Explosions & Miniatures

From American Cinematographer, Tearing up the Town by Ron Magid (December 1998)

"Originally, [ID4's visual effects supervisor] Volker Engle wanted to do teh Wall of Fire with a cloud tank effect coming toward camera, which looked good but not real. [Director] Roland Emmerich was adamant about having a tidal wave of fire going down the city blocks. I said, 'The only way that fire is going to do that is if we fudge the set.' Fire has only one way to go, and that's up. So we locked the camera onto the ceiling and just tipped the street set sideways so this fireball would come right at the camera."

- Joe Viskocil, Miniature Special Effects Supervisor on Godzilla


"If it's really flimsy, you're going to get a lot more information on film, because you can use a small charge-- small in the sense that it's not a really fast explosion. The slower the explosion, the more information you're going to get on film and the more detail you're going to see. You also have to keep it all in frame!"

- Joe Viskocil, Miniature Special Effects Supervisor on Godzilla

Janusz Kaminski: ENR & Flashing Film

From American Cinematographer, Breaking Slavery's Chains by Stephen Pizzello (January 1998)

"This was the first movie on which I used ENR, and it was also the first where I flashed the film. On The Lost World, I did extensive tests with Deluxe's CCE process. It's an incredible process, but it was a little too harsh for that particular movie. I felt that Amistad would be the right movie to use a process on. If you don't prepare, though, you can really get yourself into problems with the darkness and the contrast. ENR can almost be so high-contrast that there are no mid-range tones; if you're not careful, everything becomes either black or white. You therefore have to test, and you have to use a certain lighting style. You don't necessarily have to flash, but you do have to start filling out the shadows a bit. I flashed this film because I did comparison tests for certain things-- with flashing and without it. I found that the ENR becomes very slick and elegant if you don't flash it. It's very beautiful, but if you flash 10 or 15 percent it becomes grittier, which was the look I wanted for the story. I learned a tremendous amount about ENR from the interview American Cinematographer did with Darius Khondji [AFC] on Evita. That's a good example of a film in which great lighting is augmented by ENR for a beautiful final result. Darius' explanation of his ENR work was very helpful to me; he basically said, 'Flash it, test it and see if you like it.'

For a typical scene, I would flash the wide shot about 10 percent, but if I wanted a bit more drama or contrast I would flash maybe 7 percent. We used standard white light in the flashing. The Panaflasher is a very interesting device; I'd tested it on seven or eight other occasions, but I'd never liked it, simply because I love to have contrast. But this time, in conjunction with the ENR, I really liked it. We flashed the negative, which introduced some light into the shadows and added some grain, and then applied the ENR, which kind of counterbalances the flashing by adding more contrast and getting rid of the grain. However, ENR also affects your color saturation; the colors become softer, and the highlights become a bit metallic. That was the kind of look I wanted. I was losing a bit of the grittiness by adding ENR, but the flashing made up for it."

- Janusz Kaminski

"The special processes really added something to the film, because all of a sudden the stocks didn't look so clean. I just did some commercials with stocks that have up to 9 or 10 stops of latitude, and as the emulsions go more in that clean direction, it becomes harder to give scenes a really emotional feeling. Nowadays you sometimes have to go through leaps and bounds with the lighting to make it interesting and give it a real signature. When you use special processes to alter the way the film records, you can create a look that doesn't look quite so stylized, because the lighting doesn't have to be so overt. If you control the look on several different levels-- as Janusz did on this film with ENR, flashing and smoke-- it's a bit more effective."

- David Devlin, Gaffer for Janusz on Amistad

"During my career, I've always put a barrier between myself and technology. But on this movie I was branching out more with the ENR and the flashing. I also started underexposing the negative which I had never done. And all of a sudden, a new door opened. I started going much further into darkness than I had before. I'd always felt that you could achieve the same type of look without underexposing the negative; you can, but you won't achieve the painterly quality that the grain gives you. In addition, the color saturation becomes different when you go two stops under-- I'm talking about reading T2 on the keylight and shooting at T4. Here and there you might have a hint of light somewhere, reflecting off some glass or something, but you don't want to go more than T2 because you'll start to mess things up."

- Janusz Kaminski

Emmanuel Lubezki: Smoke and Lightning

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

"There are some elements in the film that might be viewed as 'cheap', such as the heavy use of smoke, but in a weird way, those elements help to make the images more beautiful and interesting. Using smoke also allowed us to get a consistent look for the movie. When all of the sets are smoked, you can't tell what was done on stage and what wasn't. I didn't want teh light to be too baroque, with all kinds of backlights, kickers and little lights. Most of the lighting was created with very big sources, so you can't really tell where the light is coming from. In the Western Woods set and at some of the other locations, you can definitely see the smoke-- it looks like the fog they used in the old Frankenstein and Mummy movies! Balancing the smoke therefore wasn't much of a problem on exterior sets, but it became really complicated when we used it in a smaller set like Ichabod's room, where I didn't want the audience to feel the smoke. It's difficult but after a week of using smoke you get a better feel for the proper level and how much is too much. Our use of smoke was also dependent on the CCE process. In our case, we could use more smoke, because we knew that the process would 'see through' it. The smoke affected the blacks, but the process also affected the blacks in the opposite way, so everything balanced out. Of course, if you're going to use smoke, you have to live with the limitations. One problem with using smoke was that sometimes, when we were working outside with our big cranes, the smoke would reveal where the light was coming from. That drove me insane, and I lost the battle a couple of times; in two or three shots, I had to beg the visual effects team at ILM to erase the light that was closer to the cranes, or to take the edge off."

- Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC

"Usually I hate lightning as an effect, because it has the potential to take the viewer out of the movie a bit. If it's supposed to be raining, it's fine, but otherwise it can be a bit much. When we did tests with the Headless Horseman, though, we found that the lightning really added a lot of energy to the character-- it made him more impressive, scary and Burtonian. Every time the Horseman is going to kill someone, the lightning appears as dramatic punctuation. The problem with lightning is that it really affects the editing of the movie. If it's really fast paced in one cut, and you go to a shot where the lightning doesn't match, you start to feel this lack of freedom. It took us a while to learn how to keep it constant without obliterating the images with lightning. It looks really interesting when you're shooting it, but you have to control yourself!"

- Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC

Emmanuel Lubezki: Artificial Sky

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

"One day we had a big meeting with everyone, and we talked about building everything at Leavesden Studios. When we went to England on the first scouting trip, they showed me the sets on the stages, and I thought they were joking-- all of the stage ceilings were really low, and the sets were less than 20' high. That created some big limitations, and as a result, I had to throw out my initial plans for the lighting. My first idea had been to employ huge sources, most of which would come from the back to create silhouettes, and to use very little fill light. However, the approach I eventually adopted worked out much better: I decided to create a huge toplight, which I had never done before. The stage ceilings were so low that we couldn't really hide lights in the greenbeds. Instead, we created a huge sense of sky for the exteriors shot in the stages. We installed over 500 space lights up in the ceiling, very close to each other, and then pumped smoke into the rafters to create a false sky and obscure the fixtures. That was, all of the light would seem to be coming from the sky, as it would in reality. Being low helped me because I was getting the stop I wanted, and it was easier to control the smoke."

- Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC

Peter Menzies Jr: Depth in Night Exteriors

From American Cinematographer, A Few Bad Men by Jay Holben (July 1999)

"We had to find a way to show depth of the location without the classic 'moonlight' source. We had guys put out cable stretching several hundred yards away form the main set in all directions, and we'd put lamps out there-- nine lights, Dinos and single Mole Pars. Then we would put different gels on them, depending on where they fell into frame and the type of color contrast Peter wanted to see. Finally we would add a lyaer of smoke between the lamps and the set-- that worked very well and created amazing depth."

-Rafael Sanchez, Gaffer for Menzies on The General's Daughter

"Peter is a master at using smoke. Because we were doing a lot of night shooting in wide-open spaces, the light obviously only travels so far. Beyond that it all just goes to black, which can make for a very boring frame, but Peter had this incredible system of smoke machines and miles of plastic pipes running all around with little tine holes. He would send smoke down them, and it would slowly leak out over a wide area, creating a very moody mist off in the distance."

- Simon West, Director of The General's Daughter

"I was using the fog as separation to reduce contrast in the background, and to add depth. With stray sources placed way off in the distance, once the smoke got between them and the camera, it created this whole atmosphere that extended the set far beyond the foreground. The special effects team had these smoke tubes made out of visqueen [a material similar to that used for garbage bags]. They were about a foot in diameter, and the crew would lay them all over the place. They'd put one little smoker between every couple of hundred yards, so we could run a mile of smoke very easily. If we wanted more smoke, we could just cut more holes in the tubes, and if we wanted less smoke, we could just patch them up. It was great for the rough terrain as well; because the tubes were flexible, we could just run them out anywhere. We used them a lot around the water edges in Savannah and around Brenner's houseboat, which is the setting for a major gun battle at the beginning of the film."

- Peter Menzies Jr, ASC

Jordan Cronenweth: Shafts of Light & Smoke

From American Cinematographer, Cinematography for Blade Runner by Herb A. Lightman and Richard Patterson (July 1982)

"After many tests with various units, gaffer Dick Hart came up with the most effective light to do the job, a Xenon spotlight commonly used for night advertising at sports events. This concept gave us some wonderful opportunities. For example, there's a late-night scene in Deckard's apartment kitchen which was played with the lights out. He has just had a hell of a struggle with one of the replicants. Having barely survived, he is now standing near the refrigerator. Rachel [Sean Young] is standing by the sink, which has a window above it. She is illuminated by a soft backlight through the window and the last traces of light filtering across the room from the refrigerator. Occasionally, one of those strong beams of light cuts through the sink window and glows the room just enough to read her face.

Naturally to create shafts of light, one must have some medium, which necessitated the use of smoke. The story lent itself very well to it, in the context of a highly polluted environment. It was very interesting to work with this constant atmosphere. Smoke is wonderul photographically, but not without its problems. It's hard to control, mainly due to drafts, and a lot of people find it objectionable to work in. Beyond this, it's important to keep the smoke level density constant, as a very subtle change in this density can result in dramatic changes in contrast. The only practical way to judge smoke density is by eye. [He jokingly adds,] I find that a good density is achieved just before I lose consciousness."

Cronenweth wanted to maintain the same texture even in situations where smoke wasn't used as heavily, and accomplished this by using low-contrast filters. He details, "We changed filters in conjunction with the angle of light and density of smoke. The stronger the backlight, the lighter the filter."

- Jordan Cronenweth, ASC