Cinematographer Gale Tattersall lends his skills to HBO's FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, an ambitious 12-part series which traces the history of the Apollo space missions.
It was a scene at once fantastic and real and for anyone who had witnessed the actual event, televised live around the world on the wondrous night of July 20, 1969, there was no mistaking the sight. Inside an enormous blimp hangar at the Tustin Marine Air Corps Station in California, HBO had re-created — with exacting verisimilitude — what astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin called the "magnificent desolation" of the lunar surface: a stark, gray landscape of rock and dust, mute and motionless and beautiful. Neil Armstrong and Aldrin were the first to set foot on the moon, alighting from their craft in spongy white spacesuits and bobbing softly as they ventured onto the unfamiliar terrain. It was fitting that on the first night of the Tustin shoot, a full moon illuminated the sky over the marine base.
(Loyal readers will recall that Aldrin, Armstrong and fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins were made honorary ASC members for their lunar photographic work, which is extensively detailed in AC Oct. '69.)
Produced with the cooperation of NASA, From the Earth to the Moon began shooting at Florida's Cape Canaveral in February of 1997 and wrapped 10 months later in Tustin. With a budget of $65 million, the 12-part series is HBO's most ambitious and costly project to date. Interconnected to grand effect, the project's separate segments celebrate the potent combination of romance, science, imagination and technology which fueled America's Apollo space program and put men on the moon.
While a different director took the reins of each episode (with the exception of David Frankel, who helmed three of them), Gale Tattersall served as the series' sole cinematographer. The task was formidable, requiring some 6,000 setups shot on more than 100 locations over a period of 271 days. Each of the 12 one-hour segments covers a different manned Apollo mission. Although certain characters appear in more than one episode, each is a separate entity, with its own look, tone and feel. With no time off between finishing one episode and starting another, the pace proved exhausting. "Every three weeks we'd get a new director who was eager to go, while the rest of us looked like Napoleon's army retreating from Moscow," jokes Tattersall, a self-described "rocket freak" who was thrilled to be part of the project.
A still photographer before he turned to motion pictures, the British-born Tattersall began his movie career as camera operator for cinematographer Donald McAlpine, ASC on Australian director Bruce Beresford's first picture, a 1972 comedy titled The Adventures of Barry MacKenzie. After seven years in Australia, Tattersall returned to Britain, where he began shooting commercials.
He returned to feature films in 1984 as operator on The Emerald Forest. He calls that film's director of photography, Philippe Rousselot, AFC, "one of the nicest people and greatest teachers I've ever met, and one of the most generous people in terms of sharing knowledge." Tattersall graduated to lighting director in 1986 with Comrades and came to the United States four years later to do some additional photography on The Addams Family. His other credits include Wild Orchid, The Commitments and Virtuosity (see AC Oct. '95). At press time, Tattersall was in Toronto shooting Pushing Tin for director Mike Newell.
From the Earth to the Moon marks the cameraman's first foray into television, and he half-jokes that the primary reason he wanted to shoot the series was the challenge of lighting the stark lunar surface. "Unfortunately, that sequence was done at the very end of the shoot, so I had to be quite nice to get there," he deadpans. "If they had dispensed with my services before arriving on the moon, I would have been very disappointed!"
The lunar set spanned 36,000 square feet, an area 30 times larger than the average soundstage, and it had to be lit with a single source, just as the moon is illuminated solely by the sun. There is no fill light on the moon, apart from a very limited amount which bounces back from the ground or bounces off an astronaut. "We had to build a light that didn't exist," Tattersall explains brightly. "We essentially created a 250,000-watt lightbulb."
He knew that whatever the source, it had to be highly concentrated, as there is only one very long, very clearly-defined shadow on the moon. In addition, the light couldn't be too close to the set or the relative fall-off from where it first struck the set to the farthest point would be unacceptably high. In fact, there had to be no difference in the level of brightness between one side and the other. That meant keeping the light source as far back as possible which then created the problem of needing more power. "The only way I could think of doing it was with a [6'] convex mirror," relates Tattersall. "Basically, we were using the mirror as a collector to catch a massive amount of power and then turn it all into one source and throw it out again."
To supply the lighting power, he opted for an array of 10K Xenon units. Tattersall explains, "Xenons are focused spots; their light is focused through a lens on the front of the lamp, [which makes them] really powerful. All of that power went into the mirror."
The Xenons could also be projected from a distance. Even 140 feet from the mirror, they created a beam of light only 6' in diameter. Other lamps, such as 4K Pars, are very concentrated, but couldn't be focused directly on the mirror. Only 15 10K Xenons existed in the United States, however, and Tattersall needed 21. He sought the help of Xenotech's Richard Hart, who built another six units.
Tattersall laid out his lighting plan to the series' co-executive producer, Tony To. "Tony is one of the most creative producers I have ever worked with, if not the most creative," says an admiring Tattersall. "He looked at me as if I was completely nuts and said, 'What's the B plan?' I said, 'Well, I'll be doing Taco Bell commercials in Tijuana.' He asked me what I meant and I replied, 'I can't think of a B plan.'"
During production of the moon sequence, the Xenons burned for 12 and 13 hours a day. To help prevent a fire or explosion, all of the electronic cables feeding the lamps were put in an air-conditioned tent. This measure wasn't enough: the cables couldn't take the power, and burned out. Higher-amperage cabling was required.
The biggest fire hazard was actually the wooden ceiling of the hangar. "We had to use a special material called Reposil that absorbs heat," comments Tattersall. "It's a modern equivalent of asbestos in a cloth form. We put it 10 feet back behind the mirror so the tiny amount of spill we got from the Xenons wouldn't be concentrated into the wooden beams. The best boy, Jimmy "Mac" McCullagh, was testing three of the Xenons. He was maybe 30 to 50 feet away, with goggles on, and his hair started smoking. And that was while working with just three of them!"
Heavy black drapes were hung between the "sun" and the lunar surface, save for a rectangular opening about 160' wide and 80' high. The drapes acted as cutters, controlling the light so it would fall just on the set and not hit the surrounding woodwork.
The mirror itself was water-cooled, built with a hollow tank behind it so water could run through and dissipate the heat. Recycling and cooling the water proved inefficient, so it ran into a drain instead.
Rather than use matte boxes when shooting on the moon, Tattersall decided to take advantage of the lens flare. "It gives you a feeling of the sun's intensity," he explains. "We also used zoom lenses quite a lot, because zooms have so many glass elements — and so many coatings on the lenses — that you get all of these lovely refractions in different colors. I didn't have quite enough stop to use our Cooke 5:1 zoom, so we used Arriflex Variable Primes instead." The rest of Tattersall's lens package included a set of Zeiss Superspeeds, a set of standard Zeiss optics and a Cooke 10:1 zoom, as well as a wide array of snorkle lenses, borescopes and probes.
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