American Cinematographer - July 2018 - 38

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Portrait of a Scoundrel
The view
outside the
Falcon's cockpit
was created
with another
Lux Machina
environment, in
this case a
60'x30' rearprojection
screen fed by
five 27,000lumen Panasonic
laser projectors.

"We also had a Giraffe Classic
Crane and a CineJib," Hymns continues. "All of the big gear had to be delivered by helicopter onto the
mountainside. In order to catch the best
light and maximize our shooting time in
the Dolomites, our days started at
around 3 in the morning."
For the heist sequence aboard the
conveyex, the filmmakers captured
background plates in the Dolomites that
could then be composited with the liveaction photography of the actors that
was captured at Pinewood, where the
actors worked on full-size train cars in
front of bluescreen. Evans details, "We
used SkyPanels covering the whole stage
and then hung ½ Grid Cloth 5 feet
underneath, making a 120-by-85-foot
soft light box."
38

July 2018

"Bradford chose a pre-dawn, early
morning look for the sequence, and we
shot about 150 background plates, with
an Alexa 65 mounted to the nose of a
helicopter, at the correct time of day over
a week," says Bredow. "We also shot lots
of high-resolution stills and photomodeled the mountain range to digitally
create the more dynamic and closer
shots that weren't safe to capture from
the helicopter."
Young praises the contributions
of Bredow, whose team contributed to
more than 2,000 visual-effects shots in
the movie. "Rob's an artist with a very
mindful and beautiful spirit who just
gets it," the cinematographer says. "You
look at my body of work, and you know
I wasn't even going to attempt to
convince people I knew how to tackle
American Cinematographer

these massive visual-effects sequences.
But what I loved was that everyone was
open to rethinking things regarding the
kind of photography I like. I'm a very
critical person, but I think our approach
of not trying to re-create direct sunlight
in the big effects sequences really paid
off in terms of believability."
The train heist culminates with a
spectacular explosion featuring a liquidfilled shockwave, which was realized
with both digital and practical elements.
"We needed something that could
evolve over 10 or more seconds,"
explains Bredow. "We set up a minimal
explosive charge in a 100-gallon aquarium. The event itself only lasted about
10-20 milliseconds, and we shot it with
a Phantom v2512 camera at 120,000
frames per second.
"At that speed, you need a ton of
light, so we used two [Luminys] 99K
LongStrike units - provided by Cirro
Lite - which could turn on for a maximum of 8 seconds at a time," Bredow
continues. "It was so bright that everyone on set had to wear protective
eyewear. We'd count 'three, two, one,'
everyone would avert their eyes, and
we'd set off this little tiny firecracker
charge that created this underwater
explosion ball of about 3 or 4 inches
across. The artists at ILM then

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2018