American Cinematographer - May 2006 - 41

and elsewhere, it

the second unit, that team based its

Chesapeake Bay Bridge

the

work on Mindel and

McCleery's plan
for lighting the 150'-tall windmills.
"They were all uplit from the base,
colored with a warm gel," says

cated

Mindel. "And each windmill

mounted

helped plot out
Shanghai building-jumping
sequence and even the onscreen
mask change. During the shoot, says
Dozoretz, "we put one of our artists
on set in Palm Springs. [The film¬
makers] would look at the previz, go
out

and shoot it, and then

come

back and put

the video tap into my
guy's computer, and he would do a
rough comp of the greenscreen fore¬
ground element over the back¬
ground plate." In this manner, the
team could determine immediately

backlit with

was

couple of Bebee lights,
rimming them with halfcorrected night light."
For another major action
sequence, a large portion of a
a

which were

Ahmanson

in

Calabasas,

was

California,

surrounded
hundreds of
on

dupli¬

Ranch

in

and

by "hundreds and
yards of greenscreen
the back of semi trail¬

ers," says Mindel. Originally, shoot¬
ing was to take place on the actual
East Coast location, but security
concerns

put the brakes on that

notion. "You couldn't get

further

whether the shot would work.
Once

aerial

again, Nowell was at the

helm

for

the

windmill

plates, but this time he shot
Super 35mm. "Anamorphic lenses
are
pretty slow, and by going the
Super 35 route I was able to gain
back about 1 V\ stop, which helped a
great deal on this night shoot," says
Nowell. The location covered such

P*"

V
m

sequence

-V-

--W '

A,
V.

'

a

a

large area, easily several miles square,
that lighting it was problematic. Says
Mindel, "We tiled the windmill park
with a rig ILM designed for us,
because in the end, the interior heli¬

footage had to be shot

copter

onstage. Six cameras were fixed to a
helicopter, two on each side and two
the front." The background
footage was "anamorphicized" and
plated into the sequence's greenon

screen

element.

Full service 2K/H0/SD

facility

Discreet "Fire". "Smoke", & Avid "Nikis'
All format duplication/conversion

"Early on in one of our
preproduction meetings, we were
talking about the windmill-farm
sequence, and Tom, whom I'd just
met, asked me how I planned to
shoot it," recalls Mindel. "I told him

2K/HD/SD Da Vinci color correction
Film & Video restoration

Quality control
Exceptional customer service and more.

I would

probably try to shoot it day
night because there was no way
to light such a large area. Tom said,
'That doesn't leave you very much
time if you're going to shoot dawn
for

and dusk.' And in the end,

we

couldn't shoot the windmill farm

practically in the time we were given.
We ended up shooting with some
lights in the shot, knowing we could
take them out in post." Though the
sequence was eventually handled by

-

universal studios

digital

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37
American Cinematographer - May 2006

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2006
