Fiore shot Centerville sequences on Kodak Vision2 500T 5218, and he filmed the outside world on Kodak’s more contrasty Vision 250D 5246. When working outside, his crew frequently shaped natural sunlight with bounce cards and augmented it with HMIs. “On the first day of shooting, we filmed the scene where Lincoln and Jordan first experience daylight,” recalls Fiore. “We were fortunate enough when we were out there to get cobalt blue skies and amazing cloud cover. When the location looks that good, you don’t have to do too much to it.”

When there wasn’t so much strong sunlight to work with, Fiore bounced 12K Pars into 12-by Ultrabounce and put that light through additional diffusion. The cinematographer uses HMIs sparingly; he prefers the look of uncorrected tungsten light bathing scenes in sunset-like warmth. “HMI light never really feels like the color of the sun,” says Fiore. “We frequently used Dinos with spot globes. That extra orange of the tungsten gives you some extra punch and feels a bit more like sunlight, so we left them uncorrected.”

One of the largest interiors set outside of Centerville is an abandoned industrial space where Lincoln has an inevitable confrontation with his human counterpart, the man from whom he was cloned. Though set in the Los Angeles of the future, the scene was shot in a century-old train station in Detroit, Michigan, that features arched windows and large panes of glass. Fiore’s team searched out the biggest units they could find to light through the windows. “If there are windows to work with, I generally don’t put that much light inside sets,” says Fiore. “I don’t work from a truss much. So we tried to get the biggest tungsten lights we could find.”

The crew brought in two Lightcrane trucks, each of which held four 36-bulb Dinos. These units, as well as eight other Dinos, were set up to push through the train station’s large windows and provide a 100'-long line of light. “The windows were dirty, and that helped give the light a kind of pattern,” recalls Bauman. “We also blew some smoke in there. We created hot kicks with 12-light Maxi-Brutes with spot globes that we moved around for each setup.”

At press time, The Island was scheduled to go through a digital intermediate (DI) at Company 3, but Fiore and Bay are strong believers in getting as much of a film’s look as possible in the original negative. Bay insisted on shooting The Island in anamorphic 2.40:1 because he was dissatisfied with the look of Bad Boys 2, which originated on Super 35mm and was converted to anamorphic in a DI. The director maintains that the DI is most useful when it’s used to achieve what can’t be achieved photochemically: “In The Island, we’ve got dream sequences that we were able to really twist and defocus and just wack out [digitally]. You just can’t do that kind of thing any other way.”

Like many cinematographers, Fiore says the DI presents a number of pros and cons. On The Island, the chief con was that he had to view digital dailies throughout the shoot. All of the 35mm footage was processed at Technicolor in Burbank and then sent to Company 3, where it was telecined to high-definition (HD) video. Fiore watched projected HD dailies in a trailer at the end of each day, while Bay and others viewed down-converted DVD versions of the dailies. Fiore says the setup eliminated two aspects of the dailies process that he finds valuable: first, he had no concrete timing report that would tell him exactly where his negative was falling each day; and second, there was no time when he, Bay and the rest of the crew watched dailies together and discussed specifics.

“I think there are some cons to digital dailies right now,” says Fiore. “It’s great to be able to color-correct dailies, but you can’t get something so basic as timing numbers. The tendency throughout the whole film, I feel, is that the work suffers. Every interpretation is made according to those HD images, and they have nothing to do with what’s on the negative. You can manipulate color and exposure for that neg once you transfer to HD, but you never know what you’ve really got in the negative. Plus, I was looking at HD and everyone else was looking at DVDs. Michael and I never watched anything together, and those conversations between a director and cinematographer can be valuable.”

There was also the challenge of communicating the filmmakers’ intentions to the telecine colorist. Throughout the shoot, Fiore had an assistant use a Nikon D70 to shoot stills in the Fine/JPEG mode and manipulate them in Photoshop to approximate the look he and Bay wanted. Hard copies of the stills were then printed out and sent to Company 3 along with the negative. “At least with a digital print, you can have a more objective reference,” notes Fiore.

Fiore went into The Island expecting that Bay would challenge him every minute of every day, and he says he got what he expected. “With Michael, there’s a lot of improvisation involved. It’s a matter of having the gear and the manpower to be able to fulfill his whims. It can be difficult, but it’s also a fresh approach to filmmaking — nothing is ever stale. There can come a point on a film when ideas are overanalyzed and you’re no longer working from an emotional response. That never happened on The Island.”

TECHNICAL SPECS Anamorphic 2.40:1 Panaflex Platinum; Arriflex 235; Arri 435 Primo, Angenieux, Kenworthy and Frazier lenses Kodak Vision2 500T 5218, Vision 250D 5246 Digital Intermediate