IBC
From shooting in black
and white to creating in-camera effects, we take a look at the technology and
technique behind Oscar nominated films.
The pinnacle of awards season approaches with three
of the films nominated for cinematography also contenders for Best Foreign
Language picture.
Roma and Cold
War are both based on the personal memoirs of their directors and
lensed in black and white to evoke the past without sentimentalising the story
in the ways that colour might have done.
Cinematographer Łukasz Żal also wanted director
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Polish-language post-World War II romance Cold War to
hark back to the monochrome films of the 1950s and 1960s. He shot digital on
Alexa XT paired with Ultra Primes and Angenieux zooms but aimed to match the
look of the film stock used in the former communist bloc. Location photography
took place in Poland, Croatia and Paris.
“Everything changes when you shoot in black and
white — costumes, makeup, hair, production design — because you are looking for
the contrast in every place,” Zal told Deadline. “You are looking at a
different reality.”
Roma is director
Alfonso Cuarón’s low-key realist slice of biography about a family living in
the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City in 1970. It has the signature
elaborate long takes devised by Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki in
collaborations like Children of Men and Gravity,
but this time it’s (mostly) the director’s work.
When the shooting schedule for Roma ballooned
to over 110 days, Lubezki – who had helped select the camera and prep the shoot
– found a clash shooting Terrence Malick’s Song to Song and
had to leave the picture. Cuarón – who also co-edited and scripted – took up
the reigns.
As with Gravity and Birdman,
some of the lengthy takes are not quite all they seem. In the film’s most
audacious sequence at a beach involving a rescue from drowning, several takes
are meticulously woven together to fit as one. Designed by Cuarón, the VFX
along with ‘invisible’ set replacement and decoration, was completed by MPC.
Shot at 4K resolution on the Alexa 65 to lend the
black and white tones a contemporary feel, the film’s detailed slow build
scenes break like waves over the viewer and are best appreciated on the largest
screen possible. That presents something of a conflict for the director who
could only get the $15 million film made at Netflix.
As awards season approached, Netflix gave the film
a limited theatrical run with 70mm prints (processed from digital at FotoKem in
LA) and a widescreen aspect ratio.
“Offering cinema lovers the opportunity to see [Roma]
in theatres is incredibly important to me,” said Cuarón in a Netflix press
release which demonstrates the streamer’s confidence in its approach. “The 70mm
print of Roma shows unique details not available on any other
version. Being shot in 65mm, these prints bring live detail and contrast only
possible using a big format film. It is for sure the most organic way to
experience Roma’”
The surprise on the list is German-language
film Never Look Back by director Henckel von Donnersmarck.
Like Cold War, this examines post-War eastern Europe and is filmed
in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.
Inspired by the life of Gerhard Richter’s this is
the fictional story of a painter who grew up in Dresden under the Nazis and
struggles to reconcile the cultural liberalism of the 1960s with the horrific
past. American director of photography Caleb Deschanel ASC has been praised for
bathing the story in a warm glow reminiscent of painting (using Arri XT Plus
with Zeiss master primes), although the style may sit a little uneasily for
some scenes including a graphic account of a gas chamber.
“Just like you don’t expose evil in an obvious way
as evil. It sort of lurks underneath things,” he told Goldderby about choosing
a luminous rather than darker colour palette. “The evil really comes out of the
characters in the way they behave and that was the core of what the film is
about.”
This is Deschanel’s sixth Oscar nomination
including previous nods for The Right Stuff (1983), The
Patriot (2000) and The Passion of the Christ (2004).
You couldn’t get further from the subject of Never Look Back than The
Lion King, Disney’s live action remake, which Deschanel recently wrapped.
Matthew Libatique ASC used multiple Alexa Minis to
lens the intimate story of Ally (Lady Gaga) and mentor Jackson Maine (Bradley
Cooper) in A Star Is Born. The lightweight cameras proved
particularly useful handheld or on Steadicam for Cooper’s direction which
demanded extreme close-ups of the leads and in capturing the intensity of their
performance on stage. Some of these events were shot as-live with little room
to prep or light, including at the film’s beginning at the Coachella festival.
The tight shots of Cooper and Lady Gaga performing
were shot on Kowa anamorphics, a lens choice which gave lots of flaring and
hazing of the stage lights, intended to reflect the imperfections in Jackson’s
disintegrating rocker. Cooke Anamorphic/i SF primes were used for most of the
non-stage scenes. Grading was by Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3 in LA.
“Visually, I wanted the film to feel like it was
Jack’s world when we enter, and Ally just had to exist within it as she starts
her rise to fame,” Libatique told the ASC.
“Then, as she becomes an equal and surpasses him, I
wanted everything to build to a larger-than-life feeling, with vivid colour.
She’s playing in front of tens of thousands of people, and I wanted it to be
beautiful, like a drug. Nothing could be better — but then that drug starts to
wear off, and in her last scene I just wanted white light. The colour
represents a manic rock-and-roll lifestyle, and the white light represents a
kind of sobriety.”
The extreme distortion of the fish-eye 6mm lens for
many scenes in Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist historical drama certainly catches
the eye but the physicality of DP Robbie Ryan’s [BSC ISC] work won’t be lost on
the Academy. The sole nomination to be shot on film, The Favourite has
a distinctive texture which isn’t afraid to show the powered pours and
flamboyantly wigged faces of its comic-tragic characters.
Filmed using natural light, a technique which Ryan
has ably demonstrated on films for Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) and Ken
Loach (I, Daniel Blake), he also bought into the Greek director’s
insistence on perpetual movement for the 35mm camera without using Steadicam.
This was a task which Ryan took on himself, wearing an Exoskeleton rig and
electronic handheld Double Helix camera stabilisation combination from Mr
Helix, based at Pinewood Studios, which was specially adapted to take the
Panavision Millennium XL2 camera.
Processing of Kodak Vision3 stock was done at
i-Dailies, now Kodak Film Lab London.
“We were pretty blessed with weather on location but
a couple of days it went really dark so we pushed the stock more than I ever
thought possible,” Ryan told IBC365. “Yorgos was adamant that we not use lights
otherwise it would feel artificial even during scenes when we literally had
just a handful of candles.”
A bow for camera equipment credits can be taken now
by Arri. Its technology was used by four of the five nominees for
cinematography and five of the Best Picture nominees: Roma, A Star is
Born plus Green Book (Alexa Mini), Black
Panther (Alexa XT Plus) and Bohemian Rhapsody (Alexa
65 and Alexa SXT).
Best VFX: High-tech plays lo-fi
Disney goes up against itself for this year’s Best Visual Effects Oscar as its films are nominated three times and in-house VFX house ILM twice.
Disney goes up against itself for this year’s Best Visual Effects Oscar as its films are nominated three times and in-house VFX house ILM twice.
ILM has the lead on Solo: A Star Wars Story assisted
by several other facilities including London’s Jellyfish and Lola VFX,
Montreal’s Hybride Technologies and Raynault and California’s Tippett and
Exceptional Minds. The Third Floor provided some previs. Ncam and Nvizage
provided virtual production systems.
Framestore took the bear’s share of shots for Christopher
Robin, Disney’s fresh take on the AA Milne classic which depicted Winnie
the Pooh and friends interacting with the real world.
Some 677 of the 727 shots the UK house made for
this film featured creature animation, among the most demanding of all VFX
disciplines. Framestore’s Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Chris Lawrence (Gravity)
led the overall VFX on the film with Framestore’s global head of animation
Michael Eames as animation director.
“Pooh is a very minimal performer,” says Lawrence.
“Ewan [McGregor] would have to do these very emotional scenes against him and
he wanted to know what Pooh would be doing; the answer was a very held-back,
restrained performance.”
Disney/Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity
War was made by an army of facilities including ILM, Weta Digital,
Dneg, Framestore, Cinesite, Digital Domain, Method Studios, Lola VFX and RISE.
The CG for the film’s 8ft tall supervillain,
Thanos, originated from the facial-scanning of actor Josh Brolin. The system
called Medusa devised at ILM and used to create Andy Serkis’ Snoke in the
recent Star Wars movies is due to receive its own award from the Academy at the
annual Scientific and Technical Awards.
Medusa also played a part in Steven Spielberg’s
virtual reality ride Ready, Player One. It was used to design
Parzival, the avatar of hero Wade Watts. Warner Bros’ film may have been partly
shot in Birmingham with motion-capture at Leavesden but VFX duties went back to
Hollywood. Digital Domain and ILM roughly split the work with DD responsible
for the motion effects and grungy look of the film’s ‘real world’ and ILM
taking charge of action inside the virtual ‘Oasis’ for which it got to recreate
the Overlook hotel in an extended sequence from The Shining and
the T-Rex from Spielberg’s Jurassic Park which ILM had
originally built in 1993.
Dneg has become synonymous with the films of
Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, Interstellar) who likes to shoot on film and
create effects in-camera but its artists had to up the realism for space travel
biog First Man.
As the primary VFX vendor, Dneg (Vancouver) was
tasked with creating multiple rendered sequences for use on a giant 60 ft wide
by 35 ft tall curved 180-degree LED screen. This LED wall was the best option
to achieve the clarity and brightness director Damien Chazelle was looking for
and to capture as much in-camera as possible, according to Oscar winning VFX
supervisor Paul Lambert (Blade Runner 2029).
“It allowed us to shoot certain space and in-flight
elements with our CG content to fit within the boundaries of a film being shot
16mm and 35mm,” he says. Full scale physical mock-ups of the (Apollo, Gemini) capsules
were hoisted on gimbals with the Ryan Gosling and other actors on board
surrounded by projections of the rocket’s journey. This enabled Chazelle to
film entire sequences rather than hundreds of smaller shots to be rendered for
VFX.
“In
the VFX world we generally focus on creating visuals for single shots, most
lasting between 5-15 seconds,” says Lambert. “Damien didn’t want to be limited
in this way. We had to create content for entire sequences, some lasting 10,000
frames. We began rendering front and side views to the screen but realised
creating 360 spherical images gave us the most flexibility since we could
rotate it in any direction. This was a challenging amount of work to complete
before shooting even began.”
No comments:
Post a Comment