RedShark News
The Revenant meets Gravity was
how George Clooney pitched his latest film to cinematographer Martin
Ruhe ASC. We interviewed him to find out just what went into the making of
the film, and the technology used.
https://www.redsharknews.com/the-midnight-skys-gruelling-arctic-adventure
The Midnight Sky, which Clooney directs and stars in,
lands on Netflix this month. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale of survival about
Clooney’s ageing scientist Augustine racing to stop Mission Specialist Sullivan
(Felicity Jones) and her astronaut colleagues onboard the Aether from returning
home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
It’s a human drama more than a sci-fi action film in which
both principal characters have made sacrifices. Sully for instance left a
daughter behind on earth. So when Mission Control falls inexplicably silent,
she and her crew mates are forced to wonder if they will ever get home.
“We watched a lot of space films in research and in
particular wanted the design of the spaceship in our movie to be different,”
says the German DP who shot previous Clooney-directed projects including The
American and Catch 22. “With production designer Jim
Bissell (E.T, Jumanji) we asked ourselves what a spaceship in 2060 would
look like. We decided it’s a design that could be printed in outer space by 3D
printers.
“We also constructed the spaceship to have some areas of
gravity and no gravity in others and there are also some sequences of a
spacewalk. My thought was to have a floating camera so as not to lose the sense
of gravity but also to feel weightless. We shot these sequences using a lot of
Steadicam with a constant movement and rotations of the camera so you feel like
you could be upside down.”
The film is also set in the Arctic for which the crew
endured a gruelling shoot in Iceland.
“We shot on a glacier with limited access and minimal crew
in really rough and stormy conditions,” he says. “We were there for a month,
two weeks of which we couldn’t get to base camp. We stayed in hotels and drove
45 minutes along a dirt road to the base camp and then took snow mobiles and
jeeps to get onto the glacier. We used a Super Techno on wheels especially
constructed by ARRI for this terrain, and shot drone footage.
“George would spray water into his beard and it would freeze
in seconds so it looked like he’d been walking through the snow for hours.
“Sometimes we had to wrap up all the cameras. It would take
15 minutes to change a lens. Snow would get everywhere. One day we found our
containers had blown away.
“But the light was beautiful. The nature amazing and the
sheer scope of the sky and landscape just blows your mind. It’s just not easy
to work in.”
To capture what is a very intimate story set against the
extraordinary scope of space –both terrestrial and galactic – Ruhe
chose the ARRI Alexa 65 format with detuned DNA lenses shooting full sensor 6K
and finishing in 4K. This camera was augmented with Alexa Mini LFs in the
confined space of the spaceship.
“Shooting 65 feels more intimate even though it’s larger
format,” he says. “You end up going closer with wider lenses and a shorter
field of view. I love the detail you get in the faces and how you can single
out characters from the background.
He adds, “We ended up not shoot so much at night because the
scenes involved a 7-year old girl and it’s not possible to do night exteriors
at that temperature with a child actor.”
While there is VFX work from ILM and Framestore, much of the
film is shot in camera. The spaceship interiors were lined with hidden LED
strips which the DP could interactively control, variously switching between
blue tinged control panels contrasted with red and warmer tones in the living
areas. Likewise, Ruhe mixes in warmer tones in the arctic scenes, such as when
the sun rises, so it’s not all bleak, cold and blue.
For a hologram displaying the movement of Jupiter he shot
the actors with a series of china balls for VFX to replace with an animated
model in post.
“A lot of the space sequences were designed with a virtual
camera,” he explains. “I would go into a meeting room with the virtual camera
and an iPad and I’d say ‘give me a 58mm’ or ‘I want to be at this scale’ and I
could immediately see an animated render of the spaceship interior and exterior
and models of our actors. This pre-vizualisation would inform production design
or stunts for the wirework or for myself and George it helped us judge the
timing and blocking of the scene.
“Rather than being led by the limits of technology we were
using technology as a tool to help craft the scene.”
Principal photography began in mid-October 2019 and ended
just before lockdown in February this year. Ruhe and Clooney completed the
grade remotely using Sohonet Clearview viewed on iPads before Ruhe returned to
London for grading sessions with Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3. The colorist
was in LA, Ruhe was in London and Clooney was viewing the realtime session at
another screening venue in LA.
LED screens of the type used extensively on The
Mandalorian used to light interior shots of the Arctic set interiors which
were shot at Shepperton.
“We used plates shot in Iceland as background to the windows
in these scenes,” Ruhe says. “Since the views and reflections are real it helps
the actors if they can see a landscape or a night sky.”
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