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MillimeterIn the Rings
Nov 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman
Andrew Lesnie's Second Round
 Lesnie altered his method of lighting eyes for the second LOTR film. Top, a more "fantastical" approach on the first film, and bottom, a "grittier" approach. |
Andrew Lesnie insists he was “shocked” to learn he had won the Academy Award for cinematography earlier this year for his work on Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. Lesnie, like many prognosticators, fully expected Roger Deakins to win the award for The Man Who Wasn't There. He says the only reason he even “mustered” words for a thank-you speech during the Oscars was the fact that he wanted to pay tribute to his late friend and colleague on the project, chief lighting technician Brian Bansgrove, who passed away in Thailand last December just as Fellowship was released.
Lesnie insists that Bansgrove and his crew were “the key element” in helping him craft images for all three Lord of the Rings films during a marathon, 15-month shoot between mid-1999 and late 2000.
“Brian was my main reason for winning [the Academy Award],” says Lesnie. “His contribution was so important. You have to remember, we had a massive prep period before we even started shooting, knowing we were going to film three movies simultaneously. During that period, Brian and I meticulously designed the lighting for every single set for the entire project. There were some changes made along the way, of course, depending on weather and performances and story changes and things, but Brian was an extremely close collaborator in designing and pre-rigging lighting. Along with the digital grading process in post, that lighting scheme is the most important tool we are using to create subtle differences in the overall look of the three films.”
Subtle Differences
Lesnie recently spoke to Millimeter after completing his color-grading responsibilities for the second film in director Peter Jackson's trilogy — The Two Towers — and just before heading off to shoot an independent, Australian film (Love's Brother, directed by Jan Sardi). He detailed those “subtle differences” that he feels will give the new LOTR film a “feel” slightly different from its award-winning predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring.
One key difference, he concedes, is the fact that The Two Towers was entirely digitally mastered in New Zealand at Posthouse, under the supervision of colorist and Posthouse president Peter Doyle. While the extensive effects sequences on Fellowship had been mastered digitally, the entire movie was not. Lesnie says the process has improved sufficiently in the last year to make it logistically feasible to digitally master all of Two Towers, leading to, according to Lesnie, “a sharper look and finer grain.” (For details on the digital mastering work done on the film, see “The Right Timing,” p. 50.)
“This time, the whole thing is mastered digitally, and that means we avoided the generation loss that we saw when we made over 2,000 release prints of the first film,” he says. “We were a little disappointed by the generation loss in some of those prints. We discovered that if you digitally grade the entire film 100%, doing the squeeze of the super 35mm images digitally, rather than optically, the result is less degradation of the image in your release prints. We did extensive tests and eventually figured out this was the best way to go.”
At the same time, Lesnie insists that the detailed shooting plan for every scene of each movie was the biggest reason Two Towers is not visually identical to its predecessor, even though they were shot at the same time. That plan, he explains, grew out of Jackson's creative approach to the three films and, for the most part, “worked beautifully,” according to Lesnie.
“We never wanted the three films to look identical,” he says. “We knew we could experiment, fine-tune, and change certain things in post, because we had greater control with the digital mastering process [see “Color Control,” p, 59], and that was a great help. Still, the firm plan that we developed in pre-production was even more crucial. We didn't do much of it with filters — it was all a matter of a detailed lighting plan. The first film was meant to be the most fantastical of the three, as we meet the characters and their strange world — elements of pure fantasy as we see Hobbit Town and the Elvish Kingdom, and places like that. The second film plunges the characters into war, so we wanted The Two Towers to look grittier, and more realistic. Therefore, for the scenes we shot for this film, we tended to use more aggressive lighting, and let the whole thing look grainier. We haven't started mastering the third film yet, but I fully expect it will look even more aggressive.”
Shaking Things Up
Lesnie emphasizes that the use of “more aggressive lighting” is a “fairly subtle adjustment, not something meant to be blatant.” But he does insist it will have an impact on how audiences perceive the film.
“In the first film, we were meticulous about scenes showing faces, dealing with eye light,” he explains. “Everyone had as much eye light as we could manage. In the second film, we let that issue slide selectively, depending on the scene, but subtly lighting the eyes differently. The point was to get across this notion that things are starting to get out of control. It's a method of degrading the image in-camera, taking a beautiful image and defacing it a bit, making it dirtier. Of course, this was a huge project, so for the most part, Brian tried to create lighting setups that were all-purpose, but at the same time, it's easy to increase or decrease shadowy areas, as necessary, and we did that quite a bit.”
Lesnie adds that he also took pains to rate his film stock (mainly Kodak 500T/5279) in such a way as to further degrade certain shots in Two Towers, as well as “creating situations” that permitted his camera operators to slightly shake the camera without the effect appearing to be deliberate.
 New Zealand’s countryside captured on film by Lesnie’s camera crew during the trilogy’s 15-month shoot. |
“Rather than telling the operator to shake something up, we would sometimes shake the lights,” he says. “At other times, I would tell the operator to stand back with a 200mm lens and get the camera as steady as he possibly can. Then, I'd make him stand there for five or 10 minutes, knowing it's impossible to stay perfectly still for that long, and eventually, whether he wanted to or not, there would be a different effect — an effect of slight, subtle shaking as he struggles to keep from moving. I think that is a more honest effect than telling him to shake the camera.”
Lesnie was expecting a less-complicated shoot for Love's Brother, but then again, that was scheduled to be only a seven-week job. When that ends, it's back to the universe of The Lord of the Rings, as he'll get started working with Jackson and Doyle to color-grade the third LOR film — Return of the King — due for release about a year from now.
“After that, I'll probably stick with smaller movies for a little while,” he chuckles. “When I came on board, I thought [Lord of the Rings] would be about a six-to eight-month commitment. I guess I was a little off on that calculation, but that's OK. It's all been very exciting for me — I have an Oscar sitting in my kitchen right now, believe it or not.”
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