American Cinematographer - May 2008 - 14

Left: The stuntman and the girl appear in his yarn as the Black Bandit and his daughter. Right: Cinematographer Colin Watkinson lines up a shot. we just took the edge off with Hampshire [diffusion]. Inside were smaller units, Kino Flos, 1.2Ks and Pocket Pars. We used a lot of poly and silver foamcore [bounce], and even the bed curtains were used as diffusion.” Watkinson lit wide shots of the hospital’s main ward with a 100K SoftSun on a crane. “For the fill side, we set up an 18K and a 12K on towers and shined them through a 12-by frame of Half Grid and another 4-by of 129. We had Velcro around the outside of the windows so we could quickly attach three different types of diffusion, 129, 216 and Hampshire. The sun helped sometimes, and sometimes it became a pain in the ass!” The golden, sidelit hospital exteriors were shot sporadically over the course of almost two months. “Because we were in the same location for so long, we had the luxury of choosing when to do our exterior scenes,” says Watkinson. “If the weather was bad, we’d just shoot interiors.” Lighting Jodhpur’s Umaid Bhawan Palace, where a priest betrays the bandits, was Watkinson’s biggest challenge during two months of work in India. “The gaffer, Michael McDermott, led a large team of local electricians who managed to get lights in the strangest places,” he recalls. “We fired two 6K Pars and an 18K into the domed roof, then placed 1Ks behind each of the 16 columns on the second level and 2Ks on the first level. The existing practicals were gelled to match our light and were increased in wattage where necessary, and we also added floor-standing practicals on the ground floor. The key lights, HMIs, came through grills on the ground floor. We had an 81EF on the lens.” Cranes played a major role in the adventure sequences. “We used everything from a small arm on a dolly to the Akela crane,” says the cinematographer. “Gary Pocock and Sanjay Sami placed the cranes safely and steadily wherever we needed them, on every type of terrain in the most far-flung places. We used the slide-and-glide to the point of mounting it vertically for a jib when we couldn’t get a dolly on the roof of a tiny house in Jodphur.” Watkinson is quick to credit his collaborators for the success of the massive global effort, including production designer Ged Clarke, costume designer Eiko Ishioka, underwater cinematographer Simon Christidis and stopmotion animators the Lauenstein Bros. He adds that a South African film student used Singh’s own 1917 handcrank camera to create the silent film that’s shown to patients in the children’s ward at the end of the movie. Dozens of brief second-unit shots are featured in The Fall, including shots of the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China and windmills in Spain. Watkinson and Singh shot some of these themselves while on location for commercial shoots. “The rest were done by a whole host of people,” notes the cinematographer. “Ray Leakey and Richie Donnelly did a whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia, passing through Egypt on the way. Ray has an album full of various people in the bandits’ costumes!” To facilitate a smooth digital grade at Duboi in France, Watkinson shot stills of each scene on a Canon 10D and manipulated the images in Photoshop to show the lab what he had in mind. “We knew from the start that The Fall would be finished with a digital intermediate [DI], and knowing that ahead of time helps you keep a good flow on the set — the knowledge that certain things can be adjusted later gives you a little more freedom,” he says. “I sent my stills to [post supervisor] Lionel Kopp and [colorist] Didier Le Fouest, whose work I had admired for some time, and they did an amazing job, especially on the day-for-night scene on the island. It was a real pleasure to work with them.” I 14 May 2008

American Cinematographer - May 2008

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