According to Nakonechnyj, Stryker's base required the use of some 2,000 lamps. Trinity Power of Vancouver brought in 49 portable transformers, which were built into shipping containers that could sit in various areas of these stages. Trinity brought power to the transformers, which were then used as power points at various spots throughout the stages. In all, the crew had access to 1.2 million watts.

The usual method for Sigel and Nakonechnyj, who have worked together consistently for over a decade, is to put as many lights as possible on dimmers and then fine-tune the lighting from the dimmer board. "There's a whole slew of reasons to use dimmers," says Sigel. "One is that you can save a lot of time. Instead of having guys going up and down ladders all the time, you make adjustments from a dimmer board. Even more importantly, you can do lighting cues mid-shot or within a particular lighting setup. It can be something subtle, like someone walking from one end of the set to the other; as the camera moves with them, you can bring up the fill light where you need it and bring it down where you don't. Or you can be more dramatic and move in on someone and bring down the background lights at the same time."

Within Stryker's base, Nakonechnyj set up two Grand MA computerized dimmer boards. These boards, which are most often used for live theater and concerts, allow manual or pre-set dimming of hundreds or even thousands of units. "When you're working on the set, you see immediately how incredible Tom and Tony's system is," Dyas observes. "Yes, they do spend money up front and use a lot of resources in setting up some very elaborate lighting scenarios, but it's fantastic to see Tom make requests and have those changes happen instantaneously, instead of waiting for hours and hours while things are moved around."

With the exception of one flashback scene captured on cross-processed color-reversal stock, Sigel shot X2 on Kodak Vision 500T 5279 and the new Vision2 500T 5218. The cinematographer tested the new stock prior to its release, and his reaction was positive but not overwhelmingly so. "We decided to use 5218 for exteriors only," he reports. "I think it's good; it seems a bit finer-grained and can hold a little more detail."

Sigel initially hoped that adopting 5218 would eliminate the need to use Kodak's slower and more expensive 200T SFX stock for visual-effects work, but he and visual-effects supervisor Michael Fink decided against that after Sigel filmed some tests with the new stock. "It would have been nice to use the same stock for the basic photography and the effects, but Mike and I agreed that you just can't pull as clean a matte from 5218 as you can from the SFX," Sigel explains.

X2 footage was processed and at AlphaCineLabs in Vancouver, and although Sigel would have preferred working with hi-def digital dailies, Fox requested film dailies. Sigel observes that digital dailies would have given the filmmakers a more accurate sense of what the final images might look like if their request for a digital intermediate is approved. "They also could have done better temp composites and stuff like that sooner," he adds. But it wasn't to be. Hi-def dailies were eventually struck, but not off the negative; instead, the best-light dailies were telecined. "You really can't tell very much from digital dailies if you [strike] them off a workprint," says Sigel. "And the workprint was on Vision Premier, which is so contrasty that by the time you get to the tape, you're really missing a lot."

Sigel's concerns were somewhat allayed by the fact that so much of the X-Men's world had already been crafted in the first film. "The look of that world in X2 is similar enough to its look in the original that there wasn't quite so much concern about digital dailies," he says. "If we do get to digitally grade the film, I won't be going nearly as far in terms of altering the look as I did on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. If I hadn't had hi-def dailies on that one, it would've been a problem. On X2, I don't think we were giving up as much."

One set from X-Men that Dyas was eager to enhance in X2 was the X-Jet. "I think John Myhre had a very short amount of time and very little money to make the X-Jet work," he observes, "and in X2 about eight pages of material happen on that set, so naturally we wanted to improve upon it." Once again, Dyas worked with Sigel and Nakonechnyj on ways to illuminate the jet with fixtures placed within it and beyond the craft's windows. The dimmer board allowed the team to work with Singer on interactive, in-camera lighting effects that would, in some cases, subsequently be enhanced with CGI. "We have a few scenes where the X-Jet is involved in a dogfight," Sigel explains. "There are explosions and shooting, and the jet has to go in and out of cloud cover, so we had to create a lot of the lighting effects. Using the dimmer system, we could come up with a wide variety of effects very easily. The lights were all in place; it was just a question of which ones to use and what the relationships [among them] are. We might start in bright sun and then go into clouds, with lights in the jet flashing on and off or flickering and shutting off - the kind of situation where the dimmer board really shines."

This approach jibed perfectly with Singer's attitude about the process of filmmaking in general: "Ever since I saw Close Encounters as a kid, I could see the value of interactive lighting to enhance believability, even in a scene with a lot of effects. In our movies, we don't play in the CG world as much as we play in the real world. Our actors are real, and we have to make sure our effects are as seamless as possible. Even though we obviously have to create a lot of things in post, Tom's lighting methods help us create a lot of what you see on screen in the camera. To me, that's part of the fun of making movies. If I didn't feel that way, I think I'd be an animator."