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MillimeterThe Future Does Not Look Pretty
May 15, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
McG and his team reveal how they created a new look for the venerable killer-robot series
Practical Terminator robots were designed and built by the late Stan Winston and his team based on Winston's work from the original Terminator films. Winston passed away during the project, and his company, now called Legacy Effects, finished the job under his colleague, John Rosengrant. The film is dedicated to Winston's memory. Industrial Light & Magic handled most of the CG work related to the various Terminators.
When committing to take over the Terminator universe, director McG says he planned to honor the mythology of the previous Terminator films while radically changing the look of the franchise. But he initially wondered whether stepping into the shoes of a famous director—in this case, James Cameron—on a hallowed property would have much upside for him. McG decided to solicit Cameron's views on his experience.
"I explained [to Cameron] this movie is the story of the future war [the other Terminator stories take place in the present day] —the post-judgment day story, which he thought was interesting," McG says. "But he said he reserved the right not to like the movie, and I said I reserved the right not to like Avatar. I think he knew then that I wasn't trying to replicate what he had done, but rather, I was trying to contribute to the great mythology he put forward. That was the moment he offered the story of what he felt following the great Ridley Scott on the Alien franchise. At the time, some people thought he couldn't follow Ridley Scott, and his approach was to respect the first movie while contributing to and furthering the mythology while making a great second movie [1986's Aliens]. He was very successful in doing so, and while I wouldn't be as bold as to say we could be as successful as that, I will say we took every step to ensure that kind of success."
The result of that effort is Terminator Salvation. The post-apocalyptic war between the machines who have taken over the world and the human resistance led by John Connor (Christian Bale) at the heart of the story brings McG's vision of what a world ravaged by nuclear war would look like to the bigscreen.
"I studied with some guys from Cal Tech and MIT about what things would be like after the bombs went off," McG says. "We talked about what it would do to the ozone layer and therefore the color temperature of the sky and the landscape and everything else that would exist after a global thermonuclear war. After talking to them, I felt the sun would be flarier, more intense, and harsh. So we wanted to come up with a look that reflected that. … I wanted to get some dead stock from Kodak to do this, but they didn't have enough to make it work, so we ended up shooting a lot of [Kodak Vision2] 5201 [a 50 ASA stock] for most of the movie, and we even let some of the film get damaged by heat to lose some of its integrity. We also [replicated during the digital-intermediate process] the Oz process [an extreme photochemical color-timing technique], which basically means you hit the negative with a lot more silver than you would traditionally hit it with. What we got, to me, is a hybrid between a David Lean picture and an Ansel Adams black-and-white photograph."
Oz2
The resulting aesthetic resembles, in the words of Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, "what it would feel like during the Industrial Revolution in Pittsburgh in about 1886. … Using the Oz process is far more than a skipped bleach sort of look—it's more like skipped bleach on acid."
Hurlbut says that his original goal was to perform the photochemical Oz process (the name is derived from the first letters of the last names of the two men who invented the technique at Technicolor—Bob Olson and Mike Zacharia), but the production determined it was too expensive. Instead, they did some tests and asked Company 3 Colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld to duplicate it during the digital-intermediate phase.
The result, Hurlbut says, was more successful than he anticipated, and a far different result than the so-called digital ENR process that filmmakers such as Clint Eastwood have been using to deepen blacks in their imagery. The result was an ultraharsh, desaturated look that lacks grain—the exact opposite of traditional desaturation, which normally uses grain extensively.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
