These tactics were also applied to the mission control structure, from which the Robinsons depart on their never-ending voyage. Perched miles above the Earth inside a pod atop a space needle, the mission headquarters is a curved, cavernous copper-colored affair, with 12'-thick walls perforated by four huge circular windows designed to withstand the intense pressure of space and to protect inhabitants from the blasts of launching spaceships. Levy details, "It was a roomy, open set, 120' by 60' wide and probably 35' high, with big plaster columns in the middle and two massive featured columns on either side of a gigantic view screen. We think of a 'mission control' center as having a logical basis, with people sitting in certain spots so they can communicate with others, but in our version, the technicians all watch the same master screen instead of having their own monitors. Others are clustered around practical monitors built into the bases of the columns.
"We had a neon lighting crew on the lot, and I had them construct neon tubes to fit the curved surfaces on the columns, so there would be a glow coming from the top. I then used some built-in practical lights shining up from below. Most of my lights were 20Ks 10Ks became my small lights which we placed up high to shoot straight down walls, creating light washes. When I didn't use 10Ks, I used little 500-watt lights to just put a little spot or highlight behind the action. I also picked up the warm copper tone of the walls and columns and accentuated it with light of a different color, probably apricot. Again, I just used little bits here and there to define and complement the walls behind people, and to suggest depth and layering."
The four Plexiglas windows looking out onto the launch pad were cone-shaped (like the viewing ports found on old-time diving bells), measuring 8' in diameter on the exterior of the set but 12' across inside. For the launch of the smooth, saucer-shaped first-stage Jupiter 1 spacecraft, Levy had to create interactive lighting to depict the blast of the ship's engines washing over mission control. The cinematographer recalls, "Before the ship took off, a 'blast shield,' which had a louver-like design, came down over the windows, which I used to keep the light level very low inside mission control. On the other side of the shield, I had banks of Dinos and Wendy lights with flame-colored gels, which I brought up on a dimmer. This huge lightbank ate its way through the louvers to penetrate into the dim room. Norman Garwood and I consulted on most of the finishes for the sets; for mission control, I requested gloss and semi-gloss surfaces, metallic sheens and glazes that would give the bright light something to react with, creating unusual reflections and unexpected shadows. Interesting things happen when you use an excessive amounts of light and overexpose the film stock severely."
However, Levy's primary stock on LiS was Eastman Kodak's Vision 500T 5279, which has tremendous latitude at both the top and bottom ends, making it more difficult to over- and underexpose scenes. "It's a beautiful stock," Levy remarks, "but because it has a very high latitude at the top end, it wouldn't go white the detail just kept hanging in there. Meanwhile, its bottom end is so extensive that it's often hard to make it go black; at four or five stops under, you're still getting detail you didn't count on getting. If you're trying to hide part of the set, or deliberately not show something, you actually have to make an effort not to see it."
After the launch of the Jupiter 1, which looks almost exactly like the TV Robinsons' original spacecraft, the ship undergoes a transformation, shedding its rocket-booster shell to reveal the highly detailed, egg-shaped Jupiter 2. Inside the Robinson's spacecraft and elsewhere, Levy used Kodak's fine-grain EXR 5293 stock for the considerable number of shots featuring visual effects. "We had a lot of interactive lighting. For instance, if somebody walked up to a pedestal and activated a holographic navigational instrument, we had to design an interactive light emanating from the hologram, as well as lights that would correspond with other effects we hadn't seen yet."
Garwood's Modern-design motif was also applied to the Jupiter 2's interior, which features eye-pleasing spaces that are utterly impractical in terms of the realities of space travel. "It looks like the inside of an egg," Levy says with a smile. "Rather than being a grungy, dirty spaceship like those seen in the Alien films, this ship is composed of curved surfaces with a lot of oval and elliptical cutouts. Knowing Steve [Hopkins] very well and understanding how he likes to shoot, I realized that the sets had to light themselves. The design dictated that there would be no right angles to any of the sets, and since the spaces represented a spaceship, they had to have indirect lighting there was no other choice.
"On the bridge set, I was trying to sell the scale and the idea that it's high-tech, so I did some washes of color over the walls and put strip fluorescents below the floor-level mesh. I also designed in a gap between the floor and walls so I could get a little up-glow, but because we had all of these curved surfaces, I couldn't use straight fluorescents or the light would vary with the distance to the wall. Instead, I had massive runs of curved neon made in a range of colors, shaped to fit the set under the kick board, which was open so the light could escape. You'd never see the bare neon, just the glow. The set didn't need much additional ambient light because of the 30'-high white domed ceiling. Light was just bounced around in there. Many times I was fighting to get the contrast back.
"Each crew member had their own station on the bridge life science, navigation, et cetera. Each station comprised its own section of the matted dashboard that wrapped around the set in about 120 degrees. When you have enough lights and monitors, you create an ambience, and that enabled me to light the actors from their dashboards using very small units hidden within the set. If there was a nook or cranny on the set, my rigging gaffer, Darren Gattrell, would get a practical of some sort in there.
[ continued on page 3 ]