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I’m glad that I did remember to ask Aleksey on our podcast, even if I had forgotten I had! It really was the best I have seen.
Yes, we used smoke on the ‘BR 2049’ shot on a studio backlot.
We talked with Aleksey Rodionov for our podcast and we should have asked him about that fog. I suspect it was a combination of real and added smoke but it certainly looks real.
Yes, a brilliant scene from a brilliant film. The fog is so good in that scene that I imagined it was done on the right day. Maybe it was! There is some equivalent work done on Antonioni’s ‘Red Desert’, although the wind does give the effects away at one moment. Serious fog and wind machines were used for ‘Red Desert’ as can be seen in some behind the scenes images. I have never seen images of the ‘Come and See’ rig but I imagine it must have been substantial.
I have had mixed success with fog, the best being done on stage. For an exterior you are at teh mercy of the weather. I would suggest setting your rig the day before you shoot as, invariably, smoke/fog will hang early in the day rather than later. Otherwise, if it is possible to have a flexible schedule and wait for a calm damp day …. Yes, that might not be possible. It seldom is.
Not every film begins with a look book. Some of them are created by a director in advance of the film. being given a green light, some by the production designer and some, less often in my experience, by the cinematographer. I will gather references if that is the way a director likes to prepare for a shoot but I don’t do it for my own sake. What I do are sketches of possible shots and staging as well as detailed diagrams for lighting. I find that the style of the film’s cinematography, camera movement and so forth, comes from discussions that happen during location scouting, when a director and I get time to talk through a script, or not until the actors go through a blocking rehearsal on the day of the shoot.
I am a bit rusty as well. I think it would be fine to drop the 85. I used to do that when it was just a film print and I wanted cooler shadows. In the DI you should be fine.
The solids were outside the window. The LED was bounced to the side of the shot and not directly overhead, which would not have reached so far into the face.
I did use a single white bounce outside the windows for both of the scenes. I also had a solid to cut some light as well. I was only using the bounce for the shots on Michael. Inside the first cafe I used two LEDs bouncing off the ceiling to either side of the wide shot. These were set to a tungsten balance to give some warmth to the shadows. I did not use them for the closer coverage.
Ahh! We have different ways of working. I would in the past never considered blowing up an image and I still only look at that as an option as a last resort. You say you can make a telephoto shot from a wide angle but you are loosing definition whatever your capture system. Besides, there is a different feel to a blown up shot when there is movement in the frame. But I get what you are saying. You want the flexibility.
Not so many takes on any scene. The scene with Ron eating the chips was quite a few and I felt for that actor.
We had tested the fireworks before the shoot as well as their positioning. We needed a low tide so that they could be set off from the beach and they were just off the shelf fireworks. I metered the scene in the foreground and let the fireworks fell where they might. It was just the same as on ‘Skyfall’ though some on that film were added in post whereas everything in ‘Empire’ was in camera.
Interesting comments. I would have said a 32mm but I see the trend is towards wider lenses. Shooting a close up on a 25mm or a 27mm is something I have done in. the past and would do again in the right circumstances but I doubt that often.
I was shooting film and I used a regular shutter opening.
A plate shot on an 18mm, for instance, from the same camera position as the main camera shot, if that is a 40mm, will not match. Both the perspective and the lens distortion will be different. If you are shooting a wide background and selecting a part of that background to match with your main camera shot then it is viable and only what is done on the ‘volume’. But shooting a specific plate for a specific background is different.
I used branches on a revolving pipe rig to mimic the trees that were in the plate. We had the plate playing on a small screen so we could judge the speed and timing with the background.
That was about it. We also shot our plates at a specific time of day to justify the sunlight playing on the car interor..
We never had any color references of Dreamland so I was not aware of that. The balroom was done out in an Asian style, with lots of gold etc., so the yellow would have made sense.
For ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ we chose the shots we would be shooting in the car and recorded the angle to the car, height off the ground and lens length. When we shot our plates we used these references.
The times I have used projection we also shot with the same lens length that we would use for the main action. If you shoot a 360º then it follows that you have more flexibility with your actual shots but you might still want to be careful with what lenses you use.
