American Cinematographer - December 1997 - 37

used Panavision. I
Primo

and 11:1 Primo
on

really like the
used the 4:1
zooms
quite a bit

primes, but

we

Titanic, and I found them to be

sharp as the primes. The
also helped because we
were
constantly massaging our fo¬
cal lengths throughout scenes -
changing from, say, a 27mm on

just

as

zooms

shot to

reformats the film to anamorphic
while making the internegative,"

Carpenter states. "You're at the
mercy of that lens. At CFI, and also
at Deluxe, they have excellent op¬
tical systems set up for doing this."
Kodak's 5244

was

used

35mm and then to

again while making Titanic's IN, as

something else for the rest of the

the flat IP was reformatted to 35mm

coverage.

anamorphic on the lab's equivalent
of an optical printer, running at 14
feet per minute. "The printing
stocks Kodak has today are so
good that I don't see a real tradeoff

one

a

"We

primarily shot with

Vision 5279 500T, which I really
love. It's a fantastic stock. The

blacks are excellent and seem to
have a certain luster that I hadn't
seen in other Kodak stocks. The 79
is

certainly one of the best stocks
that I've seen in terms of contrast
and shadow detail, and it really
holds the bright areas; it's very dif¬
ficult to blow it out. However, I did
expose it very conservatively at an
ASA of 320 instead of the recom¬

mended 500, and I later took care to
avoid any wild changes in the tim¬

ing that would skew the black

ar¬
eas. These considerations were all
related to the Super 35 process, es¬

pecially the overexposure. You
really want to have a meaty nega¬
tive so that when the optical squeeze
is done, you aren't going to see an
appreciable increase in grain.
"We wanted to give our
focus puller [Mark Jackson] some¬
thing, so we tried to keep things at
T2.8," Carpenter adds. "On True
Lies, we'd shoot our interiors at a
T2.8/4 split, which gave us plenty
to work with. We continued with

that

Titanic, and I also tried to

on

give the

very large night exteriors
at a little more intensity when I
could because I was supporting the
11:1

lens, which has a maximum
aperture of T2.8. But we still had to
build up

the stop."
This meant

supplement¬
ing the practical lights. "One of the
biggest challenges of working with
Jim is that he uses such a kinetic
camera, which can very often be in
several

places during a take," Car¬

penter says. "Most of the places
where one would put lights are

simply taken
to that

very

on

away. As a solution
this film, we often used

mobile lighting which could
in and out during a take.

move

Some of it

was even

the end of the

in terms of color saturation when

Super 35 to anamor¬
phic," Carpenter adds. "Whenever
you go through a printing process,
you're going to get some degree of
change in terms of contrast, but
you compare

with the new intermediate stocks
it's really negligible.
"I've heard that you see

grain in Super 35 because
you're doing an optical process. In
a contact
print, a diffuse light
source is used, but in an
optical
printing process like you use for
Super 35, a more specular source is
being used. You're therefore seeing
more of the
grain structure, so you
have to present the very best, most
pristine negative possible to the
Super 35 process."
more

Toward this end, Cameron
has devised a rigid procedure for

protecting the negative once it gets
to the lab. He explains, "In
Super
35 you're dealing with a smaller
image area on the O-neg, so you
have to be more aware of the accu¬
mulated dirt and damage that hap¬

pens to a negative every time it's
handled and a print is struck. In the
case of Titanic
which cost $190
million and runs 20 reels
the
-

-

negative cost about $9 million per
1,000' roll. If you take into account
what it would take to replace the
roll, it has no price. So every time
that hourly-paid technician at the
lab gets that thing out of the vault
and puts it on the printing ma¬
chine, he's carrying $9 million in
his hands. That's like carrying
around somebody's baby; you're
not going to play catch with
somebody's baby too often, so why
do it with your negative?

anything that did not work,"
they'll do a
hazeltine timing, make their first
answer
print, correct that and then
make another one until they get
something acceptable. That 'first'
print you see may actually be the
see

Cameron adds. "So

third

or

fourth

one.

"In response

to this, I actu¬
ally have the lab sign an agreement
before we start the answer-printing
process stating that they will not
make any print without checking
with me first. This dramatically
cuts down

that the

on

the number of times

negative is handled and

runs on the machine; therefore, we
have fewer scratches, less dirt and
a lower
potential for damage.

"Another thing we do for
safety is to strike an IP immediately
after we get a hazeltine timing,

before we make the hazeltine
check print. It's just a quasi-timed
even

IP, only meant for emergency use.
I've never had to use one, but it's
good to know that you have

something other than the O-negative if something starts getting
ripped up."
Titanic's 35mm

anamor¬

phic release prints will be struck
from this IN on Kodak's T-grain
5286 stock, as will any 70mm
prints. "CFI will take the film
though timing and the IP, and then
Deluxe will handle the release

prints," Carpenter reports. "On
True

Lies, Deluxe did the 70mm

prints and they were fantastic.
Again, I think this goes back to the
improved intermediate stocks we
have now, such as Eastman's 5244.
Between the 35mm prints and the
70mm prints, there was something
like a 20 percent jump in quality
and detail. I think they'd be
nuts not to strike 70mm

prints

for Titanic.
"Other than

watchdog¬
ging the process all the way
through, the only other special
thing I do is to make a very meaty
negative," Carpenter reiterates.
"But I'm also working with a direc¬
tor who is very involved in this
process, and Jim is not one to say,
'That's good enough.'"
-

David E. Williams

"Most labs will not let you

handheld. At

picture, when the

December 1997

American

Cinematographer

35
American Cinematographer - December 1997

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 1997
