Behind the Scenes: Conclave

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A game of thrones in the Vatican lensed by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine

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For the man who is deemed to be God’s representative on earth the route to the top is a naked grab for power. The secretive process by which this is decided among a group of Cardinals in the Vatican is called conclave, and its structure forms the spine of a new murder mystery from director Edward Berger (All Quite On The Western Front) teaming up with French cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (Ammonite, Jackie)

It is based on the novel by thriller writer Robert Harris but Fontaine says he didn’t think of the film as a whodunnit.

“The moment you start to think in terms of genre your mind is suddenly closing doors or opening others. I always want to start from a much wider approach.”

One of the first conversations he had with Berger was about The Parallax View the bleak conspiracy thriller from 1974 by Alan J Pakula. “Edward didn’t want to mimic it at all but just to notice the way this film in particular and more generally 1970s American movies are able to convey a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia.

“I never thought in terms of mystery or suspense but in terms of tension and expression of doubt as seen exclusively from the point of view of Cardinal Lawrence.

Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes is the Cardinal charged with leading the Papal selection. It’s clear that he struggles with the weight of responsibility and begins to question his faith.

The opening scenes include a 360-degree Steadicam showing the chaos that Lawrence is facing but after this the film’s language is much more restrained.

“The sense of power had to be translated by the composition of the frames. We had to suggest as opposed to stress what we thought viewers should know. We wanted to translate the sense of unease caused by this somewhat suffocating atmosphere into the visuals. We extensively used the widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio, either by packing the frames or by isolating characters.”

Aside from an oblique reference to The Parallax View and the opening of The Godfather, Fontaine says he avoided other movie or paintings.

“I try to shy away from having too strong references – they can box you in,” he says. “I did watch The Two Popes (a fact based Papal succession drama from 2019 starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce) and luckily it had nothing to do with what we had in mind. The other reason why I wouldn’t want too many references is you get easily overwhelmed by how good a reference can be making it hard to move forward.”

On an early morning private tour of the Sistine Chapel he was amazed by a strong sense of presence “weight of history” that inspired the shape of light in the movie.

“When you receive a script in which there’s a church in every other scene the temptation is to use the familiar images in our head,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be great to have shafts of light and haze from the stained glass? But the moment you do that it doesn’t feel right. Instead, we went for an almost documentary look helped by fact that the blinds and veils in each room were down, so there was barely any daylight coming through.”

However, filming in the real Sistine Chapel is out of bounds so sets were built at nearby Cinecittà studios. Founded in 1937 with the help of Benito Mussolini to support the Italian film industry, it was partially destroyed by Allied bombs during World War II. Rebuilt by the 1950s, it became one of Europe’s premiere studios and the largest studio on the continent.

“We didn’t mind building our own Vatican even if we were using some old fascist architecture,” Fontaine says in an oblique hint to the film’s critique of male dominated political power structures.

The production design team were able to restore an existing Vatican set in storage at Cinecittà.  According to production designer Suzie Davies, “Rome and the Vatican are beautiful, traditional, ornate, gilded and ancient but we also incorporated the very symmetrical, sharp-edged designs of the fascist era in Italy. The contrast between them is visually arresting.”

The movie version of the Casa Santa Marta, the residence housing cardinals during the conclave, is intended to feel almost like a posh prison. Fontaine enhances a hermetically sealed feeling using shallow depth of field and film noir techniques.

“My biggest challenge was the fact that the cardinals are not only locked down inside the Vatican but that even daylight barely comes in through the shutters. The nuances in the lighting style depended on the level of intimacy that Cardinal Lawrence has with each of the protagonists.”

Davies worked with Fontaine to help deliver the idea of opposing themes which balance light and dark, honesty and lies, gold and silver, contemporary and traditional, male and female. Casa Santa Marta is a visually darker world with linear patterns and darker lighting. In contrast, the Sistine Chapel was lighter and had a sense of freedom.

Having shot on Red cameras since lensing Rust And Bone on a Red Epic in 2012, choosing the latest model, V-Raptor 8K VV came naturally. To take the edge off the camera’s sharp resolution he carried a set of Tribe7 Blackwing 20.7mm to 137mm vintage lenses and added in a layer of film look grain in post.

“During prep we were thinking about how to show small humans in front of massive architecture. “I use the widescreen aspect ratio 2.40 to do this and often using framing characters in negative space that remind you of their scale of their environment. Since the cardinals and sisters are used to behaving well and keeping their feelings hidden, a good way to see how they express their feelings is by showing how they use their hands, which is why we have a lot of close-ups of hands.”

Vying for Papal supremacy are Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto and Lucian Msamati playing a Nigerian priest, who could become the first African pontiff in history.  A Catholic priest from Afghanistan (played by Carlos Diehz) also awakens racial prejudice. Isabella Rossellini’s nun pricks the conscience of the Church’s male hierarchy.

“Cinecittà blew me away,” Fontaine says. “You can just feel the history when standing on the stages and knowing that Fellini and Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini – (Isabella’s father) - shot there.”

A sequence in which more than 100 cardinals cast their votes over three days presented the filmmakers with a challenge. Since each cardinal writes a name and drops a ballot in an urn the question was how to make it compelling each time?  “We storyboarded and pre-vized so ensure that each of the six sequences would be unique,” he explains.

A shot of the cardinals under umbrellas during rain is perhaps the film’s most iconic image. The location was a French property in Rome called Villa Medici, home of the French Academy’s artists residency. They didn’t have enough actors or extras dressed as cardinals so Fontaine shot a number of different plates and comped them together in post “to make them look like a sea of cardinals all in forward movement together.”

The scene was also intended to be far longer he says, “but ended up in the movie reduced to this image, which perhaps gives it a stronger resonance.”

 

BTS: Wicked

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In the second shot of return to Oz musical Wicked children run through fields of tulips. These are real plants, about 9 million of them, grown on a real field in Norfolk. Each row has a specific colour and all are oriented to a specific sunlight pattern that could only exist in a studio.

“The way the farmer would normally line up the tulip bulbs wouldn’t work for the sun pass we were going to need for Munchkinland,” explains cinematographer Alice Brooks ASC who visited the Norfolk farm to explain what they needed. “We planned the shot in Unreal Engine in August for the tulips to bloom in April.”

Come April and the production got a call from the farmer that the plants were going to bloom early. “I mean, it’s like having a baby,” says Brooks, who quickly arranged for drone shots of the fields that they would later match with footage shot on a giant backlot at Sky Studios Elstree.

That extraordinary attention to detail marks Wicked as one of Hollywood’s latest hurrahs to the golden days of epic studio filmmaking. Gladiator II being epic of spectacular sets.

Brooks likens the attempt that she and director Jon Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) were making to the likes of Cleopatra (1963) and Spartacus (1960).

Production was doubly complex because of Universal Picture’s decision to split the story into two and maximise its $145m budget. Wicked: Part Two is due out next year having been photographed over a mammoth 155-day shoot alongside Part One.

“We shot it as if it were one film in many ways,” says Brooks. “None of us had done anything of this scale before. Hollywood rarely does anything on this scale anymore.  Jon asked me what my goal for the movie was and I said it would be the greatest love story ever told between two women. I wanted it to be Casablanca or The English Patient where two true friends fall in love and are then ripped apart. It’s such a strong tale of female friendship that I don't think any film has ever had before.”

Wicked is an adaptation of the hit stage musical which in turn was based on the 1995 novel of the same name derived characters from L. Frank Baum's classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  The film stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, a misunderstood young woman born with green skin who later becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. The all-star cast includes Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good Witch and Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage.

Prep began four years ago during the pandemic when key heads of department were communicating via zoom. Principal photography began in June 2022 preceded by a mammoth 18 weeks of tests.

Alice Brooks had known Chu since their days at film school together including on musical feature In The Heights. She also photographed the musical Tick, Tick, Boom! The first thing that she did after landing in London for the shoot was to go see the musical theater production in the West End along with Chu, choreographer Nathan Crowley, VFX supervisor Pablo Helman and production designer Chris Scott.

“What really struck me while watching the musical was that here we all, finally after Covid, sitting together in the dark and feeling like we are linked to arm and arm about to walk down the yellow brick road. The whole ensemble was such an incredible camaraderie.”

MGM’s 1939 version of Wizard of Oz famously burst into Technicolor but the Wicked filmmakers chose to refer back to Baum’s books. “Every single paragraph has such rich colour descriptions and each colour means something. They tell us about character,” Brooks says.

Sets for the centrepiece Ozdust Ballroom were made of clear resin allowing Brooks to light it with any colour of the rainbow. They backlit the walls to mix the palette and during tests she noticed that anytime Erivo in green makeup was near a cyan blue backdrop her colour popped.

“When Elphaba walks down the stairs in the Ozdust Ballroom, Jon really wanted her to feel as if everyone was laughing at her and looking at her. I wanted her green to pop out more than anywhere else in the movie so then I started exploring blue options for the world around her.”

Brooks used every colour of the rainbow for different scenes in the movie but a chief challenge throughout was lighting the two central characters, one of whom is a platinum blonde dressed in shades of pink and the other is green skinned, dressed in black with a huge black hat.

“That colour relationship between pink and green is so challenging because you've got two opposing colours in the same frame for most of the movie.”

Camera and lighting tests began in week two of prep with costume designer Paul Tazewell and hair/makeup/prosthetics designer Frances Hannon. “The green changed under every colour light but then Frances found this neon paint that allowed me to light Elphaba’s skin as if it were natural skin. It made the biggest difference in the world to me because suddenly I didn't need to light a certain colour temperature for the skin nor have to rely on power windows in the grade. Instead, we were able to light both women within the same frame.”

Early on they considered shooting as a virtual production and toured the Manhattan Beach stages where Avatar was shot. After lengthy discussions Chu decided he wanted a practical set build.

“John is a very tangible director. He likes to be able to touch real things and when we stood on the set at Manhattan Beach it just didn’t work for him that he couldn't touch or walk around objects [displayed virtually]

“We considered blue screen but then sets started to be built. And they got bigger and bigger and bigger going from the floor to the rafters. It's a dream as a cinematographer. I had real practical sets and huge spaces to light.”

The production ended up shooting 17 sound stages; 2 at Warner Leavesden, 2 at Platinum in Pinewood and 10 at Sky Studios Elstree including exterior sets for Emerald City which were the size of four American football fields.

“With the stage show you have your proscenium and you never get to have your beautiful close-ups. What we wanted to do was shoot many scenes in 360 degrees which is a part of the story you can’t see in the stage show.

Brooks says she worked seven days a week during the five month shoot, using the weekends when she could have had time off to go onto sets and pre-light, rig and program with Gaffer David Smith. He ended up programming 6000 lightning cues across the two movies.

“I could take the script and walk around and feel what it would be like to be Elphaba or Glinda in that space and then create my lighting and lens and angle choices from there,” the DP says. “I am a very emotional storyteller and so is Jon. We don't talk about technical stuff for most of our prep process. It's all about themes, emotions and relationships. Jon would give me the intention of the scene in one word, like ‘yearning’ or ‘longing’ or ‘power’ and those words sort of seep into me.

“For instance, we talked a lot about the idea that in Wicked, good is not good and evil is not evil. The light is not the light. The darkness is not the darkness. One night, in the middle of prep, I suddenly woke up with this idea that the light from the sun should always set for Elphaba and always be rising for Glinda. I called Jon up and said, ‘do you mind if I make some time of day suggestions for the script?’ He agreed. So now the last 40 minutes of the movie is all one long sunset. The song ‘Popular’ is a 15-minute sequence that starts pre-dawn and leads into a pink sunrise.  These decisions didn’t stem from anything technical, they came from the concept of what we want light and darkness to mean for our characters.”

While they decided against a Volume for photography, Brooks leaned heavily into Epic’s Unreal Engine for shaping the lighting and adjusting the set design.

This helped for instance in filming the throne room. “People assume this was a set extension, but it's all real,” she says. “The set went all the way up to the ceiling in concentric circles that get smaller and smaller almost like a tornado. Originally, there was not enough space to put all the Skypanels in I wanted. We were able to worked this out with the art department after designing it in Unreal. Likewise, holes for the lighting rig at just the right angle were built into the construction of the library set after we had pre-lit it in Unreal.”

To film an establishing scene of Emerald City they had planned a long Steadicam shot in which the camera operator would step onto a crane and capture a big high and wide view. Unable to walk the set while it was still being constructed, Brooks flew a virtual camera in Unreal and found that that high wide angle wouldn’t work.

“What we needed to do was actually be low and look up at the height of the world around our characters to see the full scope of the scene and to hint at where the story will end. We start out in this incredibly joyous moment and we end the movie up on the highest tower of Emerald City in Elphaba's darkest moment as she starts walking up the staircase towards the setting sun. This would not have been possible without Unreal.”

Camera tests convinced Brooks to shoot on Alexa 65 with Panavision’s lens guru Dan Sasaki her first call when it came to the film’s optics. At that point, in 2021, Sasaki was developing a new set of anamorphics with a 1.3 squeeze.

“I knew that the Panavision anamorphic blue flare would not work with the green and the pink but Dan was able to custom make lenses with a beautiful soft amber flare.”

Wicked may be the only film ever to be shot on these prototype lenses since Panavision’s later release of the Ultra Panatar 2s were altered from Brooks’ unique specifications.

Instead of matching lenses for close-ups, a 65mm became Elphaba’s hero lens while used a 75mm for Glinda. The 2.40 aspect ratio was preferred for framing the central pair.

“For the Ozdust Ballroom Jon wanted Cynthia to walk down the stairs for the very first time and feel what it was like to be there. So we had no rehearsal. Our focus puller  (Lewis Hume) didn’t have a rehearsal, neither did our Steadicam operator or our dimmer board op who has 500 lighting changes to coordinate in this scene. This was really challenging for me. Elphaba is wearing this huge brim hat, the camera is spinning around her at 360 degrees for takes of 10 minutes at a time.

“It all worth it in the end because we got the tear dripping down Cynthia’s face and Ariana wiping it away – that wasn’t in the script. The focus pulling in that moment of the story is just so beautiful. He wasn’t checking the monitor, he was doing such a technical job but intuitively knew when to move in close.”

 Myron Kerstein ACE talks editing Wicked

In his sixth project with Chu, editor Myron Kerstein ACE read early drafts of the scripts having seen the stage production a number of times on Broadway.

“This was not only the biggest films in my career, but I wanted to deliver for Jon, the producer Marc Platt who optioned the book and produced the stage production, the studio who was betting big on us, and of course the fans,” he says.

“The script also had the lyrics written into the pages, so I really tried to absorb every vocal as dialogue in scenes. I had the songs on repeat in the car, which was pretty easy because my kids were fans of the music as well!”

About a year before production started he sat down with Wyatt Smith, editor of musicals including The Little Mermaid, to get a crash course on editing VFX heavy movies.

“Practically every shot was going to have VFX, and I had little to no experiences cutting a film with many, let alone the 2,500 we would end up in the film. He gave me as much info he thought I needed, and that was immensely helpful before I started production. It was a huge learning curve but I was excited to use my instincts in smaller films and apply it to this scale.”

Moving into production, Kerstein also took over the editing of additional storyboards and pre-vis sequences liaising with department heads including Brooks, VFX Supervisor Pablo Hellman, and music supervisor Maggie Rodford.

“Those key department heads would be operating as one unit, flowing back and forth between production and post.”

 

 

Are Autonomous Vehicles Safe?

 e-TECH / IEC

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There is still some way to go before autonomous vehicles can be used safely in all situations and consumers are far from trusting their use. The IEC is helping to build a safety framework.

One of the world ‘s leading manufacturers of electric vehicles recently unveiled its plans for a Cybercab to great fanfare, highlighting the ongoing enthusiasm for driverless vehicles in many circles. However, safety concerns, both real and perceived, are threatening to stymie widespread market adoption. International standards are a way of helping to build trust in these new forms of transport.

Proponents argue that autonomous transport systems can enhance safety by significantly reducing the risk of human errors which are commonly due to drowsiness, distractedness or even drunkenness. But while it is a fact that robot vehicles do not get tired or sick and even less drunk, they have several safety issues they still have to confront.

What does the research say?

Results are mixed. A study published this year in nature communications found that self-driving cars had fewer accidents than human-driven ones in most normal driving conditions. But it also acknowledged that in less visible conditions, such as dawn or dusk, autonomous vehicles (AVs) were far more likely to have an accident than human-driven vehicles.

The study, which was conducted by researchers from the University of Central Florida, also found that while turning, self-driving cars were nearly two times more likely to have an accident than human-driven vehicles. “It is important to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles under dawn and dusk or turning conditions,” says Shengxuan Ding at the University of Central Florida and one of the experts behind the research. “Key strategies include enhancing weather and lighting sensors and effectively integrating sensor data.”

Things are not much better in the real world. Fatal crashes and near fatal incidents involving robotaxis have led to industry recalls from AV companies with the US regulator finding a “critical safety gap” linked to hundreds of collisions in one AV system. Despite what some would describe as a dismal record, most US states explicitly or implicitly allow testing of autonomous systems, with several of them even allowing commercial use. The European Union has also approved regulations for AVs that are now incorporated into laws of member countries.

IEC Standards to build trust

The IEC is preparing many of the standards which are related to the tech used for autonomous vehicles and  which ensure it is used safely. A series of standards published by the IEC technical committee that prepares standards for sensors, IEC TC 47, specifies the general requirements of power interfaces for automotive vehicle sensors. IEC TC 100 issues several standards relating to multimedia systems in cars, for instance specs related to the surround view system for cars.

Autonomous vehicles use machine learning to process large amounts of visual data in real time, enabling them to detect and avoid obstacles, pedestrians and other vehicles. ISO/IEC TR 24030 is a technical report published in 2021, which includes over 130 artificial intelligence (AI) use cases, from 24 application domains, including transport. The IEC and ISO committee which is developing standards for AI is currently revising the publication with new and updated use cases.

Keep on trucking

Driverless long-haul freight routes already exist, such as those between major metropolitan areas in Texas. So far, these vehicles have been piloted by licensed operators ready to step in if needed. But providers say they’re now ready to remove that human presence and achieve Level 4 automation, one step below full automation which makes a vehicle capable of driving itself under any circumstances.

One manufacturer testing its autonomous truck says it wants to ‘make roads safer at commercial scale’. “Anyone can do a proof of concept – anyone can do a demo,” says its spokesperson. “To put a truck on the road with redundancy built in is a completely different ball game. Safety is the primary metric by which we measure the progress of our product,” claims another autonomous truck builder.

Despite this publicized emphasis on safety by industry, the public remains unconvinced. A March 2023 poll found that drivers are increasingly apprehensive of full autonomous vehicles. Eighty percent of those polled in California in August 2023 said they were uncomfortable with the prospect of driverless trucks in their state. A survey from January this year found a staggering 93% of Americans had reservations about safety and technology malfunctions of self-driving cars.

Going underground

Autonomous  underground rail travel has been a reality for nearly 40 years. Over a quarter of the world’s metro systems have at least one fully automated line in operation. In Nuremberg, Germany, the driverless metro has carried more than 200 000 people a day since 2008. According to the Fraunhofer Institute, this demonstrates that self-driving trains increase passenger safety. While staff in a central control centre can intervene in an emergency, monitoring systems react faster than humans to unforeseen events, it says.  

Again, IEC Standards play an important role in ensuring these transport systems are safe. Different levels of automation are specified by IEC 62290-1. This IEC TC 9 standard establishes fundamental concepts for urban transport management and control systems. Grade of Automation 4, for instance, applies to metro trains that run automatically at all times, including door closing, obstacle and emergency situation detection. TC 9 also publishes IEC 62267, which specifies the safety requirements for automated urban guided transport.

Breaking the waves

In 2022, a Japanese car ferry was one of the first large vessels to navigate passage autonomously. The test was successfully repeated by a second passenger ferry and then a container freighter.

Prior to making its maiden voyage, the passenger ferry was sailed for six months along its route with a crew to collect data. The container freighter had a safety verification test conducted using a 3D simulator. Autonomous docking and undocking technology, autonomous collision avoidance routing and visual target ranging and imaging technology are being pioneered in Japan as part of a government goal to have half of the country’s fleet sailing autonomously by 2040.

Outside Japan, a luxury carmaker has been working to develop a full fleet of autonomous vessels as well as solutions for yachts. Pilotless navigation is claimed to reduce stress for crews by increasing operational safety as well as making shipping more productive and economical by relying on less staff.

Extensive trials and tests have been identified as a prerequisite for safe and successful Maritime Autonomous Ships and Shipping (MASS) traffic operation by the European Union. It has developed operational guidelines for MASS trials in which the maritime authorities of EU member states exchange information, partner on trials and improve risk assessment. This feeds into the International Maritime Organization (IMO) which is drawing up the first international regulation on autonomous ships. The MASS Code is expected to come into force from 2028.

Two IEC TCs deal specifically with the standards for maritime transport. The first one is IEC TC 18: Electrical installations of ships and of mobile and fixed offshore units, which cooperates with IMO where electrical systems on board ships are concerned. It publishes international standards in line with the International Convention on Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), an international maritime treaty which sets minimum safety standards in the construction, equipment and operation of merchant ships.

The second one, IEC TC 80: Maritime navigation and radiocommunication equipment and systems, has taken on the role of developing international standards for the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS), an internationally agreed set of safety procedures and communication protocols used to increase safety and make it easier to rescue ships in distress.

Trust in autonomous vehicles has to grow if consumers are to adopt these new forms of transport. IEC Standards are playing an important role in helping to build that trust.

'Gladiator II' BTS: Cinematographer John Mathieson on how to shoot historical shock and awe

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All the swords and all the sandals. How tough and tactile practical filmmaking yielded dividends for cinematographer John Mathieson when it came to shooting Ridley Scott’s epic Gladiator II.

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John Mathieson BSC won a Bafta and was Oscar nominated for his work on Gladiator in 2000 and returns to the arena for Ridley Scott’s hugely entertaining shock and awe sequel.

It’s his sixth film for the director which have mostly been sword & sandal (Hannibal, Kingdom of Heaven) or bow ‘n’ arrow & sandal historical epics (Robin Hood). The outlier is crime comedy Matchstick Men starring Nic Cage from 2003.

Over the course of that journey and in particular for Scott’s historical dramas the sets have got bigger as have the number of cameras with which the director likes to cover a scene.

Gladiator, the original, was of course a 35mm shoot but even here Scott was using two or three at a time. He staged even dialogue scenes in Gladiator II with four digital cameras and up to 12 for gladiatorial sequences of which there are many.

“We established the visual language for this film when shooting the first one,” Mathieson said after a screening of the film at Camerimage, Poland. So much so that Scott incorporates wide shots of the Colosseum used in Gladiator into scenes in Gladiator II.

In addition to the ‘Orientalist’ paintings of snake charmers, courtesans, and gladiators in exotic locales, Mathieson referred to the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites’ romanticised neoclassical subjects and jewel toned palette. It was a time when ‘The Grand Tour’ of Europe was a rite of passage, with Italy often as its centrepiece.

“Our template is Las Vegas. It’s gaudy, wild, vivid and just a little camp,” he said. “The result is a mixture of what Scott knows from his research and what he thinks is right for the image. It’s a Rome with the glamour we expect, but it’s not always squeaky clean. He somehow makes the real world disappear and you become a part of the story. His Rome is just better than anybody else’s because of the way his mind works. I like to say the rest of us read left to right. Ridley does it the other way. And if you ask him why, he’ll tell you to just do it.”

With the look and the style agreed and understood the challenge for the DP was delivering that for set pieces and on sets that would several times the scale of Gladiator.

Ave! Qui facturi movies te salutant

The main set in Malta recreates many of Rome’s impressive historical settings in an area approximately eight kilometres long. The sets were built to a height of around 46 feet, which was doubled digitally in post-production. The set for Macrinus’ (played by Denzel Washington) luxurious home alone covered almost 11,000 square feet, with an atrium open to the sky, a courtyard, a pool and an enormous staircase. It contained over 1,000 pieces of hand-painted faux marble.

In Morocco, there were over 80 huge tents dedicated just for the extras’ hair and makeup, and to house countless props and costumes. Here they shot the opening scene’s sea ‘battle of Numidia’ repurposing a set they had used for Kingdom of Heaven.

“This was about logistics. And reliability. This was not about crafting bokeh or customising a lens. There’s a time and a place for that but this show was not it. We wanted reliability of cameras and lots of them as well as compatibility between cameras and lenses. It’s about the gear being as easy as possible to handle.”

He shot mostly with ARRI Alexa Mini LF with additional Alexa LFs for higher frame rates augmented with crash cams and a drone.

“We had primes (Panaspeeds and Leica Summilux) but we rarely used them. I wanted zooms to bring out the scope and size of the sets. Our priority was to record enough shots of the right size, dynamic, composition, character and story.”

The zoom list included Angénieux EZ 1 45-135mm, EZ 2 22-60mm, Optica Elite 120-520mm and an Optimo Ultra 36-435mm; Primo 70 28-80mm and 70-185mm.

“I used the 36-435mm and Elite for close-ups and pushed those cameras further back because Ridley likes to shoot wide.

“The sets are so huge and so detailed that I wanted to bring that background to life as much as possible. I wanted the audience to see the person behind the person behind the person, even if they are out of focus. To do that I shot deep stops, T8.5 or T116, so we really feel the space and the textures of the background.”

The Colosseum itself was built on the same set that served the original at Fort Ricasoli in Malta, with a practical build one third the correct height of the real Colosseum, and between a quarter to a third of the span.  Mathieson hung banks of ARRIMAX 18Ks overhead and asked production designer Arthur Max to render the sand in the arena a brilliant white so he could throw black shadows, reflections and contrast.

For the wider vistas and exteriors he didn’t use much additional lighting at all, partly because of a camera plan which delivered coverage in nearly 360-degrees. Some camera ops were even dressed in costume in case they were caught in coverage.

A dream sequence was filmed in a studio, or rather a warehouse in Malta. This depicts hero Lucius (Paul Mescal) seeing his dead lover transported across the river Styx. There’s a vogue for this style of infra-red look which has also been seen in Dune II and The Zone of Interest. The scene was achieved here against bluescreen with the floor comprised of mirrors and silver pebbles.

Keeping it real

Of course, it’s a VFX heavy show too. The first film landed Mill Film the UK’s first Oscar for visual effects. Even if the majority of the baying spectators in the Colosseum are digital, Mathieson and Scott revel in shooting as much in-camera as possible. Indeed, the DP who is never shy to speak his mind, has previously been dismissive of studio shot VFX franchises for Marvel or DC (although he did shoot Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness for Sam Raimi).

“I appreciate what you can do on sound stages but I always feel like it’s clocking in and out of a factory. I like to be out on location and be inspired by what’s around me,” he said. “So for this film we’re working in heat and dust and there are mosquitos and somehow that sweat and that effort pays off with what you see on the screen. Ridley gets this too. He is tough. The shoot is tough but it yields things that are unpredictable and tactile.”

 

BTS: Blitz

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Your perception of war depends not just on when or where you were born but which level of social strata you inhabit. John Boorman’s recollection of the Luftwaffe’s lightening war on London in Hope and Glory (1987), was as an adventure. Untouched by war, Steven Spielberg drew on JG Ballard’s experiences in post-Pearl Harbour Shanghai for an equally exhilarating rites of passage in Empire of the Sun. British director Steve McQueen was born in 1969 and grew up in Ealing’s West Indian community, but his archaeology of World War II on the home front is coloured by a British Imperial destruction.

Blitz is a Brothers Grimm style fairy tale which follows the harrowing journey of nine year old George (Elliott Heffernan), whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) evacuates him to safety in the English countryside. George, defiant and determined to return home to Rita and his grandfather, Gerald (Paul Weller), in East London, jumps the train and walks back into a bombed out and broken down society.

The 12 Years A Slave director first started thinking about making a film about the Blitz in the early 2000s but it was only when he discovered a photograph while researching the BBC anthology film series Small Axe that he finally found a way in.

“It was an image of a small Black boy standing on a train platform with a large suitcase,” he says. “That image stayed with me in an almost omnipresent ghostly way, and I continued to find myself wondering who this child was, what was his story during the Blitz?”

In his capacity as official War Artist for Iraq in 2003 for the Imperial War Museum, the director gained first-hand accounts of war. That led him into deeper research of the Blitz.

He discovered that young firefighters were barely trained and terrified and that a West End night club called Café de Paris, was bombed in 1941, killing 34 people. Shortly after the bombing, reports arose of looters stealing jewellery and expensive items from the deceased clientele – authentic stories that McQueen wanted to incorporate into his screenplay.

The photo of the boy at the train station also affected the look of the film for French DP Yorick Le Saux AFC (Little Women; Irma Vep). “In every shot, we wanted the audience to feel the coexistence of life and death,” Le Saux says. “There was an image that we kept referring to where a woman is sweeping her floor, even though half of the house is missing, having been destroyed by a bomb the previous night. It was shocking to see people continuing their domestic work in such dramatic settings, but this was, of course, how they coped.”

Le Saux also points to the work of artist Henry Moore, who produced many drawings of Londoners sheltering during the Blitz. The Imperial War Museum provided access to many images from the era that had never been publicly released. McQueen and Le Saux also looked to archival footage from journalists and filmmakers who kept a record of the period. “We even looked at some pictures of the Ukraine war, to make the connection with nowadays and to realise that, almost a century later, it is the same,” Le Saux says.

Given that the production was working with a child actor, as well as undertaking a large amount of night shoots, there was a need for efficiency and reliability so the decision was made to film digitally  softened with vintage lenses and working with a palette soft blues, grays and lipstick reds of wartime colour photography.

“The idea was to create an environment that was representative of Londoners living in a permanent black out during the Blitz,” Le Saux explains. “The challenge of lighting and framing was to follow George intimately in his wandering, to empathise with him in all the adventures and things he encounters, and suddenly, to exaggerate a hostile adult world.”

The terror of the Luftwaffe bombardment from the skies is rendered abstract like white noise accompanied by Hans Zimmer’s pounding score. Editor Peter Sciberras (Power of the Dog) also worked from footage Humphrey Jennings’s 1943 docudrama of the Blitz, Fires Were Started.

With the London Docks almost unrecognisable since the 1940s (and with the capital being an expensive location to shoot) the production shot exteriors of a cobbled street and close-knit houses in Hull. The city’s transport hub (Hull Paragon Interchange) was a crucial element for the film’s departure sequence featuring children like George being evacuated. It had the scale of a London station but a visual freshness as well.

The production recreated the Café de Paris at Leavesden Studios and a flooded tube station on a stage just big enough to fit a 175-foot tube platform. The interior of the set was waterproofed and filled with water, rather than putting the set into a tank full of water.

Cinesite provided 140 invisible VFX shots focusing on the 1940s London environment and bombing sequences.

“The elaborate sets and locations built by the art department provided the framework for us to add in practical fire, smoke and water where possible, and for that practical effects work to inform the digital set extensions and pyro that were required to add the necessary scope in post-production,” says VFX supervisor, Andrew Whitehurst.

Alongside historical precision the brief demanded that the city felt “emotionally correct” within the drama, as Whitehurst puts it. “London, with its drifting smoke, dust, burning and burned-out buildings, required a careful and delicate balance of aesthetic, narrative and historical considerations.”

A shot towards the end of the film shows George running down a street as the camera cranes up and we see the destruction of the city beyond. Whitehurst explains, “In the foreground the building closest to us has recently been bombed out and the debris of the destroyed house is piled up. On location, the site of this recreated, bombed-out house had, in reality, been a building that was bombed, so there was a particular poignancy in recreating a tragic and turbulent moment in the history of that street.”

Brightcove sold for $233m, Akamai swoops for Edgio and Harmonic raises For Sale sign

Streaming Media

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Brightcove, the Technical Emmy winning video platform vendor, has been sold to app developer Bending Spoons for $233 million. It is the Italian company’s sixth acquisition this year and it is thought to be planning an IPO on the NYSE.

Brightcove’s most recent market cap was $143.98 million, which is notably lower than the acquisition price, reflecting the “substantial premium” Bending Spoons is offering to shareholders, according to InvestingPro. Brightcove maintains a gross profit margin of 61.65%, indicating strong underlying value in its core business which may explain Bending Spoons' interest in acquiring the company.

Brightcove was founded in Boston in 2004 starting out with a video player and expanding into a full online video services and monetization suite. Since its IPO in 2012, the company has focused on delivering video streaming solutions to a diverse clientele, including BBC, Showtime, AMC Networks and the LPGA.

Of late however it has faced challenges, reporting a net loss of $3 million for its latest quarter to November 4. The company’s financial health has been under scrutiny with its growth metrics considered underwhelming.  InvestingPro judged its financial performance to be “mixed”, with stagnation in revenue growth for the last twelve months (at $199.8m a slight decline of 0.22% year-over-year) a factor in the Brightcove’s decision to pursue a strategic sale.

Last month, Edenbrook Capital doubled its stake in the company to nearly 30%. Analysts noted at the time that Edenbrook might be positioning for a “value play,” anticipating a “potential market correction or strategic shifts within Brightcove that could enhance shareholder value.”

In August, the Milan headquartered Bending Spoons bought file-sharing platform WeTransfer. That followed the July purchase of digital publishing platform Issuu, the live streaming app StreamYard in May. In February it paid around $100m for the digital assets of Mosaic Group, which makes apps for mobile phones, and Meetup, a social network with 60 million members used to organise in-person and virtual events and gatherings. In January 2023 it acquired note-taking software firm Evernote.

Bending Spoons, which launched in 2013 and named after a scene in The Matrix, had a valuation of over $2.5 billion as of February. Its 39-year-old CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari told Reuters, “If and when we choose to pursue an IPO, we'll evaluate all reasonable options. Today, we have a slight preference for a listing in the United States, but our views may change.”

Marc DeBevoise, Brightcove’s CEO since 2022, said, “Brightcove is a storied and successful enterprise SaaS leader with 20 years of history, 12 of them as a public company. We have been a pioneer and innovator in the streaming market, from the early days of video player technologies to the leading video-powered engagement platform we are today. Today’s announcement will enable Brightcove to leverage the technology and market expertise of Bending Spoons and best position Brightcove to continue to thrive in the streaming and engagement technology market.”

The transaction is expected to finalize in the first half of 2025.

Akamai acquires Edgio assets

After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September select assets of CDN Edgio were picked up by Akamai last week. Edgio listed $379 million in assets and $369m in liabilities, according to court papers. At the time, its network comprised 300 Points of Presence (PoPs) worldwide, more than 7,000 ISP interconnections, and more than 275Tbps of global capacity serving around 900 customers.

Akamai was the winning bidder of the assets which included customer contracts from Edgio’s businesses in security and content delivery, and non-exclusive license rights to Edgio’s entire patent portfolio. No assets related to the Edgio network were acquired by Akamai.

Dan Rayburn noted that investment firm and Edgio debtor Lynrock won the assets for Uplynk and Interdigital, some of Edgio’s patents.

Edgio was only formed in 2022 after Limelight Networks acquired Edgecast from Yahoo and Apollo Global Management, with the combined company rebranding that year. Between 2013 and 2016, EdgeCast was a subsidiary of Verizon. Verizon acquired Yahoo! in 2017 and merged it with its Verizon Digital Media Services business (including the CDN service) to form Oath and later Verizon Media. 

In 2023 Lumen and StackPath quit the CDN business, selling their enterprise customers to Akamai.

For sale alert

One company with a ‘for sale’ sign to watch is Harmonic. The cable and video technology company initiated a review of its assets at the end of 2023 after posting a net loss of $6.5 million for its Q4. The company abandoned those plans in the spring, citing a soft buyer’s market, but a sale of some or all its divisions are now back on the table with 2.3% stakeholder Ancora Holdings urging the board Harmonic to explore a possible sale and maximise shareholder value.

Romanesque Capital, another a Harmonic shareholder, supported the call for a review aimed at a possible sale. Multiple cable industry experts have speculated to Light Reading that Comcast could make a good fit as buyer given the operator's reliance on Harmonic's virtual cable modem termination system.

Camerimage: “We have to be part of the change”

IBC

A usually quite show dedicated to cinematography erupted into controversy around female representation.

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Now in its 32nd year, Camerimage festival in Poland holds a prized place on the Oscars awards circuit and is traditionally held in high esteem among cineasts, but remarks by its founder and director ahead of this year’s event have cast its future in doubt.

Marek Żydowicz had suggested that pressure to increase gender diversity at his festival was “a fanatical revolution that destroys the cathedrals of art.”

“Can we sacrifice works and artists with outstanding artistic achievements solely to make room for mediocre film productions?” he wrote in an op-ed that left no room for misinterpretation.

Blitz director Steve McQueen promptly pulled his participation from the festival’s opening night, followed by Coralie Fargeat, director of The Substance.

Actor and producer Cate Blanchett did not, choosing to fire back from within. At a public Q&A the jury chair of this year’s Camerimage main competition said, “We’re all part of the conversation. We can’t walk away from it. We have to be part of the change.”

The optics weren’t good given that the festival had controversially decided to premiere the western Rust on which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot. Director Joel Souza, who was injured on the set, and Bianca Cline the DP who finished the film, were in attendance.

The film’s closing credits begin with the words ‘For Halyna’, followed by a question attributed to her ‘What can we do to make this better?’

Souza said that he and Cline tried to preserve every single frame Hutchins had shot in the final picture. He told Screen, “We’d recreate the set, recreate the light, recreate everything. It was a look that Halyna and I had developed together, and then a look that Bianca and I redeveloped together.”

Representation of female filmmakers

Multiple other professionals in attendance voiced their views. Hélène De Roux of Zeiss countered, “Ladies thank you all for coming. We are delighted to continue to help you build whatever cathedrals you want. Camerimage should be as happy for you to be here as we are to come here."

Wolfgang Lempp, cofounder of Filmlight said his company’s awards night for colourists, “We don’t have a women’s colourist award or a foreign language colourist award but we do recognise there is no level playing field in the real world. We unapologetically promote female participation. We would like to see more female colourists and DoPs and we’d like to see more women elected as presidents.”

Kate Reid BSC (Silo S2), said, “There’s been a lot of talk about the topic and I feel positive that things will move in a better direction. There will always be people who say ‘No’. Just don’t dwell on it. Be the best DP you can be.

Nancy Schreiber ASC (Mapplethorpe) said, “It’s not a fair world. There’s no diversity [in the audience] here in terms of other cultures. We just have to believe there are other people out there who accept we are competent and will give us a chance.

The 75-year-old added, “Besides being a women I got the age thing. Am I still walking?—Yes, I work out six days a week but there is ageism in our industry. Even white males are having a rough time at the ASC if they are of a certain age.”

Rachel Morrison, who was the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography (for Mudbound) was at Camerimage presenting her first film as director. The Fire Within, written by Barry Jenkins, is a sports biopic about Olympic boxer Claressa Shields who fought for gender parity in the sport.

“As a female DP, I know what it’s like to be in a craft that people do not picture women in, where it isn’t enough just to be good at your job,” Morrison said. “There’s still a tendency to have women tell only women’s stories. The industry thinks of women for rom-coms, or melodramas, and it’s the men who are given opportunities in action movies or sports stories. Cinematography still has further to go in terms of combatting the perceptions women face. For my entire career, people have been looking around for the DP and I’ve had to say, ‘Wait, I’m the DP.’ But it’s slowly changing.”

Lachman lifetime award

Honoured with a lifetime achievement award was the American cinematographer Ed Lachman ASC. He learned the craft working for the great European lighting cameramen Vittorio Storaro, Sven Nykvist and Robby Müller, before going on to shoot films with Werner Herzog (Stroszek), Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), Wim Wenders (Tokyo-Ga) and Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich) and Pablo Larraín whose latest film, Maria, screened in during the festival. It’s a biopic of opera singer Maria Callas starring Angeline Jolie and was shot in Budapest (standing in for Paris) on 16mm and 35mm.

“It was very important for Pablo that we shoot in La Scala (opera house, Milan) itself because that was such an important part of her life. But it was very expensive. For just four hours it cost us $250,000 and I had to figure out a way to light it within the least amount of time, like 45 minutes. They wouldn’t even let us prep lights in there because they have productions going non-stop. All of that had to be done in the time slot we were allocated.

Lachman worked with the lighting director of La Scala and just a handful of Germany crew to light the auditorium.

“I knew we needed a stronger spotlight on Maria so we had that light resting in the elevator ready to go up to the lighting booth as soon as our four hours began. That was the most difficult thing for me to do on this film because of the tight time frame, the multiple scenes we had there and because primarily that scene is shot with Steadicam.”

AI and Cinematography

A session organised by the American Society of Cinematographers explored the growing use of AI tools like Runway for content creation and revealed a mix of feelings.

While open to the idea of generating storyboards to help with the design process, most seasoned DPs were sceptical and wary of using GenAI any further.

Catherine Goldschmidt BSC (The Last of Us) said, “I have dabbled with AI because I am interested in using it as a brainstorming tool but to be honest I got a little bit nervous because I feel like the prompts need to be so specific - and we've signed NDAs – that I was worried about putting that out into the ether. I don't totally understand what happens to it.

“As far as would I draw a moral line, I would worry that if I trained the tool to produce an image with such specificity and show it to a director that then I would be making what [cinematographers] then do on set obsolete. I'm sure that's a lot of people's fear in the room. It's a fine line between approaching it as a storyboarding tool or a jumping off point and copying. If all your references are other films then you can slip into just copying other films when what you actually want to do is synthesize [references] and shoot something that is singular, special and unique and unrepeatable.”

Salvatore Totino ASC (Spider-Man: Homecoming) said, “I do have some anxiety and fears about it. My fears stem from starting to rely too much on feeding prompts to AI that I'm cutting off my brain from actually going farther than it would have had I not settled for whatever it was giving me at the time.

“The part that I'm I have a hard time with is I'm asking a computer to try to visualise an idea or thought that I'm having. When I do a project I draw a lot of references from music, photography and films and also everyday experiences that invoke a certain feeling in me that I might then I might be able to translate to the visual image. But if I’m trying to give specific prompts to a computer then my brain is no longer invoking my emotions or sparking any of my own thoughts. The computer is going to give me a result but it feels like the end of a process not the evolution of your imagination.”

DPs turned director

Aside from Morrison, another garlanded DoPs screened their first feature film as directors at Camerimage. Rodrigo Prieto ASC AMC is a multiple Oscar, BAFTA and ASC Award nominated cinematographer, best known for Brokeback Mountain (2005), Babel (2006), Argo (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and The Irishman (2019). For his directorial debut he chose an adaptation for Netflix of the 1950s novel Pedro Páramo by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, which screened at Camerimage and on which he shared photography duties with Nico Aguilar.

“I had been thinking about directing because I do like working with actors,” Prieto said. “Also, this is a novel that I've loved since I first read it in high school. So when I got the call from [producer] Stacy Perskie that Netflix had bought the rights and they're looking for a director, it was an automatic ‘yes’ from me.”

“I spoke to some of my director friends looking for advice. The first person I turned to was Martin Scorsese because at the time we were together in Oklahoma prepping Killers of the Flower Moon. He told me to just make sure I stick closely to the original material because if not, [the producers] will kill you.”

New talent

In a session aimed at encouraging young talent into the industry, Jamie Ramsay SASC (All of Us Strangers, Living) said, “I grew up in South Africa where mentorship was not really a thing. When I did have the opportunity to be on set with older DPs I always declined. The reason is I wanted my style to be born completely out of darkness. I didn’t want my choices to be influenced by someone else. I’m not saying that’s the way it should be done. I wanted it to be born out of my own failures. Now I’m in a position where I can offer advice to the younger generation of DPs I find the process so rewarding.”

Kate Reid has just shot the series What it Feels Like For A Girl in Wales. She advised, “Try to choose the projects that resonate with you because then you are likely to find your voice. Shooting faces, even in corporate video and commercials, teaches you how to light. Treat every opportunity you get to work as an opportunity to learn.”

Lighting animation

Adam Habib and Jonathan Pytko the cinematographers behind this year’s animated smash Inside Out 2 shared their process working with virtual cameras and lighting

“Everyone has heard of the phrase ‘lights, camera, action’ – we have the same thing but the order is changed so it's ‘camera, action, lights,” Habib said. “That refers to three big production departments of the film – layout, animation and lighting. The challenge for us becomes how do we collaborate across the pipeline to create the cinematography of the movie.”

They begin with environmental lighting appropriate for the time of day of each scene. “We try to emulate live action techniques by using soft lights to create a night time atmosphere,” Pytko said. “Of course, being an animated film, we need to be able to break all those rules whenever we need to for visual purposes. So we have thousands of practical lights and then our main character (Joy) is also a light source. If you were to actually photograph a light bulb it would look very flat, so we’re break those physical properties to make her look like a shaped character.”

They talked about developing a ‘colour script’ which describes the relationship between colour, light and camera that is themed throughout the film. They painted scenes for colour references and also used movies such as Tim Burton’s Batman and Punch Drunk Love for other scenes.