American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 103

Above: One

underneath; Lytwyn found that he could
lift out individual panels and put the

unique effects
shot features

a

camera

melting clock.
Right:
Cinematographer
Chris Lytwyn.

below the level of the raised

floor to capture
low angle.
For

a

shots from

sequence set

an

in

extremely

crew shot in a morgue at Bellevue
Hospital in New York. "They were bring¬
ing in bodies while we were setting up
lights," recalls Lytwyn. "The smell of
formaldehyde is nauseating at first, but
you get used to it. Still, you end up
smelling like those fluids."
Lytwyn carefully used composi¬
tion to underscore what was going on in
the narrative. For example, the lead

character remains disconnected from his

father until the very

end of the movie, so
play up the character's isolation,
Lytwyn used a lot of negative space,
confining the character to just a small
portion of the screen. Because he felt
that this type of framing might be
unnerving to viewers, he arranged the
to

frame around verticals, horizontals,

converging lines and sharp contrasts.
Finn and Lytwyn wanted to
contrast the present-day scenes with
those set in the past by making the
contemporary scenes harsh and indus¬
trial and those in the past more organic.
However, they wanted to avoid making
the flashbacks seem pastoral. Lytwyn
scenes

on

Fujichrome Velvia 50D 8540 color rever¬
sal stock, which he cross-processed and
pushed one stop. Later, when the crew
did

some

find any
90

September 2004

reshoots and

were

unable to

Velvia in New York, Lytwyn

same

approach with Kodak

Ektachrome 100D 5285, and he was

pleased to discover that there

were no

me to have Chris say that the shots were
okay, because everything I was creating
had to match what was shot by him in a

noticeable differences between the two

live environment."

stocks.

stocks have all this latitude, but they lack
the chutzpah of the 98," he asserts. "No

Han was also determined to keep
organic element in each effects
shot, and he incorporated as much of
Lytwyn's work as he could, creating
textures, lighting and plates using the
main unit's photography. In one of the

matter how much you

film's most memorable shots, a wall

newer

clock melts, much like the one in
Salvador Dali's painting Persistence of

Lytwyn shot most of the picture

a morgue,

the

decided to shoot those

used the

on

Eastman EXR 500T 5298, which he

rated at ISO 400. "A lot of the

newer

blow out the
stocks, there's still detail, which is

great for people who want to see every¬

thing. But what you can't see is often
what makes an image great."
He then did a bleach-bypass on
the negative, but due to the overexpo¬
sure in the camera, contrast and satura¬
tion remained very high. "On one of the
first anamorphic films I shot, we were

forced to

print down into the trims,
below the normal printer-light numbers,
and it gave us really dense blacks," he
says. He decided to use the same tech¬
nique again, collaborating with Don

some

Memory. Han found his early versions of
entirely computer¬
generated, lacked the realism he
wanted, so he asked Lytwyn to provide
some real camera movement. Shooting
handheld with a 24p MiniDV Panasonic
DVX100
weighted down with a sand¬
bag to approximate the weight of the
production
camera
-
Lytwyn
photographed a mark on a black wall.
the shot, which is

-

Han tracked the camera's movement and

applied that information to the virtual

Ciana and Joe Violante at Technicolor

camera

New York to refine the look for the

Despite all of the digital technol¬
ogy used on the project, Lytwyn wanted
it to stay on film as much as possible, so

which

was

made

on

print,

Kodak Vision

Premier 2393.

Matching the look was a chal¬
lenge for Han, who says his instinct is to
avoid creating effects that look blownout. But when Finn and Lytwyn came in
during post to give him feedback, they
would sometimes suggest that he make
the look more extreme. "Ultimately, [the
effects] needed to have the same feel¬
ings of hots and darks as the production
footage," says Han. "It was important to

in his CG

scene.

all of the dissolves and fades

were

contact-printed. "When you have to do
things physically on set or in the lab, the
reward seems greater when it comes,"
he says.

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