"For speed and maximum control," Garside continues, "every single light ran through a dimmer rack, so if Bill told me to give him a T8, I could give him a T8 by adjusting a lever on the controls. For a T2.8, you may only use one lamp, but for a T16, you may need 32 lamps. You're really dealing with an exponential doubling-up effect to get the extra stops. Bill actually used a lot of overhead lights through light gridcloth diffusion to create an ambience. So I had [rigging gaffer] Craig Bryant pre-rig Par cans in the roof for an ambience that could get me up to a T16. We then had to build a lot of custom overhead cloths, which we call sails, and virtually hand-fit them into position on the sets."
Pope elaborates, "We shot most of this movie with tungsten lights. Also, by using Par cans, we could change the light level without changing the color temperature, simply by turning units on or off. However, I do like to use Kino Flos on faces for interiors. In fact, I prefer to have Kinos around the actors, because they're a lot cooler. We used truckloads of Wall-O-Lites and 4' by 4' Kinos on this film."
Harvesting Humanity
For a key set depicting the future reality of mankind, production designer Owen Paterson (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Welcome to Woop-Woop) constructed several of the incubation pods in which humans are held in stasis while their energy is tapped by the computers. "We had about six of these liquid-filled pods," Pope describes. "Each was just large enough for a human being, and jutted out of a 30' by 60' wall that Owen built. Each pod was about 15' off the ground, which necessitated the building of numerous working platforms for the cast and crew. We stayed with the cooler light — 1/4 CTB on the tungsten lights — and once again used a big soft toplight, about 200 Par cans coming through light gridcloth. We also had Kino Flos coming up from below [to suggest an infinite number of the pods above and below the six practical props]. We also had Lightning Strikes units popping off occasionally, because there is supposed to be a lot of static electricity in the future reality. Additionally, Reggie, Owen and I worked hard to build some Kinos and MR-16s into the pods themselves."
"Lighting the pods was pretty tricky, because they were full of this red, liquid goop," Garside elaborates. "We wanted to make them glow, so we used underwater-safe Kino Flo units from Hydroflex, which we built into the base of each pod. That technique worked really well for wide shots. When we got in closer, we used the same interior lighting, but since the pods were made of a clear Perspex material, we enhanced their lighting by shining 1K babies up from below."
The Rebels' Lair
Once Neo is awakened from his pod-bound limbo and shown the true fate of mankind by Morpheus, he joins a small band of rebels that operate outside the controls of the Matrix. The members of this faction independently enter and depart the cyber realm in an effort to become more adept at altering the Matrix's virtual reality. To suit this purpose, the rebels have assembled a makeshift Hovercraft structure, the Nebuchadnezzar, which they navigate through the sewers of the monolithic computer network.
"Inside the Nebuchadnezzar, the rebels have special chairs that hold their bodies in suspended animation as they feed their minds into the Matrix," Pope details. "The ship set was an incredible construction. It had a solid-steel center section that held up each rebel's chair, which was hydraulically articulated. The chairs were surrounded with monitors and various mechanisms, and the floor was a sort of porous grating. We shot hard and soft light up from below through the grating, although we never let that light hit the actors. They were always lit fairly softly with Kino Flo tubes that were either built-in above each chair, or set on stands. We also integrated a few MR-16s and Par cans into the design. Overall, the ship was kept pretty dark and slimy, and we had surfaces wetted down to get gleaming highlights on the structure."
Adds Garside, "Because of the nature of that set, we really couldn't use an overhead sail for ambience. The set was designed to come apart: the roof lifted up to the grid and the sides pulled out to the wall, leaving just the center section and chairs. Because of that, key grip Ray Brown and I had to build our rigs into the set, so that if the set moved, the lights were attached and it wouldn't alter the feel. There were gaps in the sides of the ship, but we didn't want to see what was outside. We therefore skimmed 2K Juniors with 1/4 CTB down the sides of the set to bring the relief out and create some depth."
Lobby Showdown
When Morpheus is captured by three Agents and held within a government office building, "Neo goes back into the Matrix, basically on a suicide mission, to save him," Pope explains. "No one has ever survived a battle with even one Agent, but Neo is going in to attack all of the government troops, the army and three Agents!"
Entering the building's lobby, Neo and his partner, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), are confronted with a dizzying onslaught of bullets and mayhem from the heavily armed troops. "Neo and Trinity come racing down the length of the lobby, shooting up everybody," notes Pope with a chuckle. "The stone columns in the lobby literally disintegrate, with huge chunks of stone spraying everywhere. For a lot of our high-speed work, we carried Clairmont's Wilcam-12, and a lot of the gunplay was filmed at 300 fps, which required Reg and I to light the set to about a T11 [while shooting with 79, at a base exposure of around a T2.8/4]."
"Because the Wachowskis were using wide lenses — such as 10mm and 14.5mm — we really couldn't light the set from the floor," Garside recalls. "We basically had to light it all from the ceiling with a big ambience, so again we had nearly 1,000 Par cans in the roof."
"The walls of the lobby were a very dark green," Pope adds. "A lot of the action took place in two side colonnades where the overhead light wouldn't reach, so I used some Dinos and Mini-Dinos on the floor for modeling in those areas. There were always at least eight or nine Dinos burning at one time through 12' by 12' and 8' by 8' gridcloths. I tried to play all of the light from one side, and we used very little fill light. However, if your main light source is soft enough, you really only need one source."
Aerial Assault
After Neo and Trinity wreak havoc on the lobby, the duo takes an elevator up to the roof, where they commandeer a helicopter. "In the helicopter, Neo and Trinity descend down the side of the building and see Morpheus being tortured inside one of the offices," Pope details. "Since they've just blown up the entire lobby, the building's sprinkler systems have come on, and water starts filling up the rooms. We had a full-scale helicopter, which was flown by a rig attached to the stage perms; it could be lifted, lowered down and floated around. When the three Agents look up, they see the helicopter hovering in front of an enormous TransLight. Composed of several slightly altered shots of Sydney — with its sky corrected to white — the custom-made TransLight measured 190' by 40'. Again, we had to be able to shoot at 300 fps, so the set and TransLight had to be lit to a T11 when needed. Reg had a computer program that told us how many lights we'd need to achieve that. I think we had a total of 12,000 amps coming into the building."
[ continued on page 4 ] © 1999 ASC