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Next-Gen Indy

May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

New techniques deliver traditional looks on the latest in the Indiana Jones franchise.

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Spielberg's Take on Visual Effects

The long journey to bring a new chapter of the Indiana Jones saga to the big screen during the last 18 years has been well documented, but the end result is only now available for evaluation. In Steven Spielberg's view, that result adheres firmly to the original vision, philosophy, and look behind the franchise. As Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull got ready to hit theaters, Spielberg insisted that what he calls “the old-fashioned B-movie mentality” and the production methodology behind that mentality both remained intact.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and now Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — they have all been B movies,” Spielberg says. “Very expensive B movies, but still, B movies. With the exception of moving the timeline to 1957, I never had any intention to modernize Indiana Jones because my fear was that it would bring the film into alignment with the style and palette of all the contemporary adventures — many of which are based on Manga, comic art, and graphic novels. The look we established for Indy is what Indy was and should always be. Once I was immersed in the very familiar world of Indiana Jones, the shots that I came up with and the lenses I chose were, I believe, intuitively similar to what I did 19 years ago. Whenever I had a great idea for a shot that would have been along the lines of nothing I had ever done before, I immediately filed that idea for a different kind of movie, and went back to a little more measured and fun-loving angle that would complement the series, not reinvent it.”

Therefore, the only thing fundamentally different about making this installment of the franchise, Spielberg insists, is the new tools available.

But that's a key point: Spielberg and his team of collaborators labored hard to make Kingdom of the Crystal Skull appear to have been shot more or less in the same era as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) — even while updating their technological approach and workflow and aging the lead character while bringing his story into the fringes of the modern era, the start of the Cold War period in the 1950s. The new movie also used a different cinematographer (Janusz Kaminski, stepping into the shoes of original Indiana Jones cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe); added bigger digital effects (about 560 shots), including significant creature work done at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM); and brought Spielberg into the world of the digital intermediate at long last.

Still, these changes or updates, while important, do not change the inherent character of the movie, according to Kaminski, Spielberg's longtime collaborator. Crystal Skull, Kaminski says, adheres completely to the traditional Indiana Jones formula — a formula he says Slocombe pioneered on the first three movies.

“This is totally a traditional movie, and it was fantastic for me [as cinematographer] to follow Douglas' footprints,” he says. “To some degree, the [original Indiana Jones trilogy] reinvented the action-adventure genre. The genre existed going back to movies like Where Eagles Dare [1968] and Kelly's Heroes [1970], but Slocombe kind of reinvented it to some degree with his own visual style. I tried to follow the blueprint, and of course, there is that certain history the audience was expecting. So you get the guy running with the whip, the hat, the similar humor, and all those things. But, at the same time, this movie takes place in 1957, a time with more advanced technology and a different [global conflict]. So, to some degree, I had to invent my own representation of Slocombe's [template] — warmer and high key.”

In keeping with Indiana Jones tradition, Kaminski shot the movie in the anamorphic format using Panavision C and E series anamorphic lenses, and relying on two stocks — Kodak Vision2 250D and Kodak Vision 500T 5279 — for “shots that required that extra stop,” according to the DP.

Action plan

The film's extensive action sequences exemplify the trademark Indiana Jones style, while the methods and tools used to capture them and incorporate them seamlessly into the rest of the picture exemplify how far the filmmaking world has evolved since the last installment in 1989. Spielberg says, for instance, that digital effects technology has greatly enhanced his ability to weave the entire fabric together compared to how his team worked back in 1989.

“The digital tools at our disposal are basically able to do things that, when we did them in the '80s, they looked kind of fake,” Spielberg says. “Our matte paintings were good matte paintings, but they were obviously painted. When a car full of Germans goes off a cliff, the cliff is a watercolor almost, or maybe an acrylic rendering. That's not the same thing as what we do today. I always cringed in the 1980s, hoping for a technology someday that would allow daytime matte work to be much more realistic. The mattes we did in [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] were as real as you could possibly get, but that was all night work. With night work, it's a little easier to be impressionistic and really hide the fact that the horizon really is not at magic hour for the next 80 shots. In that sense, I kind of cringed when we made the original Indy films, but those shots were necessary evils.

“Now, instead of using matte paintings — which limited where the camera could move and how much it could even pan — I now have free range to move the camera inside a world that was created in the computer, and not on a canvas or a matte stand. I use more CG now because there are many more tools to keep the actors and the stunt people safe with harness and wire work than we had available to us between 1980 and 1989. A lot of the CG [now] is simple wire-removal shots, but we also had a few digital animals and other critters. We had many more effects in this movie than we did on Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Spielberg points to a stunt in the movie in which characters plummet into a raging river — a scene directly comparable to one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).

“For [Temple of Doom], we had a scene where Indy takes a sword and severs the main supports on a rope bridge,” Spielberg says. “It was a very dangerous stunt, and stuntmen were out of the question because the fall was not survivable. So George Gibbs, the mechanical effects supervisor, devised mechanical automatons that could kick their legs and arms as they plummeted 300ft. to the gorge below. We had a similar stunt to do in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but this time, we used digital actors to fall to the river.”

For all sorts of sequences, there was a series of major visual-effects tools developed internally at ILM that Visual Effects Supervisor Pablo Helman says have the potential to significantly impact the industry, which will be discussed shortly. Likewise, from a production point of view, Kaminski liberally used more sophisticated tools to help him better accomplish the ambiance of Indiana Jones-style action. Kaminski explains it was only logical to rely on such tools, given the nature of the action he was charged with filming in the jungles of Hawaii and elsewhere.

“In 1989, when they made the last movie, the technology was way different,” Kaminski says. “Not the [film] cameras, but the way of traveling high-speed with actors. The Cablecam, the Spydercam, the Technocrane — that whole way of gyroscoping the camera to follow the action did not exist. In this movie, the action is way bigger, almost nonstop, and we simply had to use that technology to shoot it. So the way we move the camera [for action beats] is still Indiana Jones, but for the modern period, and the lighting is not as glamorous, because this takes place in the 1950s and not the 1930s. Those are the primary differences, and they allowed me to do my own interpretation of [the style developed by Slocombe].”

The quintessential example of the challenges Kaminski faced shooting action is the movie's big jungle-chase sequence — a sustained scene involving four jeeps racing through the Hawaiian jungle, swerving in and around each other, as individuals stage complex stunts between the vehicles.

“It's literally almost like a racetrack cut through a jungle,” Kaminski says. “So it's really a combination of live action, second unit, and greenscreen, and to combine those elements is always complicated. ILM's work on their portion of it was amazing. But [the challenge of] putting the camera on a cable to follow the action, with the light constantly changing because you are in the jungle in Hawaii — when it is overcast one minute, sunny the next, rainy the next — was great. You have to also be there to shoot all the wide shots and, at the same time, travel with the actors and shoot anamorphic with a very heavy contrast ratio between shadow and highlights, while moving the camera between the four jeeps. I really credit my [Rigging Grip] Jim Chizmar, [Lighting Director] David Devlin, and [Second-unit Cinematographer] Flavio Labiano for tremendous help on that. But even so, it was a very complicated thing to light and shoot.”

Indeed, Kaminski says, “lighting was an essential part of storytelling in this movie,” and yet, lighting in the jungle was extremely problematic. “You can always figure out a way to capture the image, but lighting it in those situations — you can't always light perfectly when the camera moves in 180 degrees, and the actor at 45 degrees,” he says. “So we had to bring huge lighting instruments into the jungle. We had a big 40K [Luminsys] SoftSun instrument, and we drove next to the jeeps, lighting right next to them as they drove along. So that was kind of old school, like what you might see in [behind-the-scenes] still photos from the making of a John Huston Western — a camera on the rail and arc lights following a horse rider. It was like that, except, of course, we were moving about 35mph. We actually had setups where an 18K [lighting instrument] was a highlight because there was so much [natural] light outside, like in the desert. There, the sun was so bright, we had to bring out HMIs that were even brighter just to fill out shadows. It was an amazing learning experience.”

“[The process of making this movie allowed me to] rediscover the true art of cinematography, which is a disappearing art form — especially in a period movie with lots of action,” says Kaminski, a notorious traditionalist. “You start appreciating [legendary cinematographers] Gregg Toland and James Wong Howe — those masters who knew how to light and had to do this kind of lighting every day. A lot of young guys coming up today do not know how to light in this way.”

The complexities of shooting that chase through the jungle are what eventually led Kaminski and Spielberg to settle on the decision to do a digital intermediate on the film, working in concert with Efilm colorist Yvan Lucas. The DI process was something the two filmmakers had not planned on initially and had traditionally avoided over their many years of collaboration.

“For this movie, the DI was the right choice because we had lots of visual effects and wanted them to be more organic with the rest of the movie, and there were certain areas of control it gave us in [complicated action sequences],” Kaminski says. “It started because in that jungle scene, there were so many issues with mismatching light, and not always being able to put lights in exactly the proper position. I knew I would have to even certain things up. And it wasn't just light — I couldn't always control all colors in those scenes either. I had four actors [in some shots] wearing different makeup, and so I knew that is a sequence where I could [better] control contrast [in the DI suite]. Sometimes, the shot would go into very bright areas that were four stops over, and I didn't have the means to control that as well [in the field].

“So I got an agreement from [Spielberg] that I could do a DI for that sequence to control the amount of brightness in the frame, by reducing it down a little bit, maybe lowering the contrast a bit, and controlling secondary colors on the faces of the actors. So we did a DI on that scene, and Steven really liked it, and we agreed we could do the whole film like that. Basically, the technology has really improved, and the people doing the DI work have really improved in the last few years, so Steven was willing to go there.”

But Kaminski is quick to interject that he insisted on following a traditional photochemical timing template in the DI suite.

“We only agreed to do it because we felt the DI finally matches the quality of the photochemical processes,” he says. “So I used it exactly as I would photochemical timing, using point scale and primary colors. Occasionally, I used secondary colors, but only in very necessary conditions. I make my movies on the negative, and not in the DI, and I feel that was true here. This film would have looked amazingly beautiful either way, but it just happens we were able to improve certain things, or enhance them, by doing a DI this time.”

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