LEDs are no longer the new kids on the block. They are standard elements in lighting packages on major features and television series, and used regularly by documentary shooters, as well commercial and music video DPs and gaffers.

But it doesn’t stop there. Users and makers of these “energy sippers” have expanded their horizons to non-traditional places, and non-traditional shapes. Sure, there are the panels and squares and round lights. But, did you know there’s also everything from tiny cards or dots to modular Lego-style hook ups? There are infrareds and even lights that have been tabbed “bullets” not only because of their use – but also their throw.

Ribbon LED units from IATSE Local 728 gaffer Al DeMayo’s firm, LiteGear, are a prime example. They’ve been showing up in multiple applications in what DeMayo describes as, “all sorts of calls for help,” he laughs. “A gaffer friend needed a way to allow an actor to reach above his head, grab hold of ‘the Sun’, and throw it. So we worked with Props and made a cylinder of LED LiteRibbon wrapped around a battery pack and then sealed into a clear sphere.

“On The Master, a significant portion of the shoot was on a moving practical ship with ceilings at about seven feet,” DeMayo continues. “They needed to simulate window and ceiling openings where there were none. Enter our Hybrid LiteRibbon, attached with magnets – day, magic hour and night – all in one package.”

All hands on deck! LiteGear's LED LiteRibbon at sea for The Master

DeMayo says his favorite non-traditional LED application was for a recent commercial where light had to emanate from a mobile phone. “That one was easy for our LED LiteCard. It is just millimeters thick and only needs 12V DC. We’re anything but normal and we love that.”

LEDs are also taking up residence in locations more associated with high-wattage fixed elements, like multi-camera television shows and broadcast studios. Multi-camera comedies are traditionally lit from beds or pipes above the set to facilitate actor and camera movement during live-before-an-audience shooting.

“When Litepanels® ‘infected’ our stage and workflow, we found that they simply did things better and more efficiently for many applications,” reports Happily Divorced cinematographer George Mooradian, ASC. “I’ve now got everything from their Sola 4s to their Bi-Color 1x1s and their little ‘bricks’ as a permanent part of my lighting package. And, I’ll follow each evolution, adding LEDs like the new Inca 6 that was introduced at NAB to my kit.

“For some reason, a television is always on in a multi-camera show,” Mooradian adds. “This complicates lighting placement without reflections, and cameras stumbling all over your lighting effect without having to put the light in the rafters, out of the way, often meaning the light comes from the wrong direction. Then there are color temperature issues, like cool to warm tones that could require two or more lights. LEDs, like Litepanels Bi-Color, are a perfect solution. The look is right for an electron, the pixel tone that can dance to the best programs on the boob tube.”

Sam Houston University Broadcast Facility refurbished with ikan id500/1000's with DMX

Mooradian says multi-camera cinematographers need to broaden their perspective beyond traditional lighting and show “the powers-that-be” how bringing in LEDs can increase creativity and smooth out workflow. “Just because it’s always been done one way with the old school doesn’t mean it has to always be that way,” he insists.

The production staff at Sam Houston State University echoed Mooradian’s approach for a complete overhaul of their news production studios. Mitchell Loper of Kahunas USA, production manager/designer, opted for non-traditional lighting (from Texas-based LED vendor ikan) for the facility refresh for a host of reasons.

“LEDs are physically lighter, don’t burn at hot temperatures, and have a smoother quality,” Loper explains. “We’ve even used them on location with the RED camera. Our choice: ikan id500s and 1000s with DMX.”

Loper says there are plans to expand the use of ikan LED units at Sam Houston because of the positive reaction from faculty, pros, and students. Broadcast major Jordan Bontke says the switchover has impacted him in several different ways. As a freshman, he recalls the first time he went on-camera at the sports desk.

“I was nervous as it was, but when those lights kicked on, the nerves went up a few notches,” Bontke recalls. “Add to that the heat – and by the time I finished my sports report, I was literally melting in front of the camera. With LEDs, everyone is cooler physically, and calmer because of their low profile. They help the learning process, not to mention the students’ ability to be more professional. The added bonus is we can drop the name of the LEDs we’ve worked with on job interviews, showing the future employer we know what we’re talking about.”

Drop and cover! AAdyn Technology's™ Eco Bullet LED unit on ballistics shoot

“What’s important about bringing LEDs into a traditionally tungsten set up like Sam Houston’s studios,” Loper continues, “is that we no longer need to spend thirty to one hundred thousand dollars on dimmer port set ups – no need for dimmers with LEDs.”

LED’s are cool, to be sure, but for the people at Sam Houston, one of the “coolest” things was when news icon Dan Rather came in, just after the studio refresh was finished. His kudos to the team for thinking out-of-the-box meant everything to both faculty and students alike.

Users aren’t the only ones expanding LED horizons. Manufacturers have been quick to jump “off the grid” when they catch wind of a production niche. Like Florida-based AAdyn Technology™, which was approached by John Stalowy of Northwest Eco Lighting after he discovered that shooting ballistics at over 25,000 frames-per-second engendered flicker (tungsten light cycles at around 22,000 cycles per second).

“That was unacceptable to the client,” Stalowy recalls, “and I needed something else. I was introduced to Marc Kaye, founder of AAdyn, and he took an interest in this very niche area of the market. AAdyn was designing a new LED lighting source to serve the Event and Motion Picture industry.

Stalowy says Kaye shipped him a modified Eco Bullet light that was equivalent in power to an HMI 2500 with no flicker. “Not only did the light work at film speeds of 25,000 frames per second but also performed at up to 2000,000 frames per second – flicker free,” Stalowy recounts. “It was exactly what I needed. And Bullet is currently being developed to perform at speeds up to 1 million frames-per-second.”

FlexAray™ from Bulbtronics®

Dedolight is another traditional vendor thinking out-of-the-box. The company introduced a new light at NAB that President Paul Tepper says is designed for niche markets, like security/surveillance and nature photography.

“It’s the 890 NM (IR-AO infrared LED on-board – light head we call iredZILLA,” Tepper explains. “Our company prides itself on filling needs for all areas of production. This new light is specific for cameras (night shots) or surveillance systems. The focus range and narrow beam angle allows for shooting through trees without disturbing reflections.”

One of the most interesting non-traditional LED applications coming down the pike (also introduced at NAB) is the FlexAray™ from Bulbtronics®.

“It’s been designed with an interconnecting feature that allows the user to build the amount of power needed for the shot but using more lights clustered together,” explains President Lee Vestrich. “Designed for live events, television studios and film sets – and just about any other venue that needs a different kind of LED technology, we expect this light to become a new star – behind the camera and in front – because its unique configuration can be eye candy for a creative designer.”

Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York, in 1920 / Courtesy of Kodak

Have you ever heard the story about the strip of plastic that changed the world? About the development (pun intended) of a physical and chemical process that brought people into theaters built only for live entertainment, and allowed them to experience worlds as far as their imaginations could take them?

Where does one even begin to re-tell the history-making world of celluloid? Raymond Fielding, editor of A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, an anthology for The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, has more than a few ideas. He cites two 19th century developments – the Zoetrope, the first mechanism that could project images by way of a paper cylinder with equi-spaced axial slits cut through the wall, and the advent of kinematography, which allowed W.K.L. Dickson (the world’s first cinematographer?) to record a sneeze – as possible starting points. There was also the “Black Maria,” a barn-like structure built by Thomas Edison in 1893, which had an open roof encased in black tar paper and a revolving stage that moved to catch the sun, as well as Technicolor’s first-ever laboratory – a railroad car parked at a Boston train yard.

Or maybe, as Fielding suggests, the history of film emulsion really began in 1845, when nitrocellulose was discovered and celluloid was invented. Although highly flammable and dangerous, this new, interesting medium caught the attention of future-thinking inventors like George Eastman, who in 1883 partnered with mechanic William H. Walker. Their idea was to expose a strip of paper that was first coated with soluble gelatin followed by a light-sensitive emulsion. The men squeezed it down onto a glass plate that had been coated with a solution of rubber, which held the film in position while the paper was dissolved with hot water, leaving the image on the plate.

It worked, for the most part. But Walker and Eastman’s next step was an even bigger game-changer: they replaced the glass with transparent celluloid, and treated the cellulose nitrate (actually soluble cotton fibers) with grain alcohol and ether, thus creating the strip of plastic that rocked the world.

One of the first films to be exposed with Eastman’s process was Edwin Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery, shot on orthochromatic film, which was sensitive to blue and green light. In Barry Salt’s definitive history of filmmaking, Film Style and Technology, History and Analysis, Salt explains, “Colors like red and orange were not yet a concern because audiences perceived the world of that time as orthochromatic.”

Salt’s book offers a chronology of film’s rapid ascent in popular culture, noting that Eastman Kodak was the early industry leader, producing 200-foot rolls of negative and positive stock. Between 1907 and 1913, the French-based Lumiére Company released a Blue Label stock that was about half the speed of Kodak and a Violet Label that was the same speed. Belgium-based photographic-paper maker Agfa-Gevaert also got onboard the film-producing bandwagon when the new century began.

George Eastman (L), Thomas Edison (R), circa 1920s / Courtesy of Kodak

In the 1920s, Kodak began to sell a panchromatic stock that was sensitized to red, green and blue light with three different negatives through three lenses simultaneously. Kodak also introduced an interesting 16-mm reversal, used to shoot The Headless Horseman in 1922; and, six years later, an infrared sensitive film that saw blue skies as black and green foliage as white.

The Roaring Twenties also saw the ascendancy of another emulsion maker who came to parallel Kodak’s domination. Technicolor co-founder H.T. Kalmus was an M.I.T. student and instructor when he came up with the monopack, two simultaneous exposures (red/green) from the same point of view. It was a major step forward that did away with fringing because the dual strips were geometrically identical.

Fielding’s anthology, states that “when The Toll of the Sea, shot by Joseph M. Schenck, was screened at the Rialto in Hollywood in 1922, Rex Ingram was so taken with the imagery that he wanted to scrap his Prisoner of Zenda and do it all in the new process called Technicolor.” Ever the marketer, Kalmus went on to say that his new Technicolor cameras “were being sent to Rome for Ben Hur, while Douglas Fairbanks was demanding Technicolor test prints for The Black Pirate.” Newcomers like Warner Studios also jumped on board, ordering productions like On With the Show and Golddiggers to be shot with the new two-color process.

In 1934, Technicolor introduced a new three-strip camera that allowed for green light to pass through a green filter on panchromatic film, while the other half of the light was passed through a magenta filter and recorded on bipack film stock with two strips. The front film was sensitized to blue light only, and the back to magenta. The process proved so popular, it became a favorite of Depression-era Hollywood studios, which produced films like Becky Sharp (1935), and four years later, the majestic Gone With the Wind.

As the 1940s dawned, Kodak was also hitting new high notes. Historians insist the company’s landmark color negative stock of that era, Kodachrome, was originally developed for atom-bomb tests. It became in demand in the entertainment world, as shooters saw details – like when a woman would stand with the sun behind her, and details in the face and dress as well as sunspots on the sun read clearly. The new Kodak emulsion also inspired interesting hybrid approaches. Cinematographer Leonard Smith couldn’t take the bulky Technicolor cameras on location for Lassie Come Home (1943), so he shot with regular cameras and Kodachrome, processed at Eastman, with the reversal master printed with red, green and blue light at Technicolor.

Technicolor cameras rolling for Becky Sharp, 1935 / Courtesy of Technicolor and the Bison Archive

In the 1950s, emulsions changed – and sped up. Kodak won an Oscar® in 1952 for making film safe for professional use, and then soon after released its Color Negative (5247) into mass production. They also began to release stocks that were more sensitive to tungsten light, and although Technicolor continued to improve their stocks, Kodak’s lead in faster, more versatile emulsions, signaled the beginning of the end for three-strip productions (and those massive cameras), leaving Technicolor’s star to rise in the laboratory and printing ends of the industry.

The 1950s also saw Kodak introduce the first two-stage color intermediate film, which could be used to make master positives to duplicate negatives. This saved time and money for labs and optical houses. More importantly, it made feasible the achievement of optical effects that otherwise would have been impossible or impractical.

The Rochester, N.Y. firm continued to dominate throughout the 1960s. Its Ektachrome emulsion, designed to be processed in developing systems running much faster and at higher temperatures, was created to accommodate a new phenomenon – television – and the need to get news footage on the air as quickly as possible. The process allowed cinematographers to manipulate their stocks, under-exposing and force-developing, as Andrew Laszlo, ASC did on Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now.  It also allowed Freddie Young, BSC to increase speed and de-saturate color in Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair, and Conrad Hall, ASC to over-expose for Hell in the Pacific, a technique he later emphasized in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In the 1970s, when cinematic storytelling collided with a popular culture in transition, cinematographers made their own individual voices heard in the emulsion evolution. Many embraced foreign-made stocks that were faster and produced warmer tones. Using Agfa’s process of anchoring the dye formers, Fujifilm’s products became popular within the U.S. In fact, in the early 1980s, Fujifilm introduced a 250 ASA (8518) stock that was faster than anything Kodak or Agfa had to offer. The result was the Japanese firm’s capturing a large chunk of primetime television.

“We had a viable [i.e., cheaper] choice in film stocks,” recalls cinematographer Richard Rawlings Jr., ASC. “When I started with Stephen J. Cannell Productions, the film stock of choice was Fujifilm. The dramatic, colder look was perfect for my first series for him, Stingray, and [the stock] continued to bring a different look to all the projects I did for his company.”

Magnified image of Kodak T-Grain emulsion crystals

Fujifilm’s fast emulsion notwithstanding, the true groundbreaker during this era was Kodak’s T-Grain technology, which changed the traditional configuration of the silver halide crystal. While conventional grains of silver halide crystals looked like cubes or irregular-shaped pebbles, the T-Grain crystal was flat and tubular shaped, providing more surface area to allow for more efficient collection of light. The result was a much faster film emulsion than ever before for shooting in low light levels, without having to compromise grain, sharpness or other image characteristics.

Cinematographers like Haskell Wexler ASC (Blaze), Jon DeBont ASC (The Hunt for Red October) and Vilmos Zsigmond ASC (Two Jakes) were among the first to use this new stock (EXR 5245, 5296, 5248) to create startling images. In 1990, Kodak received an Oscar® for the development of T-Grain Technology and the introduction of EXR Color Negative Films. A few years later, Fujifilm also released its double structure grains, the Super-F Series, in an attempt to reshape the silver halide crystal.

Which brings us to the present day – or at least the last 30 years. In this period, Kodak, and to a lesser extent, Fujifilm, have taken control of the production market. Emulsions from both firms have gotten faster, more sensitive, and easier to manipulate. What could once only be exposed in sunlight can now be exposed in almost complete darkness. Contemporary DPs talk about Kodak’s Vision 3 5219 in the same glowing terms once reserved for three-strip Technicolor.

“It has more latitude, so you can push it a stop or two with very little appreciable increase in grain,” describes James Chressanthis, ASC (Hide, Ghost Whisperer). Cinematographer Roberto Schaefer, ASC (The Paperboy, Machine Gun Preacher, The Kite Runer) adds that “it holds more details in both the highlight and shadow areas without looking flatter.” Kodak’s 5219 is being used in all formats from Super 8-mm to 65-mm. Kodak Vision 3, 5207 and Vision 3, 5213 are also in demand around the world.

In fact, descendants of emulsions created a century ago are still going strong – and still being recognized for their achievements. Fujifilm remains popular with many cinematographers, with recent feature credits that include The King’s Speech, Hereafter, Black Swan, Precious, Hoover, The Hurt Locker, and Man on a Ledge.

“I chose Fujifilm for Man on a Ledge for primarily the reason I have chosen it before,” says cinematographer Paul Cameron, ASC. “Flesh tones. Also, I like the overall color rendition and grain structure. A fair amount of [Man on a Ledge] was shot on stage with a very limited Translight. I needed to have a little inherent grain to smooth out the edges photographically.”

In early 2011, Fujifilm was recognized with the Academy’s Sci Tech Award for its ETERNA-RDS Film. ETERNA-RDS makes a three-color separation of color images and stores them as stable black and white images for long-term motion picture information preservation, a key consideration given the industry’s concerns over digital archiving.

Kodak, winner of nine Academy Awards®, released its newest daylight stock in December 2011, Vision 3 5203 – and it doesn’t stop there. This year’s Oscar®-nominated films shot on film included The Artist, The Help, Tree of Life, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Midnight in Paris, and The Descendants, among others, all from cinematographers who are still in love with what a physical, chemical emulsion can do for an image. “We couldn’t have made the same feature without Kodak,” insists 2012 ASC Award-winning cinematographer for Tree of Life, Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC. “We used 5219 and 5217 35-millimeter film smoothly combined with a little 65-millimeter.”

Pinpointing the dawn of film emulsion may not be an exact science, but, contrary to popular thinking, neither is marking its end. As two recent AMPAS-sponsored preservation reports determined, celluloid is the best medium to archive the images that have fired the imaginative journeys of audiences the world over for the last 100 years.

Director Peter Berg has worn many hats in the film business, working in various production capacities before beginning to land acting roles in the late 80s. After appearing in feature fare as diverse as A Midnight Clear, Fire in the Sky, The Great White Hope and Cop Land, Berg took a continuing role on TV’s Chicago Hope. During that show’s run, he wrote and directed episodes, paving the way for his 1998 feature Very Bad Things. He continued to direct theatrical features, including 2004’s Friday Night Lights, which in its latter incarnation on television has allowed him to become a creative force on the small screen as well. His lifelong interest in things military has manifested not only in this month’s epic sea feature, Battleship, but also in the upcoming Lone Survivor, produced under his Film 44 company banner, about Operation Red Wing, a doomed 2005 attempt by the Navy SEALs to capture Bin Laden. Kevin Martin talked with Berg about his love for spectacle and shooting movies alongside the U.S. military.

ICG: After helming smaller-scale, character-oriented stories for features and television, your last three projects have all been epic-sized: Hancock, the Dune remake and now Battleship. Peter Berg: After Hancock, I became interested in larger pictures, wanting to explore filmmaking that had a kind of global reach. When we look back at this period of time in our industry, the definitive films are going to be what I call super-movies. These take audiences to places they’ve never been visually, most often through a large CG component. They don’t just speak to 14-year-olds here, but also to kids in South Korea, 80-year-old grandparents in Brazil and just about everybody in between. Experiencing such diverse feedback on Hancock was really enjoyable, and I wanted more of that. I just came back from traveling the world with an hour of Battleship footage, meeting film-loving people from different cultures who love that kind of escapism and adventure.

Merchandising seems to go part and parcel with the super-movie experience. Did dealing with Hasbro and incorporating nods to the game require some care? One of the fun challenges was figuring cool and fun ways to pay homage to the game. Care had to be taken, because you didn’t want to put something in that would induce groans in the audience. People sometimes act like the game Battleship is a deficit, something to overcome when adapting it, but it actually provides a pretty good engine for a movie. We have tactical situations that recall the puzzling out of an enemy’s location from the game. People remember gameplay as a benign experience, with the calling of letter-number combos. But when you get hit by one of my calls, you become desperate to do the same to me because I have located you and am trying to kill you. That brutal component is at the core of the game, which has been around over 85 years, back when people used to play it with paper, pencils and cardboard. I think they’ll still be playing it long after we’re all gone.

Did the film’s naval setting hold a big appeal? My dad was a naval historian, and I’ve wanted to do a naval film for a long time now. I’d really like to tell the story of John Paul Jones, or of the Indianapolis [cited in Jaws] or the whaling ship Essex, which ended in cannibalism. I’d love to tackle World War II battles like Midway and the search for Bismarck, but those kinds of pictures are often not all that commercial. Whereas Battleship was something that would let me go out on the ocean aboard these huge ships and make a big fun movie.

Logistics for a show this size must have been daunting. What steps did you take during prep to get the show organized? I’m a huge believer in previs, because you can solve problems up front. If everybody knows their part beforehand, it’s even better for me, because I can mix things up a bit without anybody losing the concept. With this kind of film, it’s even more the postvis than the previs that is so important. When you come back from location on a film like this, with aliens and craft still to be added, you’ve really just got plates. On other films, the editor already has an assembly, but when the main component of your shot isn’t even part of the live-action shoot, that can’t happen. So where’s my movie? How do we get it to live enough to be able to cut it properly? Postvis helps get you moving back toward that movie you were making. The main previs guys [HALON Entertainment] also did our postvis, and it really helps keep you going until the point when ILM starts delivering so finals can get cut into the film.

VFX in Hancock were a major part of the storytelling, but this picture is an even larger step in that direction. Getting ILM aboard was one of my first deals with the studio when agreeing to do the film. I couldn’t be happier with those guys. Grady [Cofer, co-VFX supervisor] is just fantastic. We put their guys into the live experience of being at sea on these ships, so they’d know exactly what was needed to make their end match to the reality of the navy at sea. They got a good idea of my style and approach, so they could find ways to bring the realism across I needed to sustain the picture. It is really tough to go from a wide shot of a real destroyer to a medium shot of a CG destroyer, since having to match to the reality of that ship is a lengthy process, one they really earned their money on.

Were you and [DP] Tobias [Schliesser] constrained in any way visually by the cramped realistic recreations of naval vessel interiors? We didn’t use as much handheld as usual. The movie is pretty dynamic, so we use a lot of crane work to move fast and fluidly around parts of the ship. I can do this because the German Sensation [Schliessler] is a great guy, and I won’t make a movie without the hardest-working man in Hollywood. We’re brothers, like Siamese twins, so we’re always on the same page. He knows my preferences and really puts a lot of care and love into lighting and composing shots, and he will just keep going, delivering more and more for a shot till I tell him, “You got it.” Before we shoot [laughs], I usually have to pick him up and physically move him away from the camera.

This was a film show; did you use any other systems? We did some digital shooting, and it’s clear the gap is narrowing between film versus digital in terms of look and what you can accomplish. At the outset, I felt strongly this should be a 35-mm anamorphic project, but there were days when I’d come on the set and see an unfamiliar camera – Tobias had some new Sony system that he wanted to demo. So we’d shoot it and see. When I work with actors, I’m known for improvising – I really don’t like to cut and prefer the repetition of going again and again – and digital lets you do this without running out of film.

You had production jobs but never went to film school. Was there a particular plan for your career when transitioning from acting to filmmaking? I don’t think in those terms. I’ve been doing film and TV and acting and commercials in one form or another since I was in high school. Going onto a film set is largely the same experience regardless of the size and budget, it’s all about creating compelling moments visually, and that always involves actors. Even when there’s a CG component, I always try to visualize fully in order to think about how best to make that aspect compelling – for the actors and the audience – so there is an imperative to watch what we’re putting up there. Acting and filmmaking are just all part of a process of creation, so I don’t distinguish between my first feature Very Bad Things or Friday Night Lights, even though I’ve got Billy Bob Thornton in the latter film. And I don’t really distinguish between that filmmaking experience and that of shooting on an Aegis-class destroyer.

How far back do your filmmaking interests go? I made my first movie, in Super-8, as a high-school sophomore in Connecticut. Two friends are playing the board game Stratego, and after one of the guys gets knocked out, he experiences a fantasy of the game coming to life.

Given the positive portrayal of the military in this film, was obtaining approvals a pretty cut-and-dried process? Approvals were a huge issue. You don’t just get access to Navy assets like Aegis-class destroyers and aircraft carriers. The people I met while going through this are friends now, but they don’t want you to put anything up there that radically opposes naval or DoD policy. Another thing that helped was that we were very specific in our requests, well before shooting, about what we needed: one vessel in dock, these ships at sea, being able to get tech advice and making sure the art department could get aboard to photograph the ships. Act of Valor also dealt with all of this in a really smart way. Early on they found out about eight exercises the navy was going to do, and then they just wound up piggybacking on those, so the navy didn’t have to adjust for them. The military can’t be in the business of working around our schedule, so if you want to avoid problems, don’t ask them to do something they aren’t scheduled to do.

With so much of the film dependent on VFX, is the DI process one that requires a lot of finessing to make it all seamless? DI is not a process of discovery for us because we have an idea going in and there isn’t much call for discussion. You can do so much in DI these days that … [laughs] let’s just say the alterations possible are so extreme, that for some people, all you really need is a bright clear image and then start changing and building from there. On this film, we just talk color, saturation and vibrancy, and as needed we’ll pull references, just to get everybody in synch for the bright, colorful dynamic look. We try to respect the real navy and show their stuff off to good effect while delivering audiences a fun movie.

Interview by Kevin H. Martin. Photo by Frank Masi.

High action on the high seas with Tobias Schliessler, ASC and director Peter Berg. By Kevin H. Martin. Photos by Frank Masi/ILM/Universal pictures.

As Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean and other films adapted from the unlikeliest of sources – toys, theme park rides and the like – have shown, high recognition factor at the box office pays off.

Battleship, directed by Peter Berg, occasionally gives a nod to its source material, a century-old board game that became popular in the 1960s when Hasbro introduced a plastic pegs version. The movie even incorporates principal strategies of the game, with the besieged heroes creating a grid of X-Y coordinates for the surrounding waters to aid in locating and engaging the unseen enemy. But in the film, the world’s naval fleets are pitted not against one another but against hostile aliens seeking global annihilation.

Cinematographer Tobias Schliessler, ASC, who has lensed three of Berg’s last four features – Hancock (2008), Friday Night Lights (2004) and The Rundown (2003) – says the actor-turned-director brings strong visual ideas to each of his films.

“Pete said he wanted to feel like it is really happening,” Schliessler explains. “But he also wanted aspects of heightened reality, stressing the sense of adventure for audiences.”

The photographic vision for Battleship began taking shape in previs nearly three years before the (35-mm anamorphic) film cameras rolled. “We started with production designer Neil Spisaks’s detailed illustrations,” Schliesser recounts. “There were two incredible previs artists, Justin Denton and Barry Howell [from HALON and The Third Floor, respectively; see Previs/Revis, ICG April 2012].

“I would see and review their work every few days, sometimes offering alternative shots or ideas for movement. We made a point of integrating lighting choices into previs so everybody would know about the interactive lighting requirement before shooting. And we spent days moving scale model ships around to get a sense of geography. We had to figure out where to put the camera to capture the size and speed of these ships – I’m talking about 900-foot-long ships traveling at 30 knots – while getting them to where they needed to be for story points. Half of our final image wasn’t even going to be visible when we went on location, so previs informed how all of our operators would frame.”

Using many cameras and Guild operators, including Chris Haarhoff, SOC, Robert Baumgartner, Maurice K. McGuire, SOC, Patrick O’Brien, Don King and Langston Travis was nothing new for Berg. Schliessler says one of the director’s strengths is orchestrating multiple cameras on the fly. “He’ll change all the angles around from one take to the next as part of the storytelling,” Schliessler continues, “and that contributes to the energy of the shooting.” Local 600 members on the shoot included film loader Stephen Early, Doggicam operator Scott Dropkin, 1st ACs Jimmy E. Jensen and Jason Jensen, B-cam 1st AC Tony Nagy, 2nd ACs Brian Matsumura, Miguel Pask and Daryl Gilmore, 2nd AC and B-cam operator Scott Whitbread, and DIT Kurt E. Soderling.

Battleship’s second unit team (which also used multiple cameras) was led by cinematographer Larry Blandford and his camera operator Christopher Duskin, B-cam/SteadiCam operator Jason Ellson, SOC, B-cam 1st AC Louie DeMarco, 2nd unit film loader Savannah Teller-Brown and 2nd AC Rob Pittman. More support, beneath the waves and in the sky, came from underwater DP Peter Romano and aerial DPs Hans Bjerno and Kurt E. Soderling, aerial camera technicians Eric Dvorsky and Marc Ehrenbold (the latter on Wescam), with additional photography provided by 2nd unit DP Dino Parks and 2nd AC Halle Fischer, and unit still photographer Frank Masi, SMPSP documenting the production.

The overall shooting plan mandated a different look for pre-battle scenes, which featured wide lenses, smooth camera moves and softer light. Once the alien attack commenced, camera movement became part of the action – a mix of handheld, SteadiCam and longer lenses – to immerse the audience in the fight.

Battleship was shot on film, reflecting director Berg’s vision that subject matter and scale mandated anamorphic capture. “I was there from the beginning when there was a one-page outline, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, this is going to be a big exciting action sci-fi movie,’” Schliesser remembers. “And Pete comes in with a visual approach [35-mm anamorphic] that got me even more excited to take on the task, as we ultimately kept to a stop between T4 and 5.6 to visualize the movie.”

Kodak’s Vision 3 250D 5207 and Vision 2 50D 5201 (for daylight exteriors) were Schliessler’s stocks of choice. For most interiors, he used Vision 3 500T 5219. With greenscreen sets (where there was enough light), Vision 3 200T 5213 was employed. Panavision Platinums were used for A- and B- cameras, as the operators appreciated the clear viewing system, which more than offset any weight issues. SteadiCam and crane work utilized Millennium XLs.

“Our anamorphic lenses were picked and tested by Jimmy Jensen,” says Schliessler. “I was very happy with the 40– to 80 [millimeter] and 70- to 200 [millimeter] zooms, and the E-series lenses gave me the nicest anamorphic flares. For SteadiCam, there were G-series lenses, and we used a set of Primo primes for lowlight situations.”

Production capitalized on U.S. Navy vessels engaged in RIMPAC exercises in Hawaii and San Diego locations. “We shot on real ships at sea and on a destroyer inside the harbor in Hawaii,” Schliessler states, adding, “We shot lots of interiors and exteriors on the [battleship Missouri], shooting on their flying bridge as well. Many of these shots were also done as stage work, so matching was tricky.”

Eighty percent of the film’s interiors were shot on sets against greenscreen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, featuring accurate recreations by production designer Neil Spisak. All sets were built of steel to hold the heavy computer screens and cables hung from the ceiling. Magnets were used to hang lighting fixtures wherever needed, as Spisak designed the ceiling so panels could be opened (to hang Kinoflos for extra light on tight sets). Schliessler says that without the art department, “it would have been impossible to light and shoot the kinds of shots we ended up with.”

In fact, the DP’s biggest challenge was the low ceilings aboard the ship. “In reality, vessel interiors are no more than seven feet high, so practicals were the only way to light inside these sets,” he observes. The art department found fixtures that became main units, with three-quarters of the practicals consisting of small snorkel lights.

A variety of color temperatures, ranging from daylight to green fluorescents and warm tungsten, were mixed in gaffer Bob E. Krattiger’s lighting placements. To strike a balance between the reality of a ship’s CIC (Combat Information Center) – made up of overhead fluorescents wrapped in blue gel – and more natural light, Schliessler settled on a gel combination of ½ CTB and ¼ plus green on daylight Kino bulbs overhead, while monitor-based light sources used tungsten with ¼ CTO to keep natural skin tones.

“Bob Krattiger outfitted these with LED MR 16 bulbs and plain tungsten track light fixtures with tungsten MR 16 bulbs painted gray,” says Schliessler. “We made about thirty of each, and one-foot, three-bulb fluorescents, ubiquitous aboard naval craft.”

Custom-built LED light panels, ranging in size from 1 × 6 to 24 × 48 with daylight, tungsten, blue, green and red LEDs provided by LiteGear were easily hidden between set pieces. “Bob and Tobias had some great ideas for integrating LED panels into the ship’s controls,” LiteGear’s Chief Product Engineer Al DeMayo acknowledges. “We specialize in creating ‘building blocks’ for gaffers and DPs – strips and panels with flicker-free dimmers, DMX and wireless controls can be made to fit just about anywhere.”

The destroyer bridge set was redressed to serve as different ships. It was built on a 9-foot-high gimbal and featured exterior observation decks on either side.

“The bridges on actual destroyers in the ocean are lit from the outside through small windows,” Schliessler explains. “Enormous amounts of bounce light, off the water and sky, enter, along with slivers of hard sunlight.”

A 60 × 60-foot diffusion created the skylight effect, while a 375 × 40-foot greenscreen encircled the set, enabling elaborate 360-degree SteadiCam moves around actors on the observation deck. The camera would follow the actors (leads included Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson and Rihanna) through the interior and back out the other side.

“We had fifteen 20Ks on trusses plus about ten 20Ks on the floor, all on dimmers for a soft overhead sky ambiance,” Schliessler describes. “It was difficult to hide these lights on wide tracking shots. Our key grip, Mike Anderson, built different sizes of greenscreen panels that we could move in front of the lights to hide them. Mike also built a greenscreen covering 600 feet of highway on both sides, thirty feet high and five lanes wide, then covered a sinking ship set piece with a screen that was easily 300 by 40 feet!”

With no room to lay dolly track, sliders allowed for moving camera shots. Technocranes were used outside of the gimbaled bridge, either shooting in through the windows or swooping in toward the actors on the observation deck. Schliessler praises ProCam’s Moviebird crane, which was the size of a 30-foot Technocrane and offered a fast-telescoping arm with a reach nearly equal to that of the 50-foot Techno. A Techno on a Chapman Super Nova crane was also employed for a complicated 360-degree move on a ramp that the actors climb before the ship sinks, part of a nearly two-minute continuous shot that took both first and second units three days and hundreds of hours to rig.

ILM visual effects supervisor Grady Cofer also began working on Battleship nearly three years ago, heading up work on water and destruction, while ILM visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman supervised creature work once shooting commenced. Cofer says the challenge for ILM recalled Pearl Harbor in terms of ship replication and synthesizing ocean, but the extraterrestrials added more complexity.

“It was a massive water and destruction show,” Cofer says. “Out of 1,500 VFX shots, over half feature water, so we spent a year on the Hopper Water Project, where we reengineered how we tackle large-scale fluid simulations and rendering at ILM. Since Peter demanded authenticity, we amassed hours of real-world reference to emulate.”

The level of realism achieved via the CG water went beyond creating a reasonable facsimile of the ocean, in some instances demonstrating an ability to generate phenomena that when captured on film would be considered “happy accidents.”

“When a splash takes place, it goes through various looks,” adds Cofer, “from a dense, massive deforming shape to smaller globules, before atomizing into mist. All the while, it reflects and refracts the light, so we were able to simulate the rainbow-like effects present from certain angles when sunlight hits water.”

Since tugboats were towing the retired battleship Missouri back to Pearl Harbor, production was afforded an opportunity that would never come again – capturing comprehensive reference of the ship via camera boat and helicopter that showed how ocean bounce light and caustic effects played across her hull.

“She was a museum piece, so we had to come up with VFX ways to make Missouri seem a part of the battle,” Helman recounts. “As a general rule we tried to have at least one real ship in every shot to use as a basis for the rest. Even for fully CG shots, we still used real ships as reference. Destruction footage revealed how an explosive blast can become a light source, so we used our proprietary Plume tool to create explosions that could relight our CG ships.”

To create an aerial lighting effect to simulate the passage of alien ships at night, Schliessler considered military flares on a cable rig, but nixed the approach due to the potential fire hazard. And even though FAA regulations restrict the number of lights that can be flown aboard helicopters, pilot Fred North (literally) rose to the occasion.

“I love when cinematographers ask you to build challenging rigs,” North admits. “When Tobias asked me to install powerful lights on the helicopter, I met with my engineers, Andy Spak and Peter Graf, and decided to use only FAA-approved parts.

“After brainstorming, we came up with four extremely powerful helicopter landing lights on each side and a LAPD-style searchlight on the nose that we installed on approved mounts, plus two landing lights already on board. It was a great idea, and since Tobias gave us plenty of time to prepare, it worked out great.”

“Fred is the best pilot I have worked with,” Schliessler marvels, “flying the copter at night between my Condors and lighting towers.” And, he adds, “the interactive lighting effects made the visual effects more believable. To suggest explosion effects on set, I combined Maxi 12-lights on dimmers with Lightning Strikes, and matched many interactives to what was done in previs so ILM had as many real-world cues as possible.”

For the alien attackers, on-set motion capture utilized gray-suited performers, with helmets illuminated with LED spotlights.

“The aliens had different body types that vary according to their function,” explains Helman. “There are big one-on-one fights between humans and aliens, and a close-up dissection scene that required complete realism. To get that you need good design, good set reference and good lighting to achieve the necessary complexity and credibility.”

Company 3’s Stefan Sonnenfeld, who has worked with Schliesser for more than a decade, handled the digital intermediate. “Stefan is good at making the image feel vibrant and natural, not like some DI post effect,” the DP recalls. “To increase the drama we emphasized strong contrasts.”

Still, with all the digital and CG options available for the ambitious scale and deep-pocket resources of Battleship, there are no magic solutions when dealing with Mother Nature’s mercurial ways. “The hardest time I had in the DI,” Schliesser concludes, “was trying to match cloudy days with sunny ones in scenes that are continuous action and that we shot over weeks. When the weather changes on the day, everyone always says, ‘Let’s fix it in the DI,’ but unfortunately you can’t make a cloudy day look sunny. At least not yet.”

So Sensitive

Just yesterday I was explaining to a producer how film has become an artistic rather than economic choice. That’s not without advantages: the myth about digital being cheaper than film is not something we still have to battle. Producers, directors, studio executives and others now understand that when you are choosing a digital camera, you are choosing the “emulsion” that will determine the quality of a project’s look. And that means the choice to shoot film becomes a viable and artistic one.

Is this proof that we are solidly in the “digital age”? I think so. Film is now an alternative to digital, rather than the other way around. History always moves us forward. But I can still hear that handful of engineers in an NBC TV studio in Chicago in 1972 insisting that within a year we would “never see any more film being shot, at all.” If you accept that prediction as fact, then film has indeed enjoyed a long and graceful old age, while the teenager that is digital has only now begun to mature.

And as digital platforms evolve, so do film emulsions. The newest stock from Kodak (VISION3 50D – 5203/7203) and Fuji (ETERNA and REALA) set new standards for daylight sensitivity, while Kodak’s reliable 500T/5219 can easily be shot at 800 to match the speed of most digital cameras. What this sensitivity does for us, whether shooting film or digital, refutes another oft-heard phrase: “You don’t need light.”

Sure, contemporary emulsions have better granularities to shoot at higher speeds, and, yes, chips on the latest digital cameras can provide a huge dynamic range. But that hardly means the director of photography now has nothing to do with lighting. It’s quite the opposite. The skills of a cinematographer to ascertain the application, placement and intensity of light on a project are more important than ever!

Life in this ultra-sensitive camera age requires ultra-sensitive eyes. In the old days, when we needed 100 to 200 foot candles to light a set, adding a light that was one stop different meant changing 100 foot candles to get there. That’s quite a bit of light. Getting that same stop today with light levels as low as six foot candles or less requires eyes that can discern details and separations in three foot candles or less. That kind of sensitivity training takes a great deal of skill and experience, as all Guild members have.

After all is said and done, the subtlety of lighting is what we are about. And understanding how to light a large set, with much smaller instruments than we’ve ever had before, is a huge challenge. Even in situations where we’re not adding lights, the director of photography has to be able to see light.

Because if you can’t see as well as the camera sees, how can you light the set?

Fraternally,

Steven Poster, ASC
National President
International Cinematographers Guild
IATSE Local 600

BATTLESHIP
DP Tobias Schliessler, ASC
by Kevin H. Martin

MEN IN BLACK III
DP Bill Pope, ASC
by David Heuring

HISTORY OF FILM EMULSIONS
by Pauline Rogers

CASTLE Q&A
by David Heuring

LIGHTING FOR THE STARS
by Pauline Rogers

DEPTH OF FIELD: Natalie Portman PSA

EXPOSURE: Peter Berg

GEAR GUIDE: Lighting

DEEP FOCUS: Declan Quinn, ASC

Walt Disney Company Publicist Arlene Ludwig

Awards Season is traditionally a time when the entertainment industry loses itself in anticipatory buzz: who among its own – actors/directors/cinematographers/writers, etc. – will take home that career-changing hardware this year? But did you know the reason the entire world knows its “gaga time in Lotusland” (try tweeting that 10 times) is because of the intense marketing efforts of those behind-the-scenes folks known as publicists? These Guild members make Hollywood’s PR machine go, and once a year the spotlight is turned on them in their annual Publicists Guild Awards, presented by Local 600.“We want the rest of the world to know what you do and how good you are at it,” ICG President Steven Poster, ASC said in his opening remarks at the 49^th annual Publicist Guild Awards luncheon, held at the Beverly Hilton this past February. And judging by the packed attendance of studio and network executives, international journalists and more than a few A-list celebrities, that wish was completely fulfilled.

In fact, all those polled were in agreement with publicist Peter J. Silbermann when he described the event as, “the one and only time of the year where all of the publicists in the business are in one room, together, and get to mingle. It’s done in great taste. And [as usual] the honorees are all deserving.”

Television Unit Still Photography Award Winner Hooper Stone (L), ICG President Steven Poster, ASC (R)

“I really felt ‘connected’ this time,” added veteran unit publicist Patti Hawn. “There was an authentic vibe within the community of publicists this year that felt like family. We are often names without faces that sometimes compete for jobs. We have one day a year when we can connect the names and the faces and become a real community.”

This year’s master of ceremonies, Australian talk show host and producer Rove McManus, good-naturedly roasted that community. The comedian’s off-beat humor was made known straight off when he announced to all the publicists in the room that, “without you, we wouldn’t know Vampires are now sexy!”

While each and every honoree was well deserving, there were a few poignant moments that stood above the rest. President Poster recalled his personal connection to honoree Carol Burnett, while the audience was treated to a visual road trip through the beloved comedian’s 56 years in the business.

“Carol Burnett has had an extraordinary career and a reputation for direct involvement in the promotion of the shows and movies in which she has starred,” long-time event chair Henri Bollinger related. “She has a clear understanding of the role publicity plays in the success of television shows and movies.”

Master of Ceremonies Rove McManus

When acting icon Julie Andrews and actress/director/producer Jodi Foster took the stage it might have seemed like an odd pairing. Until they joined to dedicate the 2012 Publicist Directory to the woman who guided both their careers from humble beginnings, Walt Disney publicist Arlene Ludwig.

“She let me drive the Disney golf cart when I was a kid,” Foster beamed. “She took me to the emergency room when I was hurt. And, she never let me win one single tennis match.”

After taking the audience on a trip from Mary Poppins to more recent pairings, Andrews turned to side stage, and with her impeccable timing, quelled the audience’s tears of sympathy for Ludwig, who has battled back from a horrific accident.

(L to R) ICG President Steven Poster, ASC, Arlene Ludwig, Julie Andrews, Jodie Foster

“Now, Arlene, get your blooming ass up here!” Andrews joyously shouted.

“It was the highlight of the event,” Hawn recalled. “When Arlene came out [with her walker], the sheer joy it produced among her colleagues was beyond emotional and memorable. Hollywood never disappoints in it’s ability to support it’s own when the chips are down and we are needed.”

Ludwig’s award wasn’t the only time attendees were reminded of the importance of recognizing those who have made long-term contributions. The 2012 Showmanship Award winners were acknowledged for the enduring strength it takes to helm the blockbuster film franchises and hit series that are the foundations of a successful industry.

Oscar nominee Gary Oldman said that David Heyman (producer of Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter franchise) deserved the Motion Picture Showmanship Award because he “represents the best example of what can be accomplished with creative and smart publicity and promotion.” [Silbermann called Heyman “the nicest producer in the business.”]

Actor Josh Charles (The Good Wife) introduced Television Showmanship Award winner David Stapf, President, CBS Television Studios. Charles traced Stapf’s career, acknowledging that his success was do in part to his background as an elementary school teacher and former publicist.

Les Mason Award winner Tony Angellotti and Bridesmaids' Wendi McLendon-Covey

“I’d trust him with my life,” Charles said. “He has that dead calm. I’ve never heard him yell. And that’s a tribute to the man who carries the pressure of the most-watched television dramas, NCIS, CSI and The Good Wife.”

Bridesmaids’ Kali Hawk presented this year’s Bob Yeager Award (which acknowledges a publicist’s community service efforts) to Sharon Black, whose extra-ordinary work on behalf of animals generated a crescendo of applause.

There were also a few surprises. When Tony Angellotti was presented with the Les Mason Award (the highest honor paid to a union publicist) by another Bridesmaids star, Wendi McLendon-Covey, fellow nominee Rob Harris texted back from his U.K. location that, “it is about time!”

The presentations for excellence in Unit Still Photography highlighted the extremely high quality of work in that category. Maria Canals-Barrera (Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place) presented the award to Frank Masi in the Motion Picture Category and to Hopper Stone in television. While Masi was on location, Stone took the stage to talk about his determination to succeed, as he went from day shooter to covering such highly watched shows as Modern Family.

Bob Yeager Award winner Sharon Black, Motion Picture Showman of the Year Award winner David Heyman

That groundbreaking comedy series was also honored with the Maxwell Weinberg Publicists Showmanship Award for the best television publicity campaign. After McManus presented the award to the Fox team behind Modern Family, he gave out the feature publicity award to the team behind Disney’s Oscar-nominated drama, The Help.

Each year The Publicists Guild honors the media that works with their members to promote the entertainment industry throughout the world. Missi Pyle, from the 2012 Best Picture winner, The Artist, presented the Press Award to Susan King of the Los Angeles Times. “Susan is someone who captures the magic of Hollywood in her reporting while demonstrating her understanding and appreciation of its history,” Plyle noted in the lead-in to the award. Oscar nominee Max Von Sydow presented the International Media Award to Elaine Lipworth of the United Kingdom, saying that, “the international media, particularly those based in Los Angeles, play an increasingly important role in creating awareness for American-made movies. It’s appropriate that we honor them here.”

Walt Disney Pictures marketing team, Feature Publicity Award winner, The Help

As McManus closed out the afternoon, attendees raced for goodie bags filled with L’Oreal products, Carol Burnett’s classic television comedy skits, and DVDs from 2011’s most popular features. Waiting together for their cars at the valet station, it was clear the family vibe was still in full bloom. Old-line publicists mingled with first timers, discussing highlights and speculating on next year’s nominees.

When asked what stood out most about the event, Local 600 stills photographer Jennifer Clasen, a first time attendee, enthused about the camaraderie, and noted how carefully crafted the event seemed to be without being overly manipulated. Instead of matching presenters with categories in a helter-skelter style, “what struck me was that the clips for all honorees were well thought out and personal and there was a personal relationship with honoree and winner,” Clasen said. “That was really special.”

“Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”Spanish/ American poet/philosopher George Santayana wrote that memorable line more than a century ago in The Age Of Reason (1905), and it serves as a haunting description for There Once Was…. The film, directed by veteran documentarian Gabor Kalman, traces the quest of a high school history teacher in Kalocsa, Hungary, Gyongyi Mago, who while doing research for a dissertation, discovers the town’s lost population of Jews, more than 400 of whom were later murdered in German concentration camps.

None of Kalosca’s 18,000 current residents are Jewish, so Mago went looking for Jewish survivors and relatives living abroad. One of them was Gabor Kalman, who was nine years old when the Nazi army invaded Hungary. Kalman survived the Holocaust, and the subsequent Russian occupation. While in college, in 1956, he joined his country’s uprising against the communist regime, then later migrated to the U. S. as a political refugee after the Soviet army brutally crushed the revolt. He earned an undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley and a Masters degree in film and television from Stanford before launching his career as a documentary filmmaker.

Jewish stores in Kalocsa, circa early 1900's

In addition to directing award winning films, Kalman was a founding member of the International Documentary Association in 1986 and on the board of directors for nine years. He has taught documentary film production at the USC School of Cinema and Television from 1987 through 2007. He has been an adjutant professor of Cinema and Television at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena since 1984. Kalman was also a Senior Fulbright Scholar and taught at the Academy of Theater and Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary in 1994 and 2008.

There Was Once… blends black and white still pictures and film from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s with contemporary color moving images. In one scene, Mago is talking with a resident who is sharing her memories, and the woman pulls out an old photo album with pictures of Kalman’s family and her parents. Although critics have applauded the film, Kalman says he’s most proud of the words from Oscar-winning cinematographer (and fellow Hungarian) Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, who called There Was Once… a “wonderful movie” that “everyone needs to see.” Bob Fisher caught up with Gabor Kalman in advance of the film’s screening (sponsored by the Embassy of Hungary and the Lantos Foundation) in Washington, D.C., April 24 at 7:00 P.M.^.

ICG: Share your memories of when you decided to produce this documentary.

Kalman: I received an email from Gyongyi Mago during the Spring of 2008. She tracked me down through some other survivors. I was totally taken by the fact that 65 years after the Jews were taken away from Kalocsa, a young high school teacher, who is not Jewish, was interested. We corresponded by e-mail and spoke during telephone conversations. Gyongyi told me she was planning to restore the vastly neglected Jewish cemetery in Kalocsa. She wanted to invite survivors and relatives of victims to a memorial. I was so impressed by what she was doing that I proposed making a film about her. Gyongyi agreed.

Gyongyi Mago

How long have you been working on the film?

Someone else recently asked me that same question, and I said about 65 years because it touches on such a large part of my life. As for the actual production, we began in 2008.  I was lucky to connect with Gabor Garami, a wonderful producer in Hungary, and contrary to what I teach my students, there was no script or treatment; I was too familiar with the subject. Gabor gave me a list of cinematographers as candidates for our crew. Zsolt Toth, HSC was on the list.  He was one of my students when I taught at the film school in Budapest, and we have stayed in contact over the years. Zsolt did a wonderful job of capturing images with just the right look.

What do you mean by “just the right look?”

Zsolt and I had long discussions about finding the look of the movie. I had some nostalgic memories of my childhood days in Kalocsa. I envisioned something in-between a pure cinema verite look and my dream-like memories. It was just me, Zsolt and the soundman.

There is another cinematographer is listed in the credits.

That is Jon Dunham, who was one of my students when I was teaching at USC. Jon has an impressive array of documentary credits as both a cinematographer and director. He shot the interviews that we did with survivors and members of their families in the United States and Canada. Jon also went to Hungary with me when we covered the memorial service at the cemetery. Zsolt shot all of the early footage in 2008 in Kalocsa. Most people didn’t remember what happened to their Jewish neighbors or didn’t want to remember. After I came home, we tracked down survivors and members of the victims’ families to interview in New York, California, Toronto, Montreal and Saskatchewan.

Memorial tablets erected by Jewish Holocaust survivors in Kalocsa in 1948.

What was your approach to shooting those scenes in Kalocsa?

I tried to do everything through Gyongyi’s eyes and from her point of view. Basically, we followed her around and covered her interactions with people while shooting verite style. Since there were no Jewish families left in the town, Gyongyi decided to interview old people who would remember those days. One lady who she interviewed read names that she had written on a piece of paper. She said that one of them had a variety store where she shopped. Gyongyi, members of her family, her colleagues and the students were very receptive. Other people were friendly, but there was also an underlying current of resentment.

In fact, there are still neo-fascists in Hungary, correct?

Yes, they are the second largest political party.

Tell us about the memorial.

To commemorate the 65^th anniversary of the emptying of the local ghetto and deportation of Jewish citizens to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Gyongyi organized a memorial service at the Jewish cemetery. It was attended by a handful of survivors of the holocaust, their descendents, Gyongyi’s students, the mayor of Kalocsa, other city officials and the Archbishop. Jon travelled to Hungary with me to help cover the memorial in 2009. Zsolt and Jon were generally working side-by-side. At one point, one of them covered the memorial service while the other one covered a neo-fascist demonstration near the memorial service. During the service, one of the neo-fascists used a slingshot to hit a visitor from New York with a rock.

Gabor Kalman

What kind of cameras did you use and how much content did you record?

Zsolt used a Sony EX-3 camera and Jon a Sony EX-1. We recorded between 40 and 50 hours.  It wasn’t a case of more is better. The interviews and all of the events were tightly scheduled. The first time we were in Kalocsa for only a week and our second visit to Hungary was less than a week. The whole thing was done on a shoestring budget. There were no sponsors. I had to watch every penny. When Jon and I were in Canada, we were scheduling two or three interviews a day. We would interview someone in the morning in Toronto, fly to Montreal and do an interview or two there.

Kate Amend (ACE) was the editor who collaborated with you.  She has edited several Academy Award winning documentaries. Kate also received the first IDA Outstanding Achievement Award for editing in 2005. Had you and she worked together before?

We hadn’t worked together, but we have known each other for a long time. Kate was teaching editing at USC when I was teaching documentary production there. I told Kate about the film and asked her to look at some of the footage and recommend an editor.

Why you didn’t ask her to edit it?

I assumed that she was busy working on projects with bigger budgets. After she looked at some of the footage, Kate told me that she wanted to edit the film. We had a wonderfully close relationship. I kept teasing Kate and asking her, when are we going to disagree about something and have an argument, but we never did.

How would you describe There Was Once?

Some people have characterized it as a Holocaust film. But it is really a story about what one person can do to influence how future generations see the past. I think Gyongyi Mago is a true heroine. After I showed the film to people at the Museum of Tolerance, in Los Angeles, they brought Gyongyi to Los Angeles and presented the Medal of Valor to her at their annual gala dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel [May 2010]. There were about 800 people at the dinner. Gyongyi accepted her award and gave a beautiful speech in impeccable English, even though she doesn’t speak English and had to memorize the words. It was quite touching. We also had a screening at the Museum of Tolerance [in West Los Angeles] with Gyongyi and her daughter present. There have been one- week screenings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 [Los Angeles] and the IFC Center in Manhattan.  There Was Once… was recently shown at the International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest. My goal is to bring it to as broad an audience as possible. I believe that through Gyongyi’s story there are important lessons to be learned.

Along the Watchtower

Thinking about new technology and its impact on the world of visual effects and, by extension, on our membership, I’m reminded of the classic Bob Dylan anthem “All Along The Watchtower” (famously covered by Jimi Hendrix). As the memorable opening lines go: “‘There must be some way out of here,’ said the joker to the thief. ‘There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.’” And then later, the thief retorts, “But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate. So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”Confusion, caused by an avalanche of new technologies, and the imperative to clarify what is on its way, are refrains that resonate with this Guild, given that this membership live atop a watchtower, literally holding the future of the industry in our hands.

Are you familiar with the term “hyper-reality?” Stripped down, it means a lot of ones and zeros are now going into image creation, with an approach to color science that is radically improving day by day. And as the guardians of that image creation, poised along the industry’s watchtower, we are decisive in determining how the audience will absorb this massive amount of information we now have the ability to capture on set.

All this added information per frame is a gift to visual effects supervisors, because we provide much more raw clay for them to blend and mold in an effort to make CG more realistic and emotive than ever before. But while visual effects teams may love hyper-realistic capture, that in and of itself does not necessarily lead to the suspension of disbelief viewers need to complete a successful film experience.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that projects relying completely on the absolute hyper-reality of new technology will not be used effectively by the director and the cinematographer to tell their story. But I do believe that to develop the kind of mystery that it takes to relate emotionally to a film or TV series, it remains this Guild’s job to help transport audiences using tools that have shaped cinematic storytelling for more than a century: light, composition, movement and color.

Today, every step of the process is complex, and crucial to what ends up on-screen: putting the image on the chip, taking the image off the chip, preparing that image for postproduction in all its many different forms, including visual effects that move down the tracks the same time as capture. It’s a process that has to be completely safe, efficient and transparent to the production on set. And it’s a process that must be watched over by the trained crews of Local 600 – assistants, operators, digital imaging technicians, still photographers and unit publicists – who are given the opportunity to be trained and updated every step of the way.

Going back to Dylan’s great song, its conclusion also leads us down the metaphoric path for what is on the horizon, and how we will respond: “Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl. Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.”

Inclement weather and distant, unknown figures hurtling toward a castle mirror the amount of new technological systems rushing toward our membership, with, I’d wager, a three-to-five-year window before all is sorted out. Certainly one way that will come about is via the creation of an end-to-end, device-independent color management system I’ve talked about for years, one that will incorporate all of the metadata from the set required by the visual effects artists to make a film work.

Until that time, Local 600 is the first and last line of defense in image creation. And we must remain vigilant, steadfast and committed to training every single one of our members atop that wall.

Fraternally,

Steven Poster, ASC
National President
International Cinematographers Guild
IATSE Local 600

Talk about a résumé builder: Douglas Trumbull’s first feature-film VFX credit was Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking visual symphony, 2001: A Space Odyssey. No one would have been surprised if subsequent efforts paled in comparison. But after directing the low-budget charmer Silent Running − a space film shot entirely within an aircraft carrier and a plane hangar − Trumbull went off and invented Magicam, an analog equivalent to today’s real-time virtual production techniques. He remained active in feature VFX work throughout the1970s, first with Robert Wise on The Andromeda Strain and then ending with the same director on Star Trek – The Motion Picture. While developing Showscan, a high-frame-rate 65-mm film process, Trumbull also supervised the stunning photographic effects for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner. What’s more amazing than Trumbull’s work on those landmark films is that his achievements went unrecognized by the Academy until earlier this year, when he finally was given an Oscar® in the form of the Gordon E. Sawyer award.

Although three decades passed before Trumbull returned to feature VFX with The Tree of Life, he’s remained busy − directing Showscan shorts and creating Universal’s Back to the Future ride and a trio of special venue films for the Luxor hotel. Every visual effects artist in the industry owes a debt to Trumbull, who continues to search out the highest possible quality in immersive theatergoing experiences.

ICG: In your eyes, is cinema starting to catch up with where you’ve been pushing it to go all these years? Trumbull: Yeah, I suppose. [Laughs.] The baggage carried by the industry for so long is no longer an impediment because we’re digital now, and this transition is enabling a new kind of movie experience in the vein of what I tried to do with Showscan. The Academy even wants to store the negative for New Magic [his first Showscan short] in perpetuity. I’m really proud of that film because it proved conclusively that a movie could be indistinguishable from reality.

So where are your goals and interests aimed now? I am on a particular trajectory toward extremely immersive cinematic experiences involving higher frame rates and brightness levels, curved screens, greater bit-depth and other attributes that help put the audience in the movie instead of watching it. Bloggers seem to think this is a threat to the status quo, that all movies will have to be made in this way. But the 24-fps standard is still perfectly appropriate for most movies, though some classics could have benefited from a more immersive presentation, like The Wizard of Oz.

Does the industry have sufficient motivation to embrace these new approaches? Today’s Hollywood trend is big tent-pole films, but their search for a more spectacular means of exhibition isn’t getting them anywhere. A lot of expensive movies aren’t doing great business, and it might be related to subconscious disappointment from audiences because of dim screens and presentation defects. Movies costing between $140 and $400 million are bottlenecking, getting squeezed out through this tiny throttle of 4:2:2 narrowband, a presentation format that isn’t bright enough to be truly spectacular. With a higher frame rate and brighter screens you could show all the millions invested in production values to audiences. But now that all gets filtered out by the medium itself.

Have any recent films come close for you? I really admired Hugo, and Tintin exceeded my expectations. I just wish they were being seen in more spectacular venues. We’re behind the curve right now because statistically, young people aren’t going to theaters as much. More than 70 percent of movie revenues come from digital media, indicating a tremendous sea change in the way media is consumed.

Can 3D and IMAX be gateways for audiences to see filmgoing as an event. First we need to overcome the dimness of 3D. The average theater image measures 2.5 foot-lamberts. The eye is not sensitive to color at that level, so you can’t respond ideally to the 3D. By way of comparison, 16 foot-Lamberts is Academy standard, while Showscan was over 30 [post-polarization.] Twenty-four fps messes up 3D as well, due to blurring and strobing, which really bothers me and doesn’t sit well with younger eyes that are used to gaming visuals at 72 fps.

Your passion for immersive cinema dates all the way back to 2001. I got completely hooked on the idea while working for Kubrick. He went with Super Panavision, the 70-millimeter five-perf successor to three-strip, designed for deeply curved 90-foot screens, which was perfect for conveying a first-person experience. He was breaking out from traditional film grammar to take them on this trip. But today people aren’t aware of everything Kubrick tried to do because they can’t see the film in Cinerama. Small theatrical screens and home viewing are inadequate for conveying that experience. Even with a 70-foot flat screen, the effect is lost.

What are some other landmarks for you beyond 2001? A high point in my career was Universal’s Back to the Future ride, which let audiences feel like participants instead of [offering] just the usual passive viewing experience. I’m writing screenplays as highly immersive experiences and hope to explore the uncharted territory of this new cinematic language. It still shocks me nobody attempted this after Kubrick, though I tried with Brainstorm.

How did you determine the optimum higher frame rate when developing Showscan? I had audiences hooked up to monitors and graphed their responses, showing them the same story and actors at different frame rates. Recently Jim Cameron, who wants to shoot the Avatar sequels at a higher frame rate, studied stuff shot 24 fps at 4K, comparing it with 48-fps material at 2K. He preferred the latter, as do I, though I found at 60 fps the imagery, which no longer suffers from blurring and strobing, becomes kinesthetically powerful enough that audiences begin accepting it as reality. Peter Jackson’s doing The Hobbit now at 48 fps, with the option of taking it down to 24 for conventional screening.

Is your capture system downward-compatible with traditional formats? My setup here lets me shoot 3D with two Red cameras running at 120 fps with a 360-degree shutter. The exposure is identical to 60 fps with a 180 shutter, just twice the data. But the 360 shutter lets you merge any number of frames together to recapture the blur perfectly as seen in lower frame rates of 60, 48, 30 and 24, with no artifacts. Currently digital theaters can deliver 144 fps, though they’re just showing the same 24 several times over.

Virtual production is making inroads in TV and beginning to factor more in feature work as well. What’s your take on it? Here on my property in Massachusetts I have a virtual stage with an 80-foot-wide greenscreen. Those 3D cameras running at 120 fps shoot live actors who are instantaneously composited into a virtual environment assembled beforehand. Our virtual production employs real-world lighting as well as lighting cues built into the CG environment. On the other side of the stage, I’m having a hemispheric high-gain screen being installed next month with dual 120-fps 3D projectors. So that will let me test on stage, then pipe it to the projector and watch right away, keeping this all an iterative learning process. My notion is to take the cast on stage and shoot a rehearsal, composite that with the best CG virtual background I can get in real-time [utilizing Unreel Pictures], and then treat all of this as an animatic.

Pixar Animation goes through something like this several times prior to final rendering. Seeing a version of the whole movie cut together in advance lets you know what works in the story and what doesn’t. You can alter your approach as needed in terms of scenes, elements and characters, or relight and change environments, before you have the actors back for principal to do it all for real, and switching from any set to another location happens at the flick of a switch. Pre-lighting can be kept as metadata; push a button on your DMX controller, and boom. The desired lighting condition returns. You shoot the whole film in two to three weeks.

But aren’t there trade-offs shooting under those conditions? Most directors aren’t comfortable in a virtual world, something I found out long ago with Magicam. Many actors, having learned their craft on a near-empty theater stage, are more comfortable. And I found that showing actors the composite on stage thrills them. “Finally, I don’t have to fake it.” If you don’t have something to show them, you wind up like 300, where everybody’s faking it because they have no solid idea about the virtual environment! My next step – something I haven’t done before except in brief experiments – is to replace the computer-generated, real-time virtual set with a miniature, which I find much more photo-realistic and believable than anything generated in a computer. Then I use Nuke and other comp techniques as needed, though I’m aiming for every shot to have at least 80 percent physical reality, rather than settling for the algorithm of the month. My tastes have always run to more organic approaches to visual effects.

Your segments in The Tree of Life reflect that. We can make miniatures look absolutely real, that isn’t a variable. I recently looked at Blade Runner, Close Encounters and 2001 in my screening room on Blu-ray, and I could see everything that was in the original prints. Sometimes it is even better, because the grain and slight weave of physical projection is gone. All these years later the miniatures hold up and are not the slightest bit obsolete due to CGI. Miniatures are used so rarely, they are practically a lost art, though Hugo shows how successfully they can still be employed. It was sad to see Kerner Optical [the physical production/model work/motion-control aspect of ILM] go belly-up; that had once been a big part of Lucas’ personal VFX facility. General Lift’s Joe Lewis has engineered a lot of motion-control work for decades, and he bought up a lot of Kerner’s stuff, which will help us with shooting the miniature end of things here.

Do you have something special in mind to showcase these innovations? There’s a space-based “hard” science-fiction feature that I hope to get made. Plus I’m thinking of redeveloping a very futuristic project called The Ride that was at Warner before management changed [laughs]; it’s a kind of Dr. Strangelove-meets-theme-parks idea.

Interview by Kevin H. Martin. Photo courtesy of Douglas Trumball.