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MillimeterShooting Enemies
Jul 8, 2009 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman
Michael Mann on making a period piece digitally.
Certain night sequences, such as this one of John Dillinger’s death scene, were shot relying on the actual kind of lighting available in 1933 at the scene of a major news event: car headlights and flares carried by that era’s version of the paparazzi.
Photo: Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures
Visual assists
Among the biggest of those challenges was the creation and digital capture of period light, since lighting instruments of that era created far different illumination than those of today. Cars and streetlamps were routinely rigged to emulate 1933 light, and periodically, those lights were the only source of illumination in particular scenes.
“We noticed in period photographs that street lighting was very spotty—that was before sodium vapor,” Mann says. “There was a certain diffusion of light that was different than what we have today. If there was a streetlight in front of a building on the cityscape, where the light did not hit, it fell off to darkness rapidly, rather than lighting everything around [the main lit area]. So we used recessed lights and low wattage and yellow incandescent lights.”
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The most effective and stylized use of period light involves scenes in which news photographers race to photograph Dillinger when he is being transferred to prison and later, after he is shot to death at night. Filmmakers say their research helped them figure out how that era’s equivalent of the paparazzi managed to instantly produce enough light to take photographs on location, with no access to electricity.
“Our prop master [Kris Peck] noticed it, looking at some period footage and newsreels,” Spinotti says. “In the corner of one of the frames, he realized they were lighting up those news scenes with powerful flares. He showed it to me and Michael, and we thought it was a brilliant way to light a scene. So we did tests at night and the result was beautiful, and the light was on the mood and dramatic, as smoke [from the flares] drifted by.”
“[The scene near the Biograph Theater after Dillinger was shot was] a wild news scene with hundreds of spectators, and when you see the still photographs, it seems like the light is coming from carbon arcs,” Mann says. “But that would have been impractical—there is no way that Movietone News could have shown up in a half-hour with carbon arcs. When we found that other image that showed the street and the light source as actual flares, we realized we could replicate that look.”
Mann could hardly build a believable 1933 ambiance without visual-effects help, which was spearheaded by supervisor Robert Stadd (see The Art of Tiling in Public Enemies). The 400-plus digital effects shots in the movie were created by eight facilities: Illusion Arts, Visual Effects Collective, Invisible Effects, Pixel Playground, Wildfire VFX, Hammerhead Productions, Pacific Title, and CafeFX. Those shots largely revolved around set and location extensions and element combinations—all designed to be as invisible as possible.
The DI process, performed by Sonnenfeld at Company 3, was fairly straight¬forward in the sense that so much of the look was finalized in-camera, with heavy lifting involving Sonnenfeld done at the front end of the process. Transferring that look to film, however, was more complex and involved significant, additional testing right up until the 11th hour, according to filmmakers. The eventual success of that process revolved around the application of various look-up tables developed for the production at EFilm before the eventual print was struck at Technicolor. Still, Carroll says digital projection is, ideally, the way Mann wants audiences to see the movie.
“Once digital cinema is everywhere, that process will be simpler,” Carroll says. “But, for now, it’s just a combination of having these great [color scientists] building LUTs for us, then tweaking them and twisting them in new ways to find areas we can go into on the film negative to help us accomplish the look Michael had originally envisioned. But if you have the opportunity to see this movie in a local movie theater projected digitally, you will be in for a real treat.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.