American Cinematographer - April 2009 - 20

Right: Sands in his cell. Below (from left): 1st AD Mark Fenn, actress Helen Madden, director Steve McQueen and Bobbitt work out their approach to a hallway scene. Bobbitt. “You get that wonderful mix of light and shadow as he passes under the ceiling lights. My fantastic key grip, Steve Pugh, and I devised a system to get the shot. The camera is on a PeeWee dolly, and off the end of the dolly is a little skateboard dolly with a mirror on it. It’s just under Sands, who is facedown, almost comatose. I simply pointed the camera into the mirror [as the actor was being dragged].” At another point, a badly beaten Sands is thrown into a bathtub to wash off the blood. As he lies there, semiconscious, a guard continues to beat him. The opposite side of the bathtub is against a wall, and the camera seems to be inside the wall, looking down into the tub. “We pulled the bathtub away from the wall just enough for me to get behind it,” explains Bobbitt. “Then, they pushed the bathtub onto me. I was literally wedged between the tub and the wall, and I was covered in plastic so the camera wouldn’t get wet.” The filmmakers deviated from their decision to not move walls only once, for a shot of Sands lying in the hospital ward. The camera looks down on him from ceiling height but weaves around the room in an elliptical fashion. “Steve [McQueen] wanted the camera to feel like a bird flying around, trying to escape,” says Bobbitt. “Steve Pugh and I came up with all sorts of weird and wonderful ways to move the camera like that, but none of them was practical. In the end, we removed the ceiling and used a Technocrane.” The hospital room is bigger and brighter than the cells and contains a larger window. “It’s less oppressive, but it still has an institutional feel,” remarks Bobbitt. His crew shined a 20K through full grid through the window, and fluorescent light floats into the room through a doorway leading to the hall. At night, the 20K was more heavily diffused. “I think we also had it on a dimmer to warm it up a bit, and we used scrims,” adds Bobbitt. During his walk through the actual prison, Bobbitt noticed small skylights in all the corridors, and he asked McCullagh to incorporate some into his set design. “That allowed me to mix color temperatures. The practical fluorescent tubes lining the ceiling provided the main source of illumination, of course, and we chose them carefully. The cheap ones have a nasty green spike that’s generally considered undesirable, but I wanted the green because it created a grunginess that contrasted nicely with the blue light coming through the skylights. I think we put two 1K Pups above each skylight coming in at different angles, and we made up frames of different levels of CTB and diffusion that we could put on the skylight to quickly change the quality and color temperature of the light.” The negative was processed at Todd-AO in London, and the 2K digital intermediate was carried out at Dragon DI in Wales. “I can’t praise colorist Geoffrey Case enough,” says Bobbitt. “He is very skilled, very sympathetic and very creative — and fast. “At the end of the day, it’s the crew that makes the film,” he adds, “and in addition to Steve Pugh, I have to thank my gaffer, Brian Beaumont; best boy, Ian Glenister; and focus puller, Conor Hammond, who did a fantastic job under very difficult circumstances.” TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Super 35mm (2-perf) Arricam System, Arri 235 Cooke and Zeiss lenses Fuji Eterna 250D 8563, 250T 8553, 400T 8583, 500T 8573, Vivid 160 8543 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383 ¢ 20 April 2009

American Cinematographer - April 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2009