American Cinematographer - August 1995 - 49
bounce around on the damn
thing. So Bear Paul and our rigging
grip, Levon Besnelian, built dozens
of amazing platforms for the
you
trimaran out of
steel, aluminum
and timber - so that we could sur¬
round the boat at any time with
space to work. We probably built
too many of them, but we wouldn't
have been able to shoot the picture
without them. It was impossible."
"It
tough," agrees
Reynolds. "But another problem
was that
you could only put the
platforms on or take them off at
dock. So in the morning we would
have to meticulously plan so we
was
could shoot as much coverage as
could from any given mounting
we
configuration before making a
change. We even had two different
trimarans. Depending on the shots
we were
doing, we would some¬
times be rigging two boats simulta¬
neously."
Because the trimaran
was
under sail in most of its scenes,
with its necessary crew of five
tucked inside the hulls looking at
video monitors, it could not be sim¬
ply anchored or even towed, as the
camera was
panning around fore
and aft for 100 degrees. The
trimaran was followed, just out of
camera
range, by what Semler de¬
You can't have that
scribes as a "bloody Spanish Ar¬
mada" of chase and support boats,
which supplied the crew with nec¬
sea.
essary equipment. "Sometimes the
Zodiacs couldn't come in to the
trimaran because it was too
constantly com¬
ing up over the boat, we were all
getting wet and it was too danger¬
ous to have
unprotected lights. I
also couldn't use anything too big,
because we couldn't get the neces¬
sary generator on a fast-enough
rough," Semler says. "So we had
some storage containers designed
for camera equipment built into the
trimaran and dressed to look like
boxes."
Regardless of the inven¬
tive use of platforms used to rig the
trimaran, the lighting situation also
proved relentlessly problematic. "I
had to get some light on these ac¬
tors," Semler says. "That's why I'm
cargo
there, to make them look like Hol¬
lywood movie stars. It doesn't hap¬
pen naturally, so we would have
very large 12' by 12' or 20' by 20'
scrims hauled up into the rigging
so we could silk
everything out -
unless, of course, they got in the
way of the sails or the wind blew
a take, so we needed lights
mounted on the trimaran. But be¬
cause waves were
boat. The trimaran has
for its
own
run an
a
generator
functions, but we had to
umbilical
tor boat
across
to
a
genera¬
which
kept sinking, or
trying to - equipped with our 5K
Honda crystal generators. Fortu¬
nately, Pete Romano had all these
underwater HMI lights, 1200-watt
-
Pars. Waves could hit them and
there
was no
hurt.
They
daylight."
danger of getting
fantastic, straight
were
However,
as one
might
suspect, such lightweight (how¬
ever
safe)
sources
did little to
coun¬
teract the brilliant Hawaiian
them around.
"For
happen
during
fill,
we
first tried to
have
sun
and the blinding Pacific glare. Con¬
firms Semler, "Normally when
big lights on a barge running
along side the trimaran: four 12Ks
and maybe six 4K Pars, punched
through a 12' by 12' scrim hot as
hell. Halfway through one of the
you're creating fill on land in day¬
light - for glamour, for overriding
sun, or for re-creating the sun if
you've lost it - you can always
first
cheat the
rehearsals, I noticed that the
lighting barge had drifted and all
the lights were just pointed out to
sun
in with 12Ks
or
18Ks
during the medium shots and
close-ups. But with three 1200-watt
The trimaran
escapes the
atoll as the
Smokers attack.
While
some
might expect
Waterworld's
epic scope in
anamorphic, the
boat's vertical
shape
convinced
Reynolds and
Semler to
instead opt for
1.85:1. "In order
to frame the
trimaran in its
entirety you
would have to
have these
really awkward
compositions,"
says Reynolds.
The pair briefly
fantasized
about going full
Academy, with
"Kevin Costner
looking heroic
as
all hell in
a
big square
frame," reports
Semler, but
ultimately
reasoned that
most theaters
can't
even
pull
the 1.85 masks
from their
projection
gates. "That
was one more
headache
we
didn't need,"
admits the
director.
August 1995
American
Cinematographer
47
American Cinematographer - August 1995
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