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The world held its breath for three weeks in 2018
as a team of divers attempted to save 12 young soccer players and their coach
trapped miles underground in a water-filled cave. The heroic rescue succeeded
against all the odds in what director Ron Howard has called “a triumph of
volunteerism” in contrast to the “triumph of professionalism” which
characterized his previous clock-ticking account of real-life survival, Apollo
13.
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The seemingly impossible outcome was solved due to
the ingenuity, skill and bravery of groups of diverse people putting their
lives and livelihoods on the line for one common goal.
“The event itself is very well known, almost
everybody knows what happened and how it ended but the missing link is what
happened inside the cave,” explains Thirteen Lives’ cinematographer
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. “We wanted to fill in the missing link.”
Mukdeeprom is a Thai native who received
international acclaim for shooting 2010 Palm d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee
Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and the Academy Award-nominated 2017
feature Call Me By Your Name.
He says he was drawn to the story by Don Macpherson
and screenplay by William Nicholson, because of the way it respected the truth
of events. “There is no superhero,” he says. “Our aim was to create a similar
look and feel to that which audiences would have had experienced watching on
the news but with cinematic quality.”
The filmmakers could draw on some of the copious
smartphone and action-cam footage recorded by onlookers and divers at the time.
However, the heart of the action for Thirteen Lives takes
place in the cramped, dark, highly dangerous tunnels often underwater for which
there was next to no first-hand source material.
They did, however, have the expertise on set of two
of the lead divers on the rescue, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, who are
played by Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell in the film.
“The underwater part was very important and we had
to focus on this first,” says Mukdeeprom, whose main concern was that the caves
– rebuilt in large tanks in Queensland to be as realistic as possible – had no
light source.
“Our set was open at the top so I could light from
above with very soft fluorescents and then adjust the lighting scene to scene
based around sources from headlamps or working lights [that the divers brought
into light various parts of the chambers.”
He selected a large format camera to give context
to the environment augmented with a smaller, lighter camera for a variety of
point of view, over the shoulder and detail shots.
“In this environment, because the operator has to
work up close to the divers, there are so many shots that the LF couldn’t give
us. We had to have a camera handy enough that someone can just grab and use.
Andrew Rowlands [A Camera] suggested the RED KOMODO and I agreed with him.”
The KOMODO’s small 4-cubic-inch form factor,
weighing only 2.1 pounds made it ideal for the grab-and-go situation. Though
tiny, the 6K camera includes a global shutter sensor and maintains the high
standard of image quality and dynamic range required.
KOMODO was used extensively for cave interior shots
of boys on the rescue gurney with the camera attached to the gurney as well as
wide shots looking down at the boys and their rescuers as they moved from the
cave to the open air. Many scenes used the KOMODO in an underwater housing to
shoot wide angle close ups and diver to diver shots. “Sometimes Andrew let
the actors who were diving grab the camera and take their own reaction shots.”
The space was so tight that this worked really well, and several shots
filmed by Farrell and Mortenson or Joel Edgerton made it to screen. “Colin Farrell loved shooting Viggo with the KOMODO
underwater. He was one our best underwater camera operators!”
Footage was recorded RAW with a LUT which was
devised by Adam Glasman, senior colorist at Goldcrest Post, applied for video
monitoring set.
The story’s pivotal moment occurs in chamber nine
of the cave when the divers eventually discover the team cold, hungry, scared
but safe sheltering on a small rocky shelf. It was also one of the first scenes
the production shot.
“This was the most difficult set in terms of
emotional complexity,” says Mukdeeprom. “We had to stick to the facts and
create the right emotional balance between relief at discovering the boys with
the realization of what whether it would ever be possible to bring them out
alive.”
This documentary-style extended to the whole aesthetic
of the movie, while scenes depicting the chaos underwater were influenced by
the language of the horror genre.
“Since the Thai boys were first time actors, Ron
decided on minimal rehearsal. He didn’t want any marks. Of course, they and the
actors have to move to be convenient for camera but, we let them move where
they wanted in the scene, and we captured it.
While Rowlands was tasked with filming wides
Mukdeeprom looked for other angles or actions that might be useful in telling
the story in the edit. In many spots in the underwater cave sets they were able
to jam the KOMODO into tight spaces and get shots of divers that would be
otherwise not possible.
“KOMODO was very helpful in some of those really
tight spaces. It allowed me so much more freedom to let these shots unfold.”
Filming the make-shift base camp outside the Tham
Luang caves presented its own technical difficulty. Since the rescue took place
during monsoon season, they needed to turn Village Roadshow Studios in
Australia’s Sunshine State into a lush, muddy jungle with stormy skies.
“In Queensland, the weather tells you to be on the
beach, not a film set,” says Mukdeeprom. “I was always fighting the sun, so we
had to black it out. We had a 70m x 30m fly swatter (canopy) to block some of
the light which was still not big enough for the area we needed to cover. We
had to move scenes and plan the shot according to the direction of the sun. We’d
shoot scenes in a corner where there was most shadow. We had rain towers
beneath the fly swatter. Managing all of this was very complex.”
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