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Aesthetic Power

Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jon Silberg

Achieving Oscar-worthy Looks for Reality, Fantasy, and Beyond

 Digital Content Producer's and Millimeter's coverage of past and present award nominees/winners

From the grim realities of war to an escape to distant fairylands, no world was too difficult to realize in the five films nominated for the Achievement in Cinematography Academy Award. Millimeter spoke with the nominees competing for this year's award (cinematographers of The Black Dahlia, Children of Men, The Illusionist, Pan's Labyrinth, and The Prestige), revealing the Oscar-worthy technical and aesthetic choices that were made in production to bring these worlds to life.

In Children of Men, Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, presents the future vision of a harsh, compassionless Western world in which humans have lost the ability to reproduce, and the human race is left with nothing to do but watch itself quickly go extinct. The cinematographer explains that he and Director Alfonso Cuarón started the project concerned that everything about the film feel believable, not designed. This meant shooting sets and locations that had the disordered look of genuine urban decay, including slightly CGI-enhanced billboards and buildings.

For Cuarón, capturing reality also suggested that action take place within long, unbroken takes without any coverage so that scenes simply unfolded as the camera captured the action. “Once you started shooting, the energy of the actors and the camera just going through the scene from start to finish was very powerful. There were times it was like ten minutes of almost real war,” Lubezki says.

When it comes to shooting, Lubezki says that he likes to experiment with different film processing techniques. “It keeps the job interesting,” he explains. “I don't like the way some films are shot just to cover a lot of dialogue. On some shows, you shoot a master, and when the director says he has what he needs, the dolly grip starts moving the camera into position to shoot coverage. When you work that way, you find that often the shots have no meaning in themselves — it's like a factory.”

Though the film went through a digital intermediate process at Efilm London, Lubezki printed film dailies of everything; he also had Efilm's sister company Deluxe do some silver retention in the printed dailies to help suggest the effect he'd later recreate digitally. “Fewer and fewer people are doing dailies,” he says. “How can you know what the images look like? How can you judge focus or contrast? If you're pushing the limits of what the film stock can do, you don't know where you are unless you print it. … It was so important for all of us to be able to get together and see the dailies projected where everyone could appreciate the work and see the film very much like it would look when it was completed.”

Director Guillermo del Toro had a similar notion about his drama set in Franco-era Spain, Pan's Labyrinth, which was shot by Guillermo Navarro, ASC. Like Children of Men, this film was shot mostly in long, carefully designed takes without any additional coverage, with one exception: a large dinner scene with many characters sitting around a table. Navarro says, it “was really the only way to do it.”

Navarro and del Toro, longtime collaborators, spent a great deal of time planning out the three looks required to tell the story of a girl trapped between real life and a fairytale land inhabited by a talking faun, monsters, and fairies. Navarro relied heavily on lighting techniques to help orient the audience when the film moved from one world to the other, or, as was the case in some scenes, existed a little in each.

Despite the ambitious script, the film, shot primarily in areas surrounding Madrid, Spain, was made on a tight budget, and the filmmakers often had to find ways to turn practical limitations to their advantage. For example, Navarro says that he shot some scenes day for night, which actually gave him more lighting control. Shooting day for night, he says, brought a warmth to the world of the women and the humans in contrast to making the men's military and fascist environment colder by shooting those scenes at night.

Similary, when it came time to a night shoot of a key battle between the fascists and the rebels, the production had to accommodate the local government, which had ruled, in the wake of a series of destructive wild fires, that absolutely no real pyrotechnic effects would be permitted. “We did a whole circus of lighting with dimmers. The whole attack was these lights,” Navarro says. “But it fell together perfectly in this very theatrical moment of the film, and it really worked better than if we'd had real explosions.”

Navarro knew that his time in the DI suite at Efilm Toronto would be limited, so he made sure to build the color palette into the negative, primarily through lighting. “The DI,” he says, “was really about protecting the decisions we'd done in camera.” And in shooting large pieces of the film entirely in-camera, Navarro's experience was similar to Lubezki's on Children of Men, helping the cast and crew alike feel more in the moment and more exhilarated when they saw their risks pay off.

For Wally Pfister, ASC, The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, was about making the bizarre events look realistic to possess an immediacy with the audience. While the film concerns rival magicians at the end of the 19th century, it was important to them to avoid the standard devices filmmakers often use to suggest a period piece. They deliberately avoided the sweeping establishing shots of the locations, preferring instead, in Pfister's words, “to throw the locations away.” Most of the scenes were captured by a handheld camera to bring a certain vitality — a present-tense feel — to the images to set it apart from period pieces that came before.

Pfister did extensive research, including what the quality of lighting at the time would have been. In particular, he researched what the stage lighting looked like at different theaters. Pfister studied sketches and paintings and learned that some theaters were lit by gas, some by early electric lights, and some by actual limelight. While trying to keep the lighting true to the time, maintaining the film's “real” look was still most imporant. “[Nolan] wanted to avoid flickering images or something that looked too monochromatic or sepia toned, and I took that same naturalisitc approach to lighting,” Pfister says.

As with the previous Pfister/Nolan effort, Batman Begins, it was decided early on that there would be no DI. Dailies were printed on film, and the final negative was timed photochemically at Technicolor. When it comes to DI, Pfister says that their attitude is: “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.” They knew they could do everything they wanted using traditional post, including preserving the resolution of the 35mm anamorphic format. “There may be a few points where I'd liked to have brought down the blacks or decreased the color saturation a little [in DI], but I'm very happy with the look we got photochemically,” Pfister says.

Cinematographer Dick Pope went for a different take on The Prestige's same subject and period in The Illusionist, directed by Neil Burger. Here, the filmmakers gradually changed from the look of a hand-cranked, hand-tinted piece of film to something darker and colder as the lead character, magician Eisenheim (Edward Norton) falls into a kind of despair.

Because Burger wanted the audience to believe that they were seeing real magic, Pope says they were spare with the visual effects. The illusions that Eisenheim performs were done either entirely, or at least primarily, using carefully constructed mechanical machinery of the same type magicians worked with at the time with some refinements added using CGI. A key trick, for example, involves Eisenheim causing an orange tree to grow from a seed before the audience's eyes. “People wrote that the tricks were all CGI and that upsets me. I don't think it would have been as good. It would be so easy to put a foot wrong — to look phony and hokey — in a film like this,” Pope says.

Because Pope had already shot two films of roughly the same period (Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake), he had already extensively researched the world Eisenheim's magic lived in. At first, he experimented with the hand-cranked technique and the silent-era style of vignetting the lens for the early scenes. But since the hand-cranked shots weren't planned, and they were working with young actors and doing love scenes, he soon decided to let the work be done during the DI at Efilm London. “It was just one too many things to worry about,” he says.

Pope also wanted to create a look reminiscent of the early color film Autochrome. This effect would also be dialed in at the post stage, but Pope says that it was also important to work with the production and costume designers to help define the color palette. Pope did as much work possible in-camera with their collaboration to achieve at least some of the look in case they didn't do the DI and had to finish it traditionally. Later, Pope made sure that the Autochrome look was at least suggested in the DVD dailies so that everyone knew his intention and was on the same page. To carry this out, Victor Muller at the Prague-based telecine company UPP created Autochrome look-up tables to apply the look to the video dailies.

Like fellow nominees, The Black Dahlia, directed by Brian De Palma, is also a period drama. Set against the backdrop of the infamous unsolved Black Dahlia murder in 1940s Hollywood, the film embodies the traditional film noir genre, which is traditionally shot in black and white. So for Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, the film was as much about shadows as it was about light, but with his own twist: applying the technique to a color film. “I lit the whole movie like a black-and-white movie, and I created deep shadows,” he says. “Seventy-five percent of the movie happens in shadows in film noir, and lights are usually very directional.”

Zsigmond lighted the actors — playing the usual underworld tough guys and floozies of period mysteries — and the evocative period sets, designed by Dante Ferretti, with hard light to create equally hard shadows essential to the film's storytelling. In an important scene, for example, the camera follows a character walking up the steps, and then pans away from him to show a door opening and a man's shadow on the wall. The camera follows the character out onto a high balcony, and you see him aim his gun. “[You] see the shadow before [you] see whose shadow it is, which is a classic film noir technique,” Zsigmond says.

Another part of capturing the genre was trying to preserve a photochemical feel, devoid of any hint of anything modern or digital. Ironically, he relied on the very modern and digital 4K DI at LaserPacific to help him achieve this more traditional look. “When you finish on film,” Zsigmond says, “you are dependent on the film stock, and today's film stocks are so sensitive that no matter how much you cut light in the background, there is still too much light there for a film noir look. We were able to make the blacks blacker than the chemical developer can.” Even in the black-and-white parts, he says, they still shot in color, and then removed the color and changed the contrast in the DI, which made it look better than if shot on a black-and-white negative.

Zsigmond ran extensive tests of 35mm film scanned and recorded at 2K and 4K resolutions, determining that a 4K DI was also essential to the look he was after. “4K was so superior,” he says. “It preserves all the good things about film capture without introducing anything that [suggests] the digital world.” Zsigmond agreed to save production money on film stock by shooting 3-perf, but insisted finishing the film with a 4K DI. “LaserPacific had a lot to do with getting the look I was after,” he says. “I think that is why I've heard from many other cinematographers that they really liked the look we were able to get in this film.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.