"I'm not against using direct sources, but I always process them through diffusion or anything else that will break that light up," he adds. "You find the same thing in nature. Beams of sunlight will pass through a cloud to create a certain effect. Blinds on a window will affect things another way. Or perhaps the light will hit an orange wall, creating a spill with a warmer tone."
Warm light is a fundamental component in Navarro's technique, particularly in the way he creates nighttime lighting effects. "We often see scenes set in the middle of a forest at night in which a character will turn toward the camera and the blue highlights on his cheekbones are stronger than anything else in the frame," he says, illustrating his point about the distancing effect of artificial-feeling lighting. "We're expected to believe that this look was created by the moon, but that effect completely blows it for me, because the artificial process has reached such an extreme that I lose contact with what the film is trying to say.
"I approach nights in a totally different way, and I think it's very much a reflection of the fact that I come from Mexico. I tend to go with warm textures and colors and very earthy materials in the art direction, and I incorporate much more sunlight into my palette."
Gaffer David Lee, who developed his skills while working on independent films in New York City, adds, "In addition to the filters on the lens, Guillermo will always gel the lamps. For him, white light from tungsten sources is around 2,900°K, and we'll go down from there. He really likes straws and CTS."
This approach was taken to an extreme on Spawn during a scene in which Violator appears in Wanda's living room, amid a supernatural firelight effect. Recalls Lee, "The purpose of this set changed at the end of the shoot because of rewrites, so we had to scramble to come up with a plan to bathe it in this surreal firelight which was emanating from this mysterious, not even justified fireplace. We ended up building two 3' x 4' panels made of 100- and 500-watt double-ended quartz tubes in reflectors basically the kind of work lights you'd buy from Home Depot. We mounted them in a four by four array of bulbs, 16 on a panel run through flicker boxes going at different rates. We also had theatrical lights going into silver cards on flicker boxes, and lots of warm gels.
"Our filter pack was CTS-based, with a theatrical red. But because we had so many sources working as one, we didn't bipack them; instead, we just put a different gel on each bulb, which mixed things up a bit and gave the light a better texture. I remember going to dailies and being astounded by how different the colors were from what I'd imagined they would be. I've seen things that are shot really warm and then timed out until they're almost blue or white. Ultimately, warmth has a lot to do with timing."
Lighting Spawn's costume was a particular concern throughout the shoot. "Spawn is not a character like Batman, who switches from being a normal guy to being a superhero," explains Navarro. "Batman switches back and forth, and that switches the audience between fantasy and reality. After Spawn comes back from Hell, he is what he is and he stays that way. He's not wearing a suit, although the actor, Michael Jai White, was. In terms of lighting, it was difficult to make that idea something the audience would readily believe."
Notes Lee, "KNB Effects, the company that did all of our makeup work and built the Spawn suit, took care of the eyelights in the costume, which worked very well, but we were always very worried about how the costume would read and how much light it could take.
"We had a couple days of testing for the Spawn suit, which was great, because it's the most important element in the film and everybody Mark, Todd, Guillermo and the effects people had a different impression of how it should look. We had to find a common frame of reference. The knee-jerk reaction was to edge-light the suit because of the textures. That way, we could avoid lighting it from the front, adding a bit of mystery and drama as the eyes glowed. But we found that that approach was like lighting someone with bad skin every now and then you could pick out a texture that you didn't want. It brought out the rubbery quality of the costume, revealing it as a suit. While we rarely used hard light anyway, our edge light was always diffused and almost always bounced. As we got into darker scenes, we could use more reflections, and that worked well, much to KNB's credit. Another consideration was that there was going to be so much done to Spawn in post; they were going to add this huge red cape and other effects." (See p. 54.)
Exposure levels were also a critical concern. Says Navarro, "I don't really like working at low stops; I like the light to be, to my eye, at a level where it doesn't look artificial or lit. Once I set the balance of things, I then figure out what the stop will be. I never say, 'I want an f4.' I light things to rescue the location, to discover what's interesting to me about it. If that ends up being an f2, then so be it. More important to me than the stop is the issue of where I want my printing lights to be.
"Choosing the stop also has to do with how much depth of field I want. If I don't want the backgrounds to play at all, I'll try to work at an f1.4 if necessary."
Even before Navarro joined the Spawn project, Dippé decided that the 1.85:1 format would be the best choice for the film. He notes, "Widescreen has all of its inherent problems in both production and post, which I wanted to avoid. I'm very accustomed to working in 1.85, and I've seen certain advantages in terms of the simplicity of working with it. I was torn, but I was worried about dealing with working at higher stops on a very effects-heavy film. I had to balance those requirements, and 1.85 was the obvious solution."
On location at the Natural History Museum, Navarro and his crew employed both Arriflex and Moviecam gear. "I learned my craft with Arris and I'm very comfortable with them," notes the cinematographer, "but on The Long Kiss Goodnight I also had a very good experience with Moviecams, so we used both on Spawn."
Many of the museum setups were shot from extremely high and low angles facilitated by both the location's architecture and the production's Louma crane. Notes Dippé, "The comic-book style is one of visual exaggeration. We also used wide angles a lot, but they were often super-tight macro shots just an eyeball, for instance. We relied on these extremes throughout the film."
Toward this end, Navarro found himself using wider lenses than he normally does "so that there would be a much stronger difference when the long lenses were used. We did a lot of Steadicam work with our 28mm, to the point where that lens basically lived in the camera. That became the lens for all of our moving shots.
"I basically stay with Zeiss primes, and I only use a zoom when I'm looking for a very specific frame or when I want to add a slow zoom in a camera move. I mainly use the SuperSpeeds, but I've also been using the SwingShift lenses [made by Century Precision] quite a bit, both on Spawn and The Long Kiss Goodnight. They are very good for when you have two actors in frame, because you can hold the focus on both of them without having to resort to a split diopter. You can carry the dialogue without having to cut between them. On Long Kiss, I also did some coverage with normal lenses so viewers could really see the difference that the SwingShift creates; it can be used to provide more of a visual accent, making a certain look or line stand out. The SwingShift can also help tie the background-to-foreground action together, by establishing relationships between things. If I tried to do this with traditional depth-of-field techniques, I'd have to build up the stop so high that the lighting would be completely out of character.
"On Spawn, we often used the SwingShift lenses to tie the characters in with the architecture, especially foreground elements. For instance, I don't necessarily have to show an entire living room set if I can see the arm of a chair in the foreground and then the character behind that with both of them in sharp focus."
[ continued on page 4 ]