The Vision 200T also worked well with Vacano’s use of soft fluorescent lighting, yielding a shooting stop of around T2.8. "I’m a big fan of soft light," the cinematographer states. "I think when you tell a story, whatever story it is, the more realistic you are the more the audience will believe what they see. If the visuals are overly artistic for no apparent reason, I always have the feeling that they’ll take the audience out of the story. For that reason, I try not to surprise the audience too much with unexpected things.
"In nature, for instance, there is not so much hard light; there’s sunlight and there’s diffused skylight," he continues. "Likewise, when you’re within interiors, people don’t normally have a bare bulb hanging on the ceiling; they have a table lamp with a warm-colored shade on it. If it were just a bare bulb, it would practically blind you. Almost every light in a living room is built to give off a diffused light rather than a strong, harsh light. In taking a realistic approach to storytelling, I therefore became a fan of soft light."
Once Vacano had his architectural lighting design and mood scheme in place, the day-to-day shooting came together surprisingly quickly, even with the special attention required by all of the visual effects (see sidebar on page 42). "We had a huge amount of pre-lighting and pre-thinking on this film, so once we were on the set shooting, it went very easily," he says. "Everything was already there. On a shot-by-shot basis, I only had to take care of the actors’ [fine-tuned lighting]. Because the sets were already lit, I would just kill the overhead lights above the actors and add lights [by bringing in Kino Flos on stands] from the side, from underneath or from wherever the source was motivated.
"I believe that whatever you are shooting, the shot is about characters. It’s about their faces and their emotions, and emotions are solely in the eyes you don’t see the emotions in the ears. Obviously, that idea doesn’t really allow for just toplight, so whenever a set has a lot of toplight, I’ll place a flag or at least some diffusion, like 216 over the actors to cut off the toplight. I can then light them from the floor, playing the light in line with the content of the scene and the characters’ feelings. If they’re having more harsh or disturbed feelings, I can follow that idea with the light."
With this method, Vacano has made a study out of working with soft light and fluorescent sources. "There is a lot of misunderstanding in terms of what soft light is about," he submits. "I work with it very precisely in the way that I try to model the light on a face. You can do wonderful things with fluorescents because of the structure and size of the bulbs. It makes a big difference if you’re lighting a face with a fluorescent bulb that is horizontal, a bulb that is vertical, or even one that’s at a 45-degree angle. In one direction it works almost like a hard light, and in the other like a soft light. Naturally, soft or hard light is very much related to the angle at which the light hits a person or an object, but with a horizontal bulb, the light is stretched around the face so it’s very soft. You can make a face a bit wider and broader, because the light from the edges of that long bulb floats around the face and fills in the sides. With a vertical bulb, the light is actually quite small and thin; you can get much more direction in the light than you can with a horizontal fluorescent. And even though it’s a soft source, you can still get a nose shadow at the right angle. That can look very nice if the angle of the bulb works, or if it’s sort of parallel to the angle of the nose. Even with a soft light like a fluorescent, you can modify a face to a great degree."
For Hollow Man, Vacano extended his soft-light approach to the world outside the underground lab, particularly for scenes set in the characters’ apartments. For Caine’s home, a three-story structure was erected on stage to allow for a sense of height through the apartment’s windows. "Allan built the interior and exterior of the apartment," Vacano relates. "There are scenes in which he looks out his window at the opposite building. Every night he watches this nice girl come home and start to undress in her apartment, but she always closes the blinds just when things begin to get interesting. After he is rendered invisible [and] his new powers have darkened his character, he starts thinking, ’Maybe I should go over and do something with her.’
"The apartment sets were completely different in feel from the lab sets," Vacano continues. "In the lab, it’s always tense and closed-in it’s just a working atmosphere, and it’s not really connected with life. The characters’ homes, on the other hand, have much more of a feeling of real lives, maybe even good lives. The colors are warmer and the furniture is different. Caine’s apartment was lit mostly with practicals and fluorescents [but with 2,900-degree bulbs] so that it was nice and cozy and a little bit warm. Also, I did those scenes with slight diffusion filters, mostly 1/4 White ProMists, just to lend the apartment a soft, cozy and personal feel; by contrast, I didn’t use any filtration at all for the lab set. The lab was all glass and metal and the costumes were not very colorful, so the main colors in those scenes are the actors’ skin tones."
Vacano used fluorescent lighting fixtures almost exclusively during the shoot, but one notable exception was made during the film’s three weeks of location work in Washington. "Obviously, you cannot light big night exteriors in a city with just Kino Flos. In one sequence, for example, the scientists are finally able to make an ape invisible, and afterwards they have a party in a nice restaurant. Later on, they celebrate on the rooftop of a building overlooking the whole city, and we had to light that from far away because no lights were allowed in the vicinity of the Capitol.
"To do that type of scene, you need lights that can be focused, with long enough throw to reach buildings far away. We set up two big Muscos, as well as several Condors with 20Ks, 18K HMIs and various Pars. Normally, uncorrected HMIs at night are too blue for my taste, so I always have a 1/2 correction on them. If I also have a 20K, I’ll add 1/2 blue to match the HMIs. Either way, it comes down to personal taste some people don’t like to use anything blue at night, but others feel it’s traditional to have blue backlight. Once you’ve done that [big lighting], you can light the faces with whatever you want. For our nighttime scenes, I used a larger fluorescent unit, such as a Kino Flo Wall-O-Lite, to light the actors."
Aside from the film’s lighting scheme, one of Vacano’s major challenges was dealing with complex effects shots involving the supposedly invisible Bacon interacting (and performing) with his fellow actors. In most instances, Bacon’s presence would be entirely removed from these scenes, but Verhoeven deemed it necessary for Bacon to don the green suit and provide the vital interaction with the other actors. Bacon’s task also became Vacano’s predicament, in that a great majority of the effects sequences would be executed by the main unit. "We worked with a lot of different motion-control techniques," Vacano says. (See sidebar about motion-control on page 46.) "We had various encoders on the heads, and we even had an underwater motion-control unit for a big fight scene in a swimming pool. With all of the effects work, we ended up shooting for almost 130 days, which was similar to our schedule on Starship Troopers.
"Anytime Kevin was in the green suit," he continues, "he needed an additional, special light. Whenever you do greenscreen work, the green has to be at least somewhat uniform in its density. We didn’t light Kevin the way I would normally light a character to match the scenery; instead, we had to fill in the shadows on him much more so that the green didn’t get too contrasty. Of course, the trick was then to make sure the fill light didn’t hit the set or the other actors!"
For the swimming-pool fight, the filmmakers couldn’t have Bacon merely don a green bathing suit or unitard and then blast light at him through the water. Instead, the effects team painted the actor entirely black with a thick tar and used the black density to extract mattes of the actor’s form. "We started that scene on location in Washington at a house that had a pool in the backyard," Vacano details. "However, we then had to rebuild the pool and backyard on stage so that we could do all of the effects shots under water. The [underwater invisibility] effect is pretty amazing you can see almost a human-shaped bubble wrestling with a CIA agent. We created just about every conceivable scenario to show off the character’s invisibility, ranging from smoke to fire extinguishers and CO2 bottles, then to sprinklers and water effects. Naturally, it all required heavy effects work.
"My second-unit director of photography, Anette Haellmigk, did many of the complicated greenscreen, fire, rain and action shots," he notes. "She has worked with me on many films; integrating your work into someone else’s style so flawlessly that no one can see the difference is a special challenge. Sometimes the second-unit crew lights and shoots complete scenes themselves, and they do an enormous amount of creative work on a big film like this one."