IBC
IBC365 previews the technical categories for the 90th Academy
Awards in which digital acquisition dominates.
It’s always a tricky and controversial task to whittle the
year’s films down to five – and then one – to win in each of the 24 categories
of the Academy Awards. And with no stand out feature but lots of very strong
contenders this year’s vote is particularly hard to predict.
The technical craft nominations are particularly intriguing
and will provide a lot of mileage for camera maker Arri since its Alexa models
were employed on four of the five Best Cinematography nominees.
Few would begrudge Roger Deakins ASC BSC, the vastly
experienced British cinematographer, finally winning the Oscar for Blade
Runner 2049, his 14th nomination. Having used Arri Alexas for director Denis
Villeneuve’s previous films Prisoners and Sicario, Deakins
retained the formula, pairing the camera with Zeiss Primes and shooting with a
large 2.40:1 aspect ratio for the film’s release in IMAX.
Wanting the LA of 2049 to resemble a smoggy version of
Beijing, with constant rain and snow, Deakins created this in-camera, rather
than artificially in post.
“Some were a bit sceptical of this approach, so, to convince and reassure them, I worked with the wonderful German special effects supervisor, Gerd Nefzer, who rigged-up a system of sprinklers and nozzles that could fill the stage with mist - something like the Everglades on steroids,” he told British Cinematographer.
“As far as I was concerned the results looked really good
and we ended-up using this system a lot during production.”
Director Guillermo del Toro’s science fiction and cold war
inspired romance The Shape of Water was originally envisioned to be
filmed in black and white. When the decision was made to film in colour Danish
DP Dan Lausten ASC DFF devised a colour palette of steel blue and greens which
were shot in camera on the Alexa XT, rather than added in post, using filters
and gels.
“Nothing is coloured by accident in Master Primes because
they’re such high quality lenses,” he told Deadline.
Remarkably, Rachel Morrison ASC becomes the first female to
be nominated in the cinematography category.
Although she had planned to shoot on celluloid for director
Dee Rees’ southern American period film Mudbound, budget constraints
forced a rethink.
Instead, she choose the Arri Alexa Mini camera in
combination with 50-year-old anamorphic and spherical lenses telling Variety that
they tended to flare when exposed to bright sources “like windows, reminiscent
of an older age in cinematography and appropriate for a film set in the 1940s.”
Bruno Delbonnel ASC AFC also went digital – Alexa again -
for another 1940s-set Oscar runner, The Darkest Hour.
To complement a colour palette of blacks and browns, he
makes extensive and subtle use of lighting to evoke Churchill’s journey from
shadow into power as he overcomes the Nazis.
“I think it’s usually a big mistake, for a period piece, to
say, ‘OK, we’re going to do Kodachrome,’” Delbonnel told Deadline.
“When you look at Kodachrome pictures, the colours are
totally wrong. I don’t want to emulate this because then people will feel
uncomfortable watching it. So [designing this picture] is more about feeling
the period than following what the technology would have been.”
In what would make a great double bill with The Darkest
Hour, Christopher Nolan’s gripping large scale reconstruction of Dunkirk is
the only one of the five nominations to be shot on film. Not just film either,
but 65mm negative where the visual impact of the IMAX format has made it a
powerful best picture frontrunner (the drama had the widest large format film print
release in 25 years.
Dutch born Hoyte van Hoytema NSC FSF ASC shot 70% of the film on IMAX (which is 65mm 15 perf). The rest was shot on 65mm 5 perf on Panavision cameras with dailies produced by US facility FotoKem in its biggest and most complex large format project to date.
“The sheer negative size of IMAX and the texture and colour
depth, clarity of the film emulsion in combination together was the most
obvious way to capture this,” van Hoytema is quoted in IndieWire.
“It also requires very minimum tweaks and corrections to
make it look great: no computers to suppress information or mechanical
interpretation. It’s just a very pure way of capturing, resembling mediu format
still photography.”
It’s worth noting that a good number of hit films with
acclaimed cinematography this year also shot film. These include The Post;
Wonder Struck (shot on Kodak 35mm B&W and colour film stocks); The
Beguiled; Call Me By Your Name; Wonder Woman; Murder on the Orient
Express (another 70mm spectacle); The Florida Project and Battle
of the Sexes.
Incidentally, Best Picture Oscar favourites Lady Bird (lensed
by Sam Levy for director Greta Gerwig) was shot on Alexa Minis and Three
Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri lensed by British DP Ben Davis BSC for
director Martin McDonagh was shot using Alexa XT.
VFX Oscar contenders
The VFX Oscar race is being pitched as a battle
between Blade Runner 2049 and War for the Planet of the Apes.
The former features several stunning sequences each
undertaken by different facilities (including Framestore, Moving Picture
Company (MPC), Rodeo FX, Territory Studio and Double Negative) but arguably the
stand out is the CG animation of the replicant character Rachael.
Head scans of Sean Young, the actor who played Rachael in
the original movie, as well as photos of Young in the early 1980s were used by
artists at MPC as visual references.
Actress Loren Peta doubled for Young in the scene. The trick
to making the scene work was generating a believable performance from the
digital replica, something only possible when the team returned to Young’s
original performance and found mannerisms which matched with
the 2049 script. Then the whole scene was animated by hand.
With UK studios full, principal photography was in Budapest.
The bulk of the film’s 1200 shots were created by facilities in Montreal and
Vancouver to take advantage of local tax credits.
Creating digital characters with an emotional intensity
and subtlety was vital to telling War for the Planet of the Apes not
least because apes appear in almost every shot of the movie. The VFX for the
film includes creating the monkeys themselves from motion capture, and required
VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon to allocate 1,450 shots to lead house Weta Digital
assisted by Stereo D and Exceptional Minds.
Shot and post produced in Canada, the final part of the
trilogy is lauded for the performance of Andy Serkis as simian chief Caesar.
“Every time we reviewed shots with Caesar, we had Andy Serkis’
performance side-by-side with Caesar to get the emotion right,” Lemmon
told TheWrap.
“There’s no [computer] program that does that for you,
that’s only the skill and dedication of the sculptors and technical people.”
London facility Jellyfish Pictures was part of the team that
delivered the VFX for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. VFX is always heavy
in Star Wars films, everything from the new Porg creatures to Snoke. VFX work
also includes epic space battles and enhanced environments. ILM took the lead
on this production dividing work among its offices in London, San Francisco,
Singapore, Vancouver and as well as Montreal-based Rodeo VX.
Also nominated are Guardians of the Galaxy volume 2,
the first feature shot at an 8K resolution (on RED cameras) to accommodate the
heavy VFX element of the story. Weta Digital, Framestore and Method Studios
were among VFX shops involved. The opening sequence requiring them to make
actor 66-year-old Kurt Russell appear as his 36-year-old self.
ILM get another nod for bringing another ape to life – this
time a re-imagined version of the classic King Kong story in Kong: Skull
Island.
The design concept was to make Kong look like a modernised
version of the 1933 Kong by sculpting anatomical body details that the original
puppet lacked while retaining the familiar physical silhouette of Kong. “Also,
like the original, our Kong walks as a biped and was designed with facial
features and expressions that are evocative of the original stop motion
performances”, senior VFX supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum told FXguide.
Deliberately unobtrusive work was done by Double Negative
for Dunkirk. Nolan was at pains to capture as much action as possible
in-camera to evoke a gritty and realistic experience, yet models were expertly
combined with aerial footage for scenes of the sinking of ships, crowd scenes
on land and most notably in the spitfire dogfights.
Sound plays a crucial role making any movie tick but none
more so than Dunkirk where the soundscapes of editor Richard King,
winner of two of his three previous Oscars for Nolan collaborations (Inception,
The Dark Knight) combined with the abstract and experimental score of Hans
Zimmer. Dunkirk is nominated for sound mixing and editing as is Baby
Driver, Edgar Wright’s heist film choreographed, beat-for-beat, to pop music by
Julian Slater in close collaboration with editors Jonathan Amos and Paul
Machliss – who are also nominated in the Best Picture Editing category.
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